Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1894-12-06
OLD DAYS OF ARCHERY.
Aa''res won with the low, Which (;up
Were Slow in Supplantine.

BATTLES Won With the bow. Which cr,.
were Slow in supplantine.
Inc history of the great English vic.
tories on French soil is the history of
successful resistance by well-nosted
archers to gallant but blunderino
charge OF feudal cavalry over had
ground. As the harquebus and cnlver;n
came IN, as French gunners improved
IN their art, the English sunremacy
dwindled. At Falkirk ua9s) Edward;s
cavalry cut up the Scotch archers. while
his archers destroyed ssthe dark i'm.
penetrable wood" of Scotch snearmen
AT Bannockburn, Bruce's cavalry scat.
tered the English archers. while tho
English cavalry sank in its prepared
pits ana were famed by his cal
throps. But in later fiobts tho
Scotch seldom, if ever, executed the
necessary maneuver of dispensing
the English archers by cavalry
charge. They did not attempt it. or
1aied' bafhed by the palisades. or the
nature OF the ground, or, as at Halidon
nh1, the cavalry were too few, and the
English bowmen's shafts penetrated
arInor. Meanwhile the arbalest men.
having to wind up their crossbows. a
tedious process, could only send one
shaft to six from the lonpbow.
The bow was thus the mistress ~
war, and the strong, well-trained En-.
glish yeorhen and peasants carried the
lives OF armies at their girdles. But bv
1929 light artillery, culverins which
could be rapidly wheeled about. came
in. gunner like John, of Lorraine.
or Nolrouf1e, the Cordelier, could an
parently kill more surely, through ar
NOR, at longer distance than Lockslev
himself The ancient English pre-emi-
nence in the bow of a certain intel
iectual hardness made England cling
TO the old weapon, while the continent
discarded 1t for the harquebus and
hagbut. At Morat, in 1476, there were
ten thousand hagbut men engaged.
But Henry I'LL, while enforcing uni
VerSai practice with the bow forbade
the use OF cross-bows 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 1917, 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 a cause of the decay of arch
cry. BY 1890, the comparative merits
of bow and harquebus are
the subject of literary con-
troversy. Sir John Smythe 159O)
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.
Barwick, on the other side, said that
wet was as bad for bow-strings as for
powder.
In one of Napoleon's battles 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. Barwick 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 musketeer 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 pronounces against bows.
Charles /. raised a corps of Highland
bowmen, and in 1925 William Meade
proposed a new model for combining
bow and pike. 1t 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 at the sight of
Highland archers He had seen no
such force under Tilly, the great Gus
tavus and other continental men of the
sword. In 1870 Sir James Turner, that
genial ruffian and prisoner of the COW
enanters, was for reviving the bow.
So was Benjamin Franklin, a century
later; but the bow as a weapon was
obsolete.-London News.