The weekly intelligencer. [volume] (Lexington, Mo.) 1891-1901, 1895-02-09
OLD DAYS OF ARCHERY.
battles Won With the How. Which Guns
Were Slow in Supplan. NJ.

Battles Won with the How, Which Guns
Were Slow in supplan: NJ.
The history of the great English vic
tories on French soil is the history of n
successful resistance by well-posted
archers to n gallant but laundering
charge of feudal cavalry over bad
ground. As the ~harquebus and cGlverin
in, as French gunncrs improved
in their art, the English supremacy
dwindled. At Fallsirk Q29s) Edwards
cavalry cut up the Scotch archers, while
his archers destroyed 'the dark. i'm
penetrablc wood" of Scotch spcarrnen.
At Bannockburn, Bruce's cavalry scat
tered the English arclIers. while the
English cavalry sank in It's prepared
pits and were famed by his cal
throps. But in later fights the
Scotch seldom, if ever, executed the
necessary mancuver of dispensing
the English archers by a cavalry
charge. They did not attempt it, or
failed, bafied by the palisades. or the
nature of h ground, or, as at IIalidon
Hill. the cavalry were too few, and the
English bowmen's shafts penetrated
arnor. Meanwhile the arbalest men,
having to wind up their c~rossbow's. u
tedious process, could only send one
shaft to six from the longbow.
The bow vas thus the mistress of
war, n 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, CT Lorraine,
or Noirouhe. the Cordelicr. could APP
parently kill more surely. through ar
NOR, at a longer distance than Locksiey
himself. The ancient English prc-emi-
hence in the bow of a certain intel
lectual hardness made England cling
to Ia old weapon, while the continent
discarded it for the harquebus and
hagbut. At Morat, in 1876. there were
ten thousand bagbut men engaged.
But Denr- W. while enforcing uni.
versai lr."itrc with the bow forbade
the use. "a - 50 bows md hand-guns.
II Lord Herbert Of Cherbury is right
in his Lille of Rayne of Henry VIII"
written, of course. q century later).
the scientific party in English military
councils was all for '~'villainous salt
petre." At Pinkic Cleugh, In I.47, the
old English bow massacrcd the Scotch.
and tho Venetian envoy warmly
praised English archery. In 1871, the
badness or expense Of the bows is al
legged as a Of the decay Of arch
cry. BY 1890, the comparative merits
Of a bow and harquebus IRE
the subject Of a literary con
troversy. Sir John Smythe ua9o)
Is all for the bow. It 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.
Berwick, 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 dnmped 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
1t is easier, to aim with gun than bow.
and that good archers are scarce.
Physical fatigue. too. ~incapacitatcs nm
archer moro than a musketeer. Sir
John replies that II q 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 al hall
strength, was the great defect of the
old arm. Men, if not horses, were
more demoralized by the bullet thar
by the arrow by 1910 the lord deputy
in Ireland pronounccs against bows
Charles l. raised o corps of Highland
howmen. and in 1925 William Meade
proposed o new model for combining
bow and pike. 1t did not take. In
the civil war we meet bowmen .bu,
rarely. The oxford undergraduate
on the royal side used the old arm: bu'
Dugnld Dalgetty, as we know. could
not restrain his mirth at the sight o.
Highland archers. He had seen M
such force under Tilly, the great Gus
tavus and other continental men of tho
sword. In 1870 Sir James Turner, tina
genial rufian and prisoner of the GOV
enanters, was for reviving the bow
So was Benjamin Franklin. n century
later; but the bow as n weapon wa,
obsolete.-London News.