Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Archery and English Longbowmen

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July 7, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

15:45

Archery and English Longbowmen

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	So I had the opportunity to do some archery recently and I really enjoyed it.
	It was really good fun.
	It was one of those pay, I think we paid £15 for an afternoon of wandering around a wooded area shooting at animal targets.
	And it was brilliant fun.
	I strongly recommend it.
	And I enjoyed it so much that I decided that I'd get an archery kit.
	I'd invest a bit of money and do it more regularly as a hobby because I really, really liked it.
	And it's the sort of thing that my friends enjoyed as well.
	So we're planning basically to put sort of fiver in the pot and then do an Sunday afternoon artery competition.
	And whoever gets the most points takes the money.
	You know, it's just fun stuff to do.
	So after a bit of googling, I settled on Merlin Archery's premium artery kit for gens.
	I think it's to do with the size and the poundage of the bow.
	The bow that I'd used on the course was only 22 pounds and I'm reasonably bulky so I hadn't really had a problem drawing it.
	In fact, it was quite easy and I could find I could really pull the bow string back quite far and get a lot of extra power into it.
	Whereas a couple of my friends who are with me, one of them is a really slender guy and he was having a bit of trouble getting it right the way back.
	So I chose the medium strength for this bow with the height of 5 foot 8 and above, which I just about managed to make because I'm 5'9.
	There were cheaper alternatives around than the £175 one.
	That was actually a reasonably expensive one on the sides.
	It's not too expensive.
	You know, you can spend vast amounts of money on these things.
	But for what I was getting, I thought it was quite a good deal.
	I was getting basically everything you need and a target.
	So I thought it's worth it.
	And the bow itself looked pretty good.
	And now that I have it, I can say it's really nice.
	It's so much better than the learner bows that we were given on the course.
	It obviously came dismantled and unstrung.
	And after watching a quick intro video, I didn't realize just how easy it was to put these things together.
	Check this out.
	So this is the handle of the bow.
	And you just have each arm, I think it's called, snaps on using a dovetail joint thing, I think that's what they're called.
	And then the bow is ready to be strung.
	And all you do is you find the top of the bow and find the large loop of the string.
	You put that over the edge and onto the shaft of it.
	And then with the small loop, you just hook that into the grooves on the end that you can see there.
	And when you've got that, you've got this thing which is called the bow stringer or something.
	Anyway, you put this end over the bottom to keep it in place and make sure it stays on the nook.
	And then you put the large loop over the top as so.
	And what you do is put your foot on the black stringer.
	Heave it up a bit until the bow's bent.
	Using this effectively as the string.
	And then you just hook it over the end, as I'm doing there, kind of.
	But as I eventually manage.
	And then there we go.
	One strung bow ready to be drawn.
	Other than the arrows and the cameras, the only other piece of equipment I was using was this finger guard thing to protect your fingers from repeated use, which we did find was an issue when we were on the sort of three-hour hike around the woods when we first did it.
	But this thing came with the kit and it was fantastic.
	I didn't feel anything on my fingers the whole time I was doing it.
	So I found the safest spot in my garden when there was no one around and put the target in it.
	I measured the distance using long strides and it was about 10 meters or 30 feet away.
	So honestly not very far, but at least it felt like I was aiming at something and there was at least a chance I was going to miss.
	The only drawback to using the finger guard is that it took forever to load an arrow onto the bow.
	The damn thing is so bloody fiddly.
	And as you can see I initially attached my GoPro camera to the bow and I thought that was a great idea.
	I didn't think of anything that might go wrong by doing it until I fired it.
	Yeah, it sounded like someone banging a fucking drum.
	Now, I've got a funny feeling that that actually is an indicator that I've not set up the bow correctly.
	In the tutorial video, that's what he said.
	But honestly, I don't know what to do.
	So next time I speak to someone who has more experience with bows than I have, I will ask them.
	And so I've turned the volume down on this.
	And another thing is that it made the image rattle.
	It made the mistake.
	And again, I just didn't think, I didn't put any thought into it.
	I'm sure I would have come to the conclusion that it was a bad idea in advance if I'd actually given it two seconds worth of thought.
	But I was just too excited to attach the camera to the bow and see how it looked.
	So, silly me.
	Since it's in frame, what you can see here is the quiver that you get, which can clip onto your belt and hold probably 20-25 arrows at a push.
	And since we're on the subject, the arrow that you can see there is the basic arrow that comes with the kit.
	I think it's 28.5 inches.
	And I did buy a few 30-inch ones to see the difference.
	Honestly, I couldn't really tell much of a difference to be honest, but then it's probably because I'm too much of a noob.
	Having found that the GoPro footage was no good, I set up another camera with which to take hopefully better footage.
	I haven't really watched it properly, so I guess we'll see how it comes out.
	But you can see how fiddly it is putting the arrow on.
	The finger protection, it doesn't bend well enough.
	So it's a real pain.
	So I'm actually left-handed, but I was using a right-handed bow because, frankly, I don't really see why you'd want to use a left-handed bow.
	The power doesn't seem to be coming from your arms, it's coming across your back, and you feel the strain in your left shoulder if you're right-handed.
	Although I have to say, it's a good few hours later, and I'm feeling it in my right shoulder as well.
	But at the time, it was very, very noticeable on my left shoulder.
	I'm quite pleased with my accuracy, but it's only 10 meters, and I think the power I was putting into the shots really helped with that.
	The more powerful the shot, the more accurate it felt.
	And the bow is whole orders of magnitude more accurate than the sling.
	Cat, the fuck are you doing?
	Get the fuck out of here, cat.
	This is dangerous.
	I just want to point out I couldn't actually see the cat from the angle I was at.
	Otherwise, I wouldn't have carried on firing.
	The last thing I want to do is actually hurt something.
	That being said, yeah, you better fucking run.
	It is also a fact that epic beards make you better at anything that involves weaponry.
	However, Robert Paulson-esque moobs don't help.
	I actually caught my nipple on the bowstring one time, and it really fucking hurt.
	One thing I noticed is that I was holding my breath when I went to take the shot, and I only exhaled after I'd taken it.
	It appears I was unconsciously stabilising for accuracy.
	This is a different set of shots that I've edited down from the perspective of the target, just to see what it's like.
	I'm firing really, really fast here, but believe me, there was a much longer delay between shots.
	Although, apparently, English longbowmen could fire an arrow every six seconds, which is about twice as long as each one of these is taking in front of you, which, I mean, I would imagine a lot of training went into that.
	So you can see how consistently far through the target my arrows were going.
	I was using quite a lot of power on each draw.
	I don't know what the poundage of my bow was, but it probably wasn't all that impressive.
	Frankly, I'm quite pleased with my clustering, though.
	I've been not too bad.
	But again, it was only 30 feet away, so.
	If I had to speculate, I'd say the poundage of the bow I'm using maybe 30 pounds.
	It's a bit heavier than the test bows I was using with 22 pounds, but it's not that much significantly more powerful.
	So I can't claim to be a longbowman yet.
	We actually know quite a lot about medieval English longbows, because we were quite lucky in the fact that it was a very, very popular weapon that was very well documented when English kings went and invaded France, because they were incredibly litigious.
	These original documents record the names of every man who left England to fight with Henry V and every man who came back.
	This is a tremendous role.
	I mean it's not only tremendous in what it tells us, but also as you can see in its size, it kind of goes on forever.
	All the troops who went to Agincourt had their details recorded on one of these medieval muster rolls.
	The English army was composed of 5,500 archers and only 1,500 men-at-arms.
	Had Henry taken a gamble on having so few men-at-arms because he thought the longbowmen were the best troops?
	After studying these documents, Anne thinks there might be another reason.
	We can see the sums of money that the troops got.
	Here we've got Sir Thomas himself as four shillings a day, his men-at-arms each 12 pence a day, and then 60 archers at sixpence a day, VI a day.
	And we're even luckier to have actual examples of medieval longbows.
	In 1545, Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose, sank in battle with the French.
	On board, it had dozens and dozens of longbows that were perfectly preserved until it was salvaged in 1982.
	Modern day boyers and archers were invited to examine the recovered longbows and the arrows and make replicas and test them out and see how they were.
	Well, it turned out that these bows were massive.
	Most of them were over 6'6 in length and some appear to be approaching 7 foot.
	And they were all described as chunky all the way almost to the tips.
	Basically, they were designed to hold and store a lot of energy inside them before being released.
	The champ claims to be able to shoot a 120-pound bow, and apparently there are a considerable number of people out there shooting £150 and beyond.
	As you can imagine, the men who wielded these weapons were very, very strong.
	In fact, there are, of course, skeletons from the Merry Rose that have been examined by sports scientists.
	On one of these skeletons examined, the surface area of the joint between the lower arm and the elbow was almost 50% larger than the joint on the other arm.
	This obviously being the arm that held the bow.
	And it was, as you are probably aware, a legal requirement that every man and boy practice archery regularly from an early age.
	These people from childhood would have been practicing to use increasingly heavier bows for war.
	This would have made expert English longbowmen very, very powerful men physically.
	And you hear a lot about them being deformed, the skeletons being deformed.
	Deformed is the wrong word to use.
	It's more well-trained.
	But there's no doubt that these guys would have been really fucking strong.
	There was even a specific technique for using the bow as well.
	You'll notice the way I was doing it is called the Victorian style, which is more designed for accuracy.
	In the Middle Ages, they had a completely different style, which unfortunately I couldn't find any good footage of, but involves them basically kind of stepping in to the shot.
	And so if viewed from the side, it appears that the person is entirely contained within the bow.
	They obviously aren't actually inside the bow, but that's the amount of straw you'd have on it.
	So it would almost completely cover their body if viewed from the side.
	And then this would be fired in one smooth motion.
	You'd kind of rock your body down and then aim up and then fire because you'd be firing as part of several thousand others and just trying to blanket an area with incredibly powerful arrows.
	And when the beleaguered and battered French knights finally slogged up the hill through the mud in this storm of arrows towards the English archers, it's not like the English archers were weak men.
	There's probably a good chance that your average English longbowman was physically stronger than the French knight he was fighting.
	Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that in a one-on-one fight under fair conditions the longbowman would beat the French knight.
	The French knight would be way more skilled at arms.
	I guess what I'm saying is that the miracle at Adgincourt isn't actually as surprising as you'd think given the circumstances.
	But I wasn't supposed to be talking about Adgincourt, I just kind of got off track.
	Yeah, the bow I got was nowhere near as impressive as anything that I've been talking about.
	But it was a lot of fun and it was really easy to pack up, which is what you can see here.
	I mean, it literally took a couple of minutes to just unstring the bow like the way, basically in the way you strung it.
	And then just take these things off, then unclipped the doodads, the arms, and then just put it away in the bag.
	it's easy as that really of course i take forever and a day to do it because i'm some sort of incompetent But yeah, it's really good.
	And the whole kit was really nice.
	I know I'm giving them a glowing review, but it was a really good kit, and I really felt it was worth the money.
	And I'm really looking forward to kicking my mates' asses at archery.
	I'm going to let this play out because I just want you to see that putting the whole kit away took about, I don't know, two and a half, three minutes, something like that.
	And I wasn't exactly in a hurry.
	So, it's really nice sport to do.
	I really enjoyed it.

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