A Bundle of Tudor War Arrows
A Bundle of Tudor War Arrows
Gaerhun Gwynnedd
mka.
Paul Lalonde
Abstract
Until the raising of the Mary Rose in the late 1970s little physical evidence
of medieval arrow shafts was known. Although some bows were preserved in various
armouries their amunition was largely ignored. Added to this is that an
arrow is mostly bio-degradable: the shaft and fletching tend not to survive.
Many points have been recovered, but the author is only aware of two arrow shafts
to have survived to the modern era outside the Mary Rose dig, although a number
of crossbow bolts have survived in collections.
With renewed interest in the Mary Rose and modern diving technology nearly 2500
war arrows have been recovered from the ship. In all cases the points were completely
destroyed but the shafts survived in the anearobic conditions of the dig.
This entry makes use of the Mary Rose data as well as iconographic and textural
descriptions to reconstruct a magazine of arrows
as would have been kept ready at battle stations on the ship.
Introduction
The English were rightly proud of their longbows. Formidable weapons, with
draw weights ranging from 100 to 180 pounds, they could shoot an arrow capable of
piercing mail and thin plate at distances of several hundred yards. When these
weapons were used in massed lines great carnage resulted.
Hunting vs War
There are two important distinctions between archery tackle used for
hunting and that used for warfare. These distinctions are caused by
the fact that hunted animals rarely wear armour. This means that
hunting arrows need not pierce steel and so can be designed with
a broad, sharp, slicing point, and that the arrows need not be
shot very hard. In constract, when shooting a highly armoured
opponent, a fine point will me more likely to pierce through
either mail, or even plate. And to help them allong the arrows
are launched with as much power as possible. Bow weights up to
180 pounds are not unknown in period (Howard Hill holds
the modern record for heaviest draw-weight shot, at 192 pounds,
done in the early part of this century). The lightest bow aboad
the Mary Rose had a 90 pound draw weight. These are outlandish
compared to modern equipment, but quite manageable. I have shot
a 110 pound longbow, and though strenuous, I am confident that with
weekly practice I could master such a beast.
Physical Properties
The Mary Rose Data
The Mary Rose arrows have 30 inch shafts, averaging in diameter
between one centimeter and a half inch. The fletch were 6 inches
long, tied with a closely-spaced thread binding. Neither the
fletch nor the binding thread remain, but the impressions left
in some seating compound shows where they were. Likewise the
points were destroyed, but are thought to have been bodkin points,
both because of the spacers used to seperate the shafts, and
from contemporary litterary sources [Rule 1982] .
The Arrows were almost all made of poplar. Other woods are
alluded to in the dig reports, but not explicitly mentionned.
It is interesting to note that Roger Ascham states that
ash makes a good arrow wood, ``unlike Aspe which is used
Nowadays''[Ascham 1545].
Experiments
Heavy shafts are nice to shoot with a heavy bow. That's an
awful lot of bow. Bodkins go through anything and rip up
your target butts. The author has for the last several years
shot nothing but shafts prepared as presented here, but with
feild points rather than bodkins, and scaled suitably for
shooting from a 65 pound bow. The shafts fly true, and
never has one broken at the nock.
Construction
Splitting Shafts
The first part of making an arrow is to prepare some shaft blanks.
The prefered technique for doing this is to find a nice straight-grained
tree of the appropriate species, fell it, and remove three foot long
straight sections. These can the be split lenghtways radially until
the wedges are about as thick as an arrow, much as shakes are split.
A further round of splitting reduces this wedges into shaft blanks.
Unfortunately I do not have access to mature ash or poplar trees
to cut down and treat this way. I can however aquire seasonned
lumber. But seasonned lumber will not split the same way as green
wood will. I chose instead to bandsaw my board to make blanks
a half inch square. The disadvantage is that my blanks are less
likely to follow the grain as well, which could lead to a weakness
in the arrows, although my experiences have shown that selecting
straight-grained boards to start from gives adequate results.
Planing the shafts
Once the blanks are made they are run through a simple jig consisting
of a long v-groove in a board in which the shaft is rotated while
a handplane is used to nock off the corners. Once all the corners
are gone you are left with a shaft.
An improvement can be made to this jig by adding runners on either
side of the groove on which a custom-made plane runs. This makes
the process much easier since little attention needs to be paid
to guiding the plane. More details can be found in the appendix.
Nocks
Once the shaft is finished the nocks must be formed. Every arrow
off the Mary Rose had a horn insert set into the shaft at right
angles to the grain of the wood to provide support against the
large splitting force of the string on release.
Instead of horn I have used bone - it is much easier for me
to aquire, although it is a bit harder to work. Like horn it
provides a good grain-free, shock resistant reinforcement to the
nock. I glued the inserts in using hot hide glue, removing
the need to clamp the ends.
Once the glue has sed the nock can be filed into the end of
the shaft, at right angles to the bone inset. The nock should
fit snugly onto the bowstring.
Fletching
Roger Ascham prescribes goose feathers. Turkey will do, as will
eagle, though it is claimed that they are inferior.
The particular feathers used are the strong flight feathers from
the wing. Which wing is largely irrelevant, although all the
fletch on one arrow must be from the same wing to ensure straigh
flight.
It is frequenlty asserted that helical fletching is not period.
This is disproved by explicit mention in {em Toxophilus}, where
Ascham states that the fletch should cause the arrow to spiral
since an arrow stops moving when it stops spinning. Apart from
his poor grasp of physics, this passage clearly shows that
helical fletch were used in period.
Furthermore, even through the Mary Rose arrows no longer have their
flights, a line of seating compound can be seen on them, running
in a slight spiral, indicating that they are helically fletched.
To convert a feather into a fletch it is necessary to split it along the
quill, and to remove out the strongest 6 inches in the middle to form
the fletch. A sharp knife is advised. Leaving a short section of
quill ahead and behind this section makes it easier to tie the fletch
to the shaft. This is done by running a bead of glue (I use a fish
glue, the glue used on the Mary Rose arrows is unidentified, but likely
animal based) down the quill of each vane, and tying them down at one
point toward the front of the shaft with thread and then wrapping the
thread in a tight spiral around the feather, pulling it down to they
quill. Once the thread is tied off at the nock end the positions
of the feathers can be fine-tuned before the glue finishes drying.
Attention has to be paid in placing the cock-feather appropriately:
Any grain run-out must be identified, and oriented so that should
the arrow split along this run-out that the shards will fragment upwards
rather than down into the archer's hand.
Points
The points were perhaps the most challenging part of making
these arrows. I started from a length of 3/8" square mild steel
bar stock and tried to work out how to make socketted bodkin points.
The process is surprisingly straightforward, and after making about
a dozen I was down to less than 15 minutes each, and their finish
and consistency improving dramatically.
The process starts by forming the socket on the end of the rod.
Hammer the stock over the horn of the anvil, forming a fan shape
about an inch and a half long and an inch and a half wide at its
widest. It is thinest at its widest, and thickest where the fan
joins the stock. This usually took me two heats and a lot of good
solid hammer blows, most with the face of the hammer, but a few
with the straight peen to help the fanning action. The corners
can't be made completely square, but a rounded approximation
will work fine.
The next step is to heat the thicker section of the fan and
part of the square section and to start the cone by laying the
fan lengthways over the step of the anvil and hammering into
it with the peen of the hammer. Once started you can form the
waist of the the bodkin while simultaneously curling the rest
of the material into a cone. Heat your steel again and jam
a round tappered rod into the cone and tidy it up.
Now use a cut-off tool, such a a hardy or a hot chisel, to
remove the cone from the rod, about half an inch ahead of the
point of the cone. With tongs wet down the cone so that it will
not heat as quickly and return the point to the fire.
Now draw a point and quench your point.
If necessary you can now touch up the socket on a grinder - I find
that many of the points can use this treatment to make the
end of the socket just that much more even. Once you are happy
you can re-heat the points and quench them in oil to give them
that nice black finish, which not only looks good, put helps
prevent rust, which in a ship-board situation would be chronic.
The points are then attached with a dollop of hot pitch.
Bibliography
Roger Ascham. Toxophilus, Reprited by Scholarly Press, Inc, 22929 Industrial
Drive East, St. Clair Shores, Michigan 48080, 1545.
Adrian Eliot Hodgkin. The Archer's Craft.
Faber and Faber Limited, 24 Russell Square, London, 1951.
London Museum. Medieval Catalogue.
ewblock HMSO Books, London, 1967.
Margaret Rule. The Mary Rose: the excavation and raising of Henry VIII's
flagship. HMSO Books, London, 1982.
Copyright maintained by Paul
Lalonde/Gaerhun Gwynnedd <plalonde@telus.net>
Appendix
Making Arrow Shafts
Making Arrow Shafts
Gaerhun Gwynnedd, mka. Paul Lalonde
SCA target and war archery have lately been dealt a nasty blow - Port
Orford cedar arrow shafts are becoming unavailable. The spotted owl
shares it's habitat with the cedar, and recently a ban was imposed on
harvesting even the deadwood from those regions in which the spotted owl
makes it's home. This has lead to a shortage of cedar arrow shafts,
with no obvious replacement picking up the market share.
Distressed by this I set out to manufacture my own shafts from hardwood.
Roger Ascham, in his excelent treatise on archery, names a number of
woods which make good arrows: Ash, Elm, and Willow being some of the
more common.[1].
Good straight grained ash being available from a local lumber yard,
I purchased a length of 1"x8" and went to work.
Cutting Blanks
The first step was to cut the wood to manageable lengths. As I shoot 30
inch shafts I cut the board into 32 inch lenghts, leaving me a bit of
leeway for errors. The next step was trickier. I had to figure out
what diameter to make the shafts. Although it is possible to calculate
this using the general spline equation from the technical appendices of
Robert Hardy's excellent book ``Longbow,'' [2] some of the constants
needed are difficult to establish for the piece of wood sitting on your bench. I chose instead to experiement with a number of shafts of different diameters. Putting off this process let me go ahead and rip my board into square blanks half the thickness of the 1" board. (A 1" board
from a lumber yard is actually 13/16th of an inch thick.) Taking
account of 1/16 th of an inch loss to my table saw blade left me with
numerous 3/8th blanks to experiement with. If you use a table saw to
cut these please be careful - long thin peices are particularly prone to
being kicked back by the saw.
These blanks were then carefully straightenned by heating them
gently over a candle and bending them straight, checking them against a
level.
Building a Jig
The next step (or maybe really the first step) was to build a jig to
plane the blanks into cylindrical shafts.
The jig I built is modelled after one built by Graydon the
Curious. I wanted a jig that would let
me make barrelled shafts (these are thicker at the center, making the
shaft stiffer without adding as much weight), so I chose to use a two pass
process in which I'd plane one end circular, turn the blank around and
plane the other end. The basic principle is to lay the blank in a V
shaped groove and plane the protruding surface slightly, then to turn
the blank an repeat until the cross-section is circular. The hard part
is in not removing more wood that necessary. A solution to this is to
build a set of rails on which to run a handplane and to align the V groove to
the rails. By aligning the groove at different depths a tapered or
barrelled shaft can be cut.
The Jig
I made my jig out of a few 2 foot long pieces of 1x4 oak I had around.
The hard part turned out to be making the V groove. If you have a
router and a bit that will cut a V groove you can simply cut a groove
1/4" inch deep in a 22" long board. Not
having a router, I had to do it differently. What I did was to rip one
of my boards in half, temporarilly joined them together, planed the edge
flat and square, then took them apart. I then scribed a line 1/4"
along the top edge of each board and along the inside face, where the
boards were joined. Then I planed both boards to the scribed lines so
that when rejoined I'd have a v groove. Once re-joined I drilled a hole
at one end of the groove and inserted a short peg (Ok, a small length of
broken arrow) to be a stop for the blank held in the groove.
I next built the rails. I made the rails as the long sides of a small
box that the v-groove just fits in - when I place the grooved piece in
the box I can hold it in place with just clamp pressure. I dovetailed
the ends (though a simpler joint may well work, I just like dovetails)
to the rails. Note that the rails have to be taller than the ends so
that when a blank is resting in the groove the end is not in the way.
The end near the stop in the V-groove has to be shorter to let the plane
which will be riding on the rails overshoot the end.
To let me adjust the depth of V-groove relative to the rails I cut two
slots in each of the rails, below the level of the V-groove piece, in
which I placed long bolts. By adjusting the placements of the bolts I
can adjust the depth of cut at the center of the arrow (the bolt
farthest from the stop in the V-groove) and at the ends (the bolt
nearest the stop).
The Plane
This left me needing a plane to run on the rails. In particular the
plane had to rest on the rails and not be allowed to drift from side to
side. This meant making my own. I'd never made a hand plane before but
it turned out to be much easier than I'd imagined.
I started with an 8" long chunck of 2"x3" maple - any close-grained
hardwood will do - and a 1 inch wide plane iron (blade). And a decent book on
making hand planes [3]. Making a woodplane is a bit beyond the
scope of this article, but you can
probably find more detailed instructions in your local public library.
It's fairly simple and quite rewarding work.
Another option, if you don't want to make a plane, is to find a wooden
plane at a flea market and to nail rails to it's sides. They are fairly
cheap if you avoid the people selling them as interior decorating
accessories. I've gotten a number of planes for under 10 dollars
a peice. Note that if you can't find a narrow enough plane you can
always make the V-groove block wider to accomodate what you find. Just
try to be careful that you aren't defacing a priceless collector's piece.
Planing a Shaft
So now with a bunch of blanks, a jig, and a plane, I could start making
shafts. It's mostly a matter of adjusting the jig, dropping in a
blank, planing it round, turning it end for end, and planing it round
again. There is however a trick to getting roundish shafts rather than
badly deformed elipses. Instead of taking the first few passes with the
jig straight down to the depth stops stop short after a couple of
strokes and turn the blank, repeating until the cross-section is roughly
octagonal. Then you can start working down the corners of the octagon
down to the depth stop.
You can clean up the shafts with a little block plane afterwards to make
them smoother. After a few shafts you will find that your time per
shaft has dropped to just a minute or two (Ok, maybe three).
As for setting the jig, you will have to experiment a bit. I've found
that shooting a 65lb longbow at 30 inches, ash shafts 5/16th at the ends
and close to 3/8th at the center work well for me. I can quarantee that
your mileage will vary.
One more thing. You will likely not be able to get a dozen matched
shafts out of a dozen blanks. They will be close, but your best bet is
to spend an afternoon cutting shafts then match them into weight groups,
keep the ones that shoot well for you, then make your friends very happy
with the rest.
References
- 1
-
Roger Ascham.
Toxopholus, or The Art of Shooting A Bow.
1545.
- 2
-
Robert Hardy.
Longbow: a social and military history.
Bois d'Arc Press, 3 edition, 1993.
- 3
-
Lee.
Making Hand Planes.
Lee Valley Tools, 1990.
lalonde@cs.ubc.ca
Thu Feb 9 17:59:36 PST 1995
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