River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1894-12-20
OLD DAYS OF ARCHERY.
Battles Won with tine Row. Which Gun
Mere SIoxy In Snpplanfino

BATTLES Won with the Row. Which Gun.
Were Slow In supplantng.
The history of the great English vic
tories on French soil is the history of a
successful resistance by well-posted
nrchers to a gallant brit laundering
charge of feudal cavalry over bad
ground As the harquebus and culverin
came in, as French gunncrs improved
in their art, the English supremacy
dwindled. At Falkirk (l29s) Edwards
cavalgy cut up me Scotch archars while
his archers destroyed THE dark. i'm
penetrable wood" of Scotch spearmen.
At Bannock burn, Cruces cavalry scat
tered the English archers, while the
English cavalry sank in its prepared
pits and were famed by his call
throps. Bct in later fights the
Scotch seldom, if ever, executed the
necessary maneueer of dispensing
the English archers by a cavalry
charge. They did not attempt it. or
failed, baffied by the palisades, or the
nature of the ground, or, as at Halidon
Hill, the cavalry were too few, and the
English bowmen's shafts penetrated
armor. Meanwhile the arbalest men,
having to wind up their crossbows. a
tedious process, could only send one
shaft to six from the longbow.
The bow was thus the mistress of
war, and the strong, well-trained En-
glish yeomen and peasants carried the
lives of armies at their girdles. But by
1929 light artillery, culverins which
could be rapidly wheeled about. came
in. A gunner like John, of Lorraine.
or Noiroufie, the Cordelier, could APP
parently kill more surely, through ar
NOR, at a longer distance than Loclsley
himself. The ancient English pre-emi-
hence in the bow of a certain intel
lectual hardness made England cling
to the old weapon, while the continent
discarded it for the harquebus and
hagbut. At Morat, in 147G, there were
ten thousand hagbut men engaged.
But Henry ILL.,, while enforcing uni-
versal practice with the bow forbade
the use of cross-boivs and hand-guns.
If Lord Herbert of Cherbury is right
in his Life of Rayne of Henry VIII"
written, of course, a century later),
the scientific party in English military
councils was all for 'villainous salt
petre." At Pinkie Cleugh, in 1912, the
old English bow massacred the Scotch,
and the Venetian envoy warmly
praised English archery. In 1871, the
badness or expense of the bows is al
legged as cause of the decay of arch
cry. BY 1890, the comparative merits
of a bow and harquebus are
the subject of literary con-
troversy. Sir John Smythe Q59O)
is all for the bow. 1t shoots
straighter; there is no powder
to foul or to become wet, no trouble
with matches, the shooting is faster,
men can shoot with the bow in much
deeper ranks; arrows brighten horses.
Barwicb, ON the other side, said that
wet was as bad for bow-strings as for
powder.
In one of Napoleon's battles a whole
regiment had to surrender because the
rain damped the powder in the pans of
the flint locks. Probably archers, with
two strings to their bows, would have
been in better case. Barwicl1 adds that
it is easier to aim with gun than bow.
and that good archers are scarce.
Physical fatigue, too, incapacitates an
archer more than a musketeer. Sir
John replies that if lnusketeer shoots
oftener than ten times in an hour he
will seldom or never hit his mark
On the whole, the lack of strong
shooting with the bow, the prevalence
of hasty, timid loosing at half
strength, was the great defect of the
old arm. Men, if not horses, were
more demoralized by the bullet than
by the arrow. By 1910 the lord deputy
in Ireland prononnces against bows.
Charles |. raised corps of Highland
bowmen, and in 1925 William Meade
proposed new model for combining
bow and pike. IL did not take In
the civil war we meet bowmen ,but
rarely. The Oxford undergraduates
on the royal side used the old arm; but
Dugald Dalgetty, as we know, could
not restrain his mirth Mt the sight of
Highland archers. lie had seen no
such force under lilly, the great GUS
tavus and other continental men of the
sword. In 1870 Sir james Turner, that
genial rufiian and prisoner of the COW
ena-oers, was for reviving the bow.
So was benjamin Franklin, a century
later; but the bow as a weapon was
obsolete.-LOndon News.