Like most boys growing up in 1950s Britain, my bedroom ceiling was festooned with a hanging tangle of model aeroplanes, suspended by fishing line. Senior in the fleet’s hierarchy was the legendary Supermarine Spitfire.

What I did not know then was that the same principles shaping those Spitfires had already been mastered by medieval armourers five centuries earlier.

The iconic shape, and acrobatic aerial agility, of the Spitfire relied on double-curvature panels. Standard factories struggled to produce these because, if pressed too hard, the metal would thin too much, or crack. Beating out the perfect shapes was individual, highly skilled, and time-consuming work.

As the spectre of war loomed in 1939, the British government tasked ‘AP Aircraft’ in Coventry to put the Supermarine Spitfire into mass production. Scaling up to meet the desperate deadlines of war was an immense challenge. To answer that challenge, AP Aircraft sent for Edward ‘Ted’ Loades (1909 - 2002).

I haven’t traced our family tree, and so I don’t yet know if Ted Loades is a direct relation of mine or not; I certainly hope he is!

Recently I have been corresponding with his grandson, and that has brought his extraordinary story to my attention - a story that resonates powerfully with my own passion for the beauty of medieval armour, together with my boyhood appreciation for classic planes and performance cars.

Ted Loades was a master, the master, of the English Wheel1. This is a manual tool that uses steel rollers, under pressure, to stretch and shape metal by hand. His ability to “feel” the grain allowed him to produce Spitfire skins that were both incredibly light and structurally sound.

Achieving structural strength through form was not only the goal for the designers of fighter aircraft; it was also the Holy Grail of the medieval armourer.

Curved metal is substantially stronger, more resistant to deformation, than is a flat sheet.

By creating rigidity and resistance with elegant curves, the medieval armourers of Augsburg and Milan had much in common with Britain’s WWII aeronautical engineers.

A knight required his armour to be as light as possible without sacrificing its ability to withstand heavy blows. Aircraft needed to be lightweight, relative to the power of their propulsion, in order to be able to take off, and yet strong enough to hold together against the buffets of flight.

Whether you are making a helmet, a breastplate, an aircraft, or the body of a motor car, curves make it both rigid and lightweight; complex curves make it even more so. When form and function dance together with harmonious proportion, a unique beauty is born.

HIGH STAKES AND ENGLISH WHEELS

During WWII, Ted Loades worked ‘all hours’ to produce the key double curve panels, that were needed for Spitfires, in quantity, and to train others in the craft. In 1941, he and some colleagues formed their own company, Abbey Panels. They continued to fulfill the high demand as sub-contractors to the Castle Bromwich Aircraft Factory, who manufactured the Spitfire.

In the ‘English Wheel’, Ted had a reliable mechanical journeyman fit for modern production, but his skill, his art, was the armour’s eye for three-dimensional curves.

Although some form of ‘wheeled anvil’ almost certainly existed prior to the 20th century, its provenance is elusive. It was not available to the medieval armourer, though it is probable that, by the 15th century, some form of water-powered rolling mills were employed to create evenly-gauged plates of steel.

From these, the medieval master then stretched and shaped the metal by hammering it over a stake. These hardened steel pins could be set in a block and offered a wide range of curving shapes.

Steel’s malleability was increased by heating it. By eye alone the armourer was able to gauge shape and thickness; he also understood precisely how hard to strike according to the colour of the heated metal.

When raising a helm, or other piece of armour on a stake, just a few blows too many, or too heavy, in the wrong place could thin the dome enough to create weak spot. Even for a quality helm that could be struck a dozen times, incurring no more than dimples, this tiny area of compromised thickness was vulnerable to a chance arrow. Imperceptible to the eye, such flaws were inherent to the risks of the battlefield.

THE MOTORCAR CONNECTION

After WWII, Ted Loades, still with Abbey Panels, sub-contracted to Jaguar Cars. In the next two decades, he was responsible for creating and refining the iconic shapes of the C-, D- and E- type Jaguars during their prototype phases, turning technical drawings into works of art on wheels.

My father loved Jaguar cars. I got to know their shapes quite well. I was 10 in 1960 and earned my pocket money over the next few years washing his Jaguar Mk 1.

Both he and I were mad about motorcars. I went to a boarding school - a strange mix of cold dormitories, constant caning and convivial camaraderie: insipid food and inspired teaching. It was there, at the age of about 11, that I started my first magazine. It was called ‘THE MOTOR’.

My father sent me his used motoring magazines. I cut out photographs of cars, stuck them into an exercise book, and with a blot-inclined ink-pen wrote some nonsense about them on the lines below. I would pass the ‘magazine’ round to other boys in exchange for confectionery - sugar was the currency of the day.

That has come full circle. I consider that this Substack is now my online magazine. Should you be generous enough to subscribe with a paid subscription, I promise not to spend it all on cake and sweets2.

In the early 1960s much of the excitement in the motoring world focussed on the Le Mans 24-hour race - my magazine referenced it frequently. One of my favourite cars, originally designed for Le Mans, came along a little later - in 1966. This was the Jaguar XJ13. Ted Loades rebuilt the body, after an earlier version crashed. Looking at the photograph below, seeing it in ‘white metal’, I think it holds up well to comparisons with the aesthetics of armour.

Sadly, because of Jaguar’s shifting priorities at the time, this beauty never made it to Le Mans.

If vehicles could time-travel, and had the 15th-century Baron von Matsch of Churburg Castle (South Tyrol, Italy), had a car, I think it might have been a Jaguar XJ13. Just look at those lines. You see, we know his taste in armour.

Around 1440, von Matsch commissioned the Milanese armourer Giovanni Corio, to make him the ‘Avant Armour’3. Corio’s masterpiece (he sub-contracted the leg pieces to Giovanni da Garavalle) now stands in the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow. It is noted for its sweeping lines. If I had been naming the Jaguar XJ13, I’d have called it the Jaguar Avant or the Jaguar Corio.

THE MONOCOQUE SUPREMACY

The thing about well-designed cars, and spitfires and plate armour is that the skin is the structure.

Monocoque (French for single shell) construction represents the ultimate marriage of form and function. It is a system where the external skin of an object acts as its own chassis, distributing stress across its entire surface.

Cars and aircraft were once built with struts, stays and flat panels. Before the advent of the single-shell breastplate, knights wore a ‘coat of plates’; a mosaic of small plates riveted to a textile garment - it was more cumbersome, less deflective and it could be heavier.

A harness of well-fitted plate armour is a rigid exoskeleton - it is both skin and bones. By curving the metal, the armourer achieved a structural rigidity that allowed the steel to be remarkably thin—often no more than 1.5mm—while remaining reasonably proof against the weapons of the day. In doing so he also created a unique form of sculptural art - art that could move, ride and fight.

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The principles of monocoque design were central to the Jaguar aesthetic, but the beauty of the XJ13’s curves weren’t merely decorative; those compound curvatures gave the thin sheet metal the strength to hold a massive V12 engine and a driver at 200 mph without buckling. When the skin is the structure, there is no room for a wasted line.

THE APOGEE OF SLEEK

Ted Loades’ skills were pivotal in ensuring that another ‘60s icon became a reality - the Jaguar E-Type.

Without Ted Loades, the E-Type may have remained just a beautiful sketch. Malcolm Sayer, the designer, had the vision, but he needed a craftsman with an armourer’s eye to make that vision practically viable. Wheeling with flow and flair, Ted worked on the prototype to create the subtle curves that maintained the structural integrity of that long bonnet4 without adding weight or supports.

The E-Type’s elongated, curved shape was optimized for high-speed stability and reduced drag. It was also necessary to house a long and powerful inline 6-cylinder engine. Function drove form, but the form transcended into something else - a work of art. I can see both the cleverness of it and the beauty in it. Enzo Ferrari called it "the most beautiful car ever made."

As much as I can admire it, I would never want one, of course - far too flashy and, with its priapic aspirations, a little bit socially embarrassing. However I know who would have absolutely loved it - the 15th-century Archduke Sigismund of Tyrol. Just look at his amour!

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Looking at the two iconic designs above brings another to mind - Concorde - and guess what? Ted Loades’ company, Abbey Panels, was responsible for manufacturing its droop nose and visor. This required incredible precision to ensure it could withstand the aerodynamic pressure of Mach 2 flight.

I lived in South West London during the late 70s and, no matter what I was doing, when I heard Concorde overhead (every day) I would rush outside, or to a window, to marvel at that magnificent bird.

With that, we come nearly full circle to the visored bascinet near the beginning of this piece, which has echoes in the Concorde shape.

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PRACTICALITY AND PERFORMANCE

Of course functionality is the primary aim of all these designs. Planes must fly, cars must hold the road and armour must offer a good level of protection. Catch-your-breath beauty is only an occasional by-product.

Most of the time we want a chubby Airbus for its cheaper fares, rather than the panache of Concorde, or an unassuming everyday car with good fuel economy and reasonable comfort, rather than the dash of an E-type.

The average medieval fighting man wanted whatever armour he could get hold of for protection. Style was secondary; unless you were a knight. A knight wanted the most dazzling armour he could afford. The psychological impact of a glorious, finely-tuned armour was an essential part of your warrior’s toolkit.

In addition to its powerful sculptural forms, armour could also be a canvas for decoration, with gilding, blueing, etching and other techniques. There is no disputing the jaw-droppingly beautiful art of the finest pieces, but my personal preference is for ‘white armour’ - the plain shiny stuff. Its coruscating surfaces thrill in a perpetual dance with light. That is sculpture at its most dynamic.

One of the unique properties that connects the best motor cars, aircraft and knightly armours is that they demand to be seen in action. We want to see a performance car stick to the track as it corners, we want to see a fighter plane climb and swoop like a swallow, and we want to see a knight in his armour, run, fight and ride with lightness, ease and grace. We want to see all that design working.

The shape and the workings of a car or a plane or an armour can be fascinating, but only rarely do any of these objects ascend to the level of art. Cars, planes and armours don’t all work aesthetically; some are only moderately stylish and others downright ugly. Utility with some attempt at ‘style’ is the norm and that’s ok; it would be a dull topic indeed if there weren’t supreme examples to be passionate about.

I know there are many other aspects to cars, planes and armour that make them interesting, but their commonality is to be found in that perfect blend of form and function that, every so often, produces a masterpiece of exceptional beauty.

POSTSCRIPT

I started this piece by recalling the model Spitfires hanging from my boyhood bedroom ceiling and so began this chain of connections. My wife also has a powerful connection with the Spitfire. Her paternal grandfather - John E. Hawkins - was an American who volunteered to join the RAF at the outbreak of hostilities, long before the USA entered the war. He flew Spitfires and was awarded the DFC. I should like to have met him and shaken his hand.

My father died in 1971. I have only recently discovered the Ted Loades story. Did my father know about Ted? Was there a distant family connection that inspired his love of Jags? He never mentioned it to me. Had he lived longer, I might have asked him. I also like to think that, had he lived, I could have shared my love of plate armour with him, and that he could have learned to appreciate it as I do as, among other things, an art form.

A TRAGIC ACCIDENT

The Butts at Mile End were a popular Tudor archery ground, located just outside London’s city walls. There would have been several butts (earth mound targets) set up on the open ground, for people to gather and shoot at different distances. Henry VIII’s Archery Act of 1511 (3 Hen. 8. c. 3), required all men under the age of 60 to practice archery regularly1.

John Coke was doing just that on Tuesday, September 11th, 1515, when an incident occurred. According to the Coroner’s Rolls (KB 9/468/49),

“John Coke was shooting at the Buttes at Myles End, when John Shorter suddenly and unforeseeably, walked between the aforesaid marks…the arrow struck the same John Shorter in the left part of his head, whereof he died instantly.”

The inquest sought to determine if the act was ‘felonious’ (murder or manslaughter), but because Coke was carrying out his mandatory civic duty - ‘shooting at the butts’ - the case was adjudged as ‘misadventure’, and he was acquitted.

The Law of Deodand: When Objects Pay the Price

His bow, and the offending arrow, were nonetheless subject to ‘Deodand’. This strange 12th-century law, not repealed until 1846, ruled that, if an inanimate object (like a bow, a cart, or a mill-wheel) - or an animal (like a horse or a bull) - caused the death of a human being, the object itself was considered ‘guilty’, whether the human owner was convicted of a felony or not. The object, or animal, was thereby forfeited to the Crown.

Deodand is an abbreviation of the Latin ‘Deo dandum’ - ‘to be given to God’. The idea was that the goods (or animals) would be sold by the King’s Almoner to pay for Masses for the soul of the deceased. In practice, the plaintiff most often regained them by paying for their value - in other words, the equivalent of a fine.

In the case of John Coke, we know that the court appraised his weapons as follows:

• The Bow: 8 pence (8d.)

• The Arrow: 1 penny (1d.)

• Total Deodand: 9 pence (9d.)

Although this represented around two days’ wages for a skilled man, it was a trifling sum compared to the cost of a new bow.

A new yew bow would have set him back 3 shillings and 4 pence (40d.) Bows made from elm, ash, or wych, were less expensive but it is probable that John Coke had a yew bow. The court archives tell us that he was a yeoman, a man of substance, who was the freeholder of some land.

Even in used condition, his bow seems to have been deliberately undervalued - a token ‘fine’ acknowledging that he was carrying out his lawful duty, and that it was the king’s wish to encourage archery practice, not penalize it.

I have no doubt that John Coke paid the 9 pence and redeemed his bow; bows are very personal and treasured weapons.

PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE

The key to Coke’s defence was that John Shorter appeared “suddenly and unforeseeably”. If there was any chance of Coke first seeing him, then the onus would have been on Coke to have shouted “FAST!”

Roger Ascham (1515 - 1568), later archery and Latin tutor to Queen Elizabeth I, wrote in his 1544 book Toxophilus2

“The archer must evermore take heed... and if any man come in the way, he must cry ‘Fast!’”

‘Fast’ in this context means ‘Hold Fast’ / ‘Stand Fast’ - stay put/don’t move/ freeze! This meaning of the word ‘Fast’ shares etymology with the word ‘fasten’ - to be fixed securely. It is equivalent to the golfer who cries ‘Fore!’

There has long been confusion among modern archers about the term ‘Fast and Loose’. Mistakenly attributing the term to archery tradition, they call ‘Fast’ when everyone has finished shooting, as a signal that it is safe to walk to the target and retrieve arrows, and call ‘Loose’ as the signal to shoot. Such a mix up would have been a fatal mistake in the 16th century.

The expression ‘playing fast and loose’ derives from a trickster’s game3 , not from archery. So be mindful, the next time you hear an archer cry ‘Fast’ - ask yourself if you think they know what they are saying. Your life could depend on it.

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TO BE BLUNT

The most well-known, and best, image we have of archers shooting at the butts is from the 14th century Luttrell Psalter.

They are shootings ‘blunts’. Not only do we see the arrowheads but we also see the pockmarked surface of the butt, cratered with divots, where the blunts have struck. When I recreated this scene for my 1995 film, we found the blunts produced exactly this appearance.

However the large, wooden, bulbous blunts depicted in the Luttrell Psalter do not seem to appear in 16th century art, which is curious. With a powerful bow, a sharp-headed arrow would bury deep into an earth butt. This doesn’t seem ideal, for reasons I shall explain shortly (hint: it’s to do with how butts were constructed).

Our go-to guide for all things Tudor archery - Roger Ascham - provides an answer.

“Our English heads be better in war than either the Scots or the French heads…but for the butts, and all manner of prick shooting, the little blunt-headed pile is best”

He goes on the explain that,

“[a blunt head] is more easy to be pulled out, and will not fret the mark so much as a sharp head”

He further elaborates that,

The head of a butt-shaft must be blunt, round and heavy…to keep the wind better and not wander or waver in the air.”

We can deduce that the blunts he was talking about were metal, because he warns against rusty heads being harder to extract and damaging the mark, advising that,

“an archer should always have a piece of leather with him, to furbish his heads.”

As for how these were shaped, he mentions several designs, including one called,

“the silver-spoon head, for a certain likeness to the knob end of some silver spoons.’

The finial of the spoon above shows a ‘striking’ similarity to the form of the blunts shown in the Luttrell Psalter, though, if metal, these would have needed to be considerably smaller, or else they would be too heavy.

There is no mention what type of arrow Coke was shooting, but I have no doubt that, if shot from a strong bow, a thump to the side of the head with any type of blunt would prove equally fatal to a hit with a sharp.

The big, fat, medieval blunts strike an earth butt with a satisfying audible thwack and also produce a plume of fine dust, registering the hit. Ascham’s smaller metal blunts would be less spectacular but at least they didn’t drive too deeply into a butt, making them difficult to extract. This leads us to the question of how butts were made? How do you leave an earth mound out in all weathers, without it becoming a collapsed soggy mess?

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HOW TO PREVENT A SAGGY BUTT

Fortunately we have detailed accounts from parish records, listing the costs for the materials and labour required for the construction and maintenance of butts. They are full of fascinating clues.

England did not have a standing army during the sixteenth century. Defence of the realm relied on local militias, known by the mid-century as the Trained Bands. It was the job of the local church to administer the logistics. Small parish church armouries held a stockpile of arms and armour for the men of the village - these still included bills and bows as the backbone of their arsenals. The parishes were also responsible, by law, for providing and maintaining the butts. Churchwardens acting as parish quartermasters, maintained meticulous records.

FAGGOTS

A key clue comes from the accounts of the churchwarden of St. Margaret’s, Westminster in 1540:

“Item, paid for iiij lode of ffaggotts for the foundation of the butts ... ijs viijd”

Faggots were tied bundles of coppiced wood (often birch or hazel) used as kindling for large fires (handy for burnings at the stake) and, as we see here, for constructing archery butts. So we see that the above item was 2 shillings and 8 pence for four [cart] loads of faggots. Quite an expensive outlay and a LOT of sticks.

Stacked horizontally these would form the core of the butt, providing bulk and structure; in the manner of modern rebar. They also acted as an excellent internal drainage system. Water could trickle through the gaps between the sticks and run out the bottom of the mound; instead of saturating the earth.

A 1538 entry in the parish records at Cratfield, Suffolk provides additional information,

“Paid to John Hubbard for ditching and for faggoting the butts ... xvd”

The reference to ‘ditching’ suggests some form of drainage system around the base of the butts. It seems possible that ‘faggots’ were then laid in this trench, creating the equivalent of a French drain4.

PALES AND RAYLES

To hold the bundles of sticks at the core of the butt in place, stakes (known as pales or palings) were driven into the ground at intervals. Oak, chestnut or willow were the best woods for surviving in waterlogged conditions.

Rayles (rails) were horizontal bars notched against the palings in the manner of a fence to keep things in place until capped with turf. They were also used as cross-ties, creating a sturdy honeycomb in which the faggot bundles could be inserted. This tangled snarl of pales, rails and twigs was then filled in with shovel-loads of earth or sand.

Parish accounts regularly record the cost of additional palings, suggesting they were required not only as structural anchors for a new butt, but also to shore up a sagging butt over time.

At St Mary’s Mendlesham5, in 1613 we find this entry:

“Payd unto Bartholemew Knittes for a Rayle for one of the Butts & for setinge up one of the posts and palinge of the same, he findinge some of the planks 1s”

The Mendlesham records also account that in 1638 (a splendidly late date for archery practice at the butts!):

“Payd to John Load for Irons for the Buts – 3s”

As a native of East Anglia, I cannot help but wonder if the Suffolk John Load here was a distant relative. More interestingly, he was supplying iron for the butts. As a reenforcing mechanism, iron rods would be much easier to thread into the wooden grid within.

Maintaining the butts was an expensive business. Also from Mendesham in the same year:

“Layd out more to them [Nicholas Knights & Goodman Laurence] for 3 dayes work for mending the Butts – 8s”

Pales and rails also served another purpose. Butts were often set up on common land. Land where sheep and cattle grazed. Sheep nibbling your butt may sound like a niche fetish, but it was a real problem for the parish authorities. Grass covered butts on common land required a fence set close to the mound. It would be a simple matter to lift or hinge the front panel out of the way when shooting.

TURF

After packing the latticed core with dirt or sand, it sculpted to shape, giving the butt the profile of a half-dome, with a rounded, sloping roof. To seal this outer skin and help the water to run off, it was then clad with a thatch of turves - aka sward or sod (US). These clumps of grassy turf are indicated in the account books as either turves or flaggs.

The Mendlesham records for 1593 record:

Itm to Roby’t Salmon for carrying of the flaggs to the buttes –20d

Also:

“Layd out to Jewell for making the Butts & for fetching two loods of flaggs – 5s”

A great deal of the cost seems to have gone to the carter for ‘carrying’ these heavy rolls of earth.

“Layd out to Elliot for making the Butts - 2s 6d for carrying the flags therefor – 12d”

This grass thatch was crucial in preventing the butts dissolving into a soggy mess after heavy rain. In order to promote dense growth, like that a bowling green lawn, it needed routine clipping with shears. This encouraged tighter growth, which was more water repellant.

Mendlesham 1596:

“Layd out to Witham for bringinge 3 goings of flagg from the greene for repayre for Butts withall 2s 9d”

SAND

The churchwardens’ accounts of St. Lawrence, Reading, have the following entry in1541.

Paid for sand and for turving the butts and for faggotts to lye in the same ... iijs

Here we see the familiar materials of turf and faggots, with the addition of sand!

Anyone who has lavished loving care on a patch of lawn will know the value of a commodity called ‘lawn sand’.

Today it is a mix of fine sand, fertilizer and a moss killer. However it is the sand that is the key to a ‘tight’ lawn.

A thin layer of sand fills in low spots, without smothering the grass. Sand particles are larger and coarser than clay or silt. Mixing sand into the soil creates “macropores” that allow water to move downward rather than sitting on the surface. Better drainage prevents "wet feet," a condition where grass roots rot. Promoting deeper roots creates a filigree of enmeshed turf and a secure outer jacket.

References to turfing the butts occur time and time again in the records…

Cratfield, Suffolk 1539:

“Paid for sand and for turving the butts…xvjd” [16 pence]

Maldon, Essex 1540:

“Expenses of making new butts... for sand and timber”

North Elmham, Norfolk 1547:

“Item, for carrying of sand to the butts…ijs” [2 shillings]

Chagford, Devon 1558:

"For sand and for mendyng of the butts ijs” [2 shillings]

Sand was also the optimal material, perhaps mixed with some clay soil to give it ‘stickability’, for facing the butts. Today a sand berm is the preferred material as the backstop on a shooting range and in traditional Japanese archery, archers shoot against a bank of black sand called the azuchi.

If we imagine the butts’ internal skeleton of twisted sticks and pales, it is obvious that an arrow penetrating to the inner core would either be damaged or unextractable. I’m not sure how thick the sand/clay facing would need to be, but it is surely obvious that shooting at the butts demands shooting with blunts!

SANDPITS

Conspicuous in the Mendlesham records are references to sandpits. In 1637 we read that 8 shilling was paid for filling the sand pits:

“feling the sonde petes at the butts 8s”

This suggests that a large supply of sand was kept adjacent to the butts, both for dressing the turf and for repairing the face. I suspect it was kept in covered pits rather than in heaps, so that they always had access to dry sand.

In an area like Suffolk, where Mendlesham is located, the soil is a heavy clay, so sand would be especially important there to counteract the ‘clagginess’ of the clay.

There was a lot of work and knowledge required for maintaining the butts.

Samuel Dammant, churchwarden of St Mary’s, Mendlesham was still taking care to maintain the butts there as late as 1639

For carrying of menner [manure] and feling the sonde petes [sandpits] at the butts – 8s

Here we see the addition of ‘fertilizer’ to the sand mix; just like modern lawn sand.

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Tudors and Beyond

During the reign of James I of England VI of Scotland, in the first quarter of the 17th century, archery began to decline but the statutes remained on the books and there were penalties for not keeping the butts in good repair.

Mendlesham again in 1616:

“pd for the amersement for the Butts 3s”

An amersement was a fine for neglect of duty. The days of the longbow on the battlefield already seemed a distant memory, but its utility had not yet been forgotten.

In 1625, Sir William Cavendish, as Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, was responsible for mobilizing the local militia. On this occasion he was obliged to explain to the Privy Council of the newly-crowned Charles I, that it was only 4 days after he had set 50 men on the march to Plymouth, that he received the instruction that 12 of them should be archers6.

In that same year William Neade published his military treatise ‘The Doube Armed Man’. Neade argued that the biggest weakness of a musketeer was the "reloading time" and the vulnerability to cavalry at that moment. By "double-arming" a soldier with both a bow and a pike, he sought to give the pike blocks a dual function in defending the shot.

Charles I granted Neade a "privilege" to teach this method and ordered the use of the bow and pike in the militia., causing men like Cavendish a considerable headache. It was all very well theorizing about the benefits of longbowmen but without regular training, their effectiveness was minimal and the possibility of recruiting them becoming nigh impossible.

The butts had begun to fall into disuse, though they had lasted long after might have been expected. Time to bring them back - so all you longbow archers out there, let’s see some authentic buts being built…and do please share your photos here.

Postscript

When I made the film ‘Archery - Its History and Forms’ in 1994, we constructed two butts - as seen in the stills in this article. At that time I had no idea how a butt was constructed, but assumed they were solid earth mounds.

They only needed to be temporary and so, in order to save time, and effort, we created a core with broken pallets, boxes etc. Little did we know that, intuitively, we were on the right track. The turf and facing is just a shell.

That film, though a little outdated with some of the information, is still available to view on my You Tube Channel. The two scenes of shooting at the butts have always been my favourites. You can see it here:

Archery - Its History and Forms

OUT IN THE COLD

April 18, 1943:

Lieutenant Hermann Ritter, a 51-year-old, Austrian naval officer, reluctantly in the service of Nazi Germany, was exhausted, hungry and bone-achingly cold.

Six days previously he, and his small command, had set out from their base at Hansa Bugt, situated on one of those frozen tendrils of land that fringe the north-east coast of Greenland, and headed south.

They had crossed treacherous ice fields and made their way along the trappers’ trails that snaked around the feathering of frozen fjords. At times these trails crossed the fjords directly. It was a perilous gamble to sledge over the frozen sea ice, but they did it.

Under Ritter’s command were four German soldiers. Two travelled on a sledge1 hauled by a team of Greenland dogs, whilst the other two slogged on foot. A second sledge, heavily laden with supplies, was driven by a Danish hunter called Marius Jensen. By reputation he was an exceptional dog musher. He was 31-years-old; 20 years younger than Ritter.

Ritter and Jensen travelled together, but it would have been too dangerous to add the weight of a passenger to the sledge; only the driver could stand on the runners. There was no telling when a crack in the ice would plunge it into the Arctic waters beneath. Hermann Ritter, despite being the older man, had to journey alongside on foot. He was no stranger to polar travel but this was an especially gruelling journey.

His heavy wooden skis had weighty steel edges to bite into the ice when crossing frozen fjords. When traversing snow-covered hills, he strapped strips of sealskin to the undersides. These allowed the skis to slide forward but bristled against the snow to prevent sliding backward. Where the snow had drifted, he had to shoulder his skis and tramp, lifting his ice-heavy boots as high as he could, like a soldier marching on the spot, to plough through the snow. It was all grunting, unrelenting, hard work.

It was a far cry from the life Ritter had known years earlier, when the Arctic was a place of adventure rather than war.

At this time of year, daytime temperatures could rise to between -13°C and -7°C (8°F to 20°F) but at night they dropped to around -25°C (-13°F). However, in the Arctic, April is known for its merciless winds, causing the wind chill factor to plummet to -40°C (-40°F). Adding to their discomfort was 20 hours of daylight, making it hard for the body to rest.

Trappers’ huts, basic wooden cabins dotted every 12 miles or so along the coastal trails, offered some respite from the constant glare, the savage cold and the lacerating wind, but if supplies weren’t to run out before they got to the next main station, travellers could stay only briefly.

Ritter’s patrol reached a trapper’s hut at Myggebugten on April 18th, where they sheltered from a storm, and rested the dogs.

THE SWITCH

The next day, April 19th, Ritter commanded his four soldiers to head for Ella Island, where there were reports of an Allied weather station. Their orders were to destroy it. The trapper, Marius Jensen, had drawn a map for them the previous evening.

Ritter’s plan was to stay behind with Jensen and make further reconnaissance in the area. He saluted the men as they set off and then stepped back into the cabin to ready himself for his mission. Hermann Ritter and Marius Jensen were now alone.

Outside Jensen was finishing up harnessing his dog team. In preparation for their scouting trip, Ritter had propped his skis, ski-poles and heavy bolt-action rifle (a Mauser Karabiner 98k) against the sledge, and then gone back inside.

From within the hut, Ritter heard the distinctive, heart-stopping, click-clack / clack-click of the rifle bolt - a round was now in the chamber. He perhaps assumed a polar bear had been sighted, but when he appeared at the door, he found himself staring down the barrel of his own rifle. Marius Jensen said simply:

“Now you are my prisoner”

He probably said it in German and the emphasis would almost certainly have been on the word ‘my’ because, until that moment, Jensen had technically been Ritter’s prisoner. It was a switch.

Marius Jensen, was not just an arctic hunter and expert dog musher; he was a member of Denmark’s North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol and he had been captured by Ritter and his men several weeks earlier, on March 26.

But why were Jensen and Ritter in Greenland in the first place?

THE WEATHER WAR

With overwhelming force, German forces occupied Denmark, on April 9, 1940. Despite continued, courageous resistance from the population, the government had little choice other than to co-operate. While the Danish government was under German rule, Greenland's link to Danish sovereignty was effectively severed.

After a brief period of diplomatic manoeuvrings, Eske Brun, one of two Danish governors, who had run the colony up until then, declared autonomous control of the entire island. He set up headquarters in Nuuk and declared support for the Allied cause. The other governor, Aksel Svane, took himself off to Washington as a liaison.

In 1941, the United States assumed temporary security responsibility for the island and set up vital airbases.

Greenland was a large and strategically important landmass2. It was an unsinkable aircraft carrier, situated between North America and Britain, that allowed short-distance combat planes to cross the Atlantic for service in Europe. Greenland’s capital Nuuk sits almost exactly halfway between Washington, DC and Copenhagen.

Aside from its value as a refuelling base, Greenland was crucial for the gathering of weather intelligence. Before satellites, weather patterns sweeping into Europe could be predicted from weather stations in Greenland and radioed to both Washington and London.

This was critical information for planning both air and naval operations. The North East of the island provided the most relevant data. North Atlantic weather generally moves from West to East; whoever controlled the Greenland coast had a crystal ball for the weather that would hit Europe 24 to 48 hours later.

Obviously, these meteorological reports were of equal interest to the Germans.

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THE SLEDGE PATROL

Eske Brun, the governor, was all too aware of this and so, in 1941, he set up the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol. He initially recruited 15 men - 10 Danes, 1 Norwegian, and 4 native Greenlanders. All were trappers and hunters; they all knew the trails and the terrain. Marius Jensen was among them. They operated in pairs and relied entirely on dog sledges.

Their task was to patrol 700 miles of uninhabited coastline in search of German weather stations; a beat that stretched from the far north as far down as Scoresbysund. Below there, the island was ‘relatively’ more populated and the locals could keep an eye out for any German activity.

The North East Greenland coast is fringed with vast fjords, encased with fingers of rocky upland. For most of the year the crags are snow-covered and the fjords are sealed with sea ice. During a single ‘spring patrol’, a two-man team would typically cover over 2,500 miles (4,000 km) of travel, weaving in and out of the fjords to ensure no Nazi weather stations were operating in the shadows of the mountains.

Dog sledges were by far the best way to navigate the hostile terrain, not least of all because they could carry tents and several weeks’ worth of food supplies, ammunition and sacks of coal for the huts.

There was a savage beauty to the land but travel was both arduous and hazardous. Direct routes often took a path across the sea ice. When doing this, Greenland dogs were often harnessed differently to the way we see Huskies hitched in other parts of the world.

Instead of the usual train hitch—pairs of dogs running one behind the other - Greenland dogs were often arranged in a fan hitch. It spread their weight and, if the ice thinned and cracked at any point, only one or two dogs might fall through before the sledge could be stopped. In train formation, the entire team could be dragged into the watery void; sledge and driver swallowed with them.

Of equal importance to their role in transport was the dogs role in detection. They are constantly alert to any unusual or threatening scents, and able to pick them up from as far away as three miles, depending on the wind. These may be the distant peril of a prowling polar bear or the whiff of humans hiding in a far-off hut. A good dog man knew how to interpret their signals.

Eske Brun was aware that as ‘armed civilians’, his patrolmen were not covered by the Geneva Convention. If caught, the enemy might execute them as spies rather than take them prisoners of war. It was not practical to put them in standard uniform. However Governor Brun appointed them to military ranks and issued them with armbands to identify them as military personnel. That status was boosted when they were also made a reserve unit of the U.S. Army.

Crusted with ice, armbands were hard to see and the frozen fabric had a tendency to snap and fall off. It was common for the Sledge Patrol to keep an armband in their pocket, only putting it on when approaching a German Position.

FIRST CONTACT

March 8, 1943:

Marius Jensen and two Greenlandic patrol members, Mikael Kunak and William Arke, set out to patrol the area north of Eskimonæs, their home base. There was a trapper’s hut on Sabine Island, 60 miles (96 km) away, that they wanted to check.

The dogs picked up the scent of ‘strangers’ from several miles away - aromas of different tobacco and food items. Their ears pricked up and their pace changed, signaling that something ‘un-Arctic’ was ahead. As they drew nearer, they saw smoke coming from the chimney and footprints on the ice: the footprints of men wearing military-style boots with heels, not the soft sealskin kamiks worn by local trappers.

However before they reached the hut, they saw two men escape up the mountainside. Inside they found two half-empty mugs of coffee on the table, sleeping bags, Nazi uniforms, daggers, supplies, coal and almost half a polar bear.

The three men set out straightaway on the return journey to Eskimonæs, to report the discovery as soon as possible, but Jensen knew that the dogs were in need of rest and so they stopped for the night in a hut just 5 miles (8km) south of Sabine Island.

Meanwhile the two German soldiers had made it quickly back to their headquarters at Hansa Bugt, a secluded inlet that was also on Sabine Island. Jensen and his men had found a hut with two scouts, not realizing that over the hill was Germany’s secret headquarters, commanded by Lieutenant Hermann Ritter.

March 11, 1943:

Sheltered in the tiny hut, they heard men approaching during the night. The dogs had raised the alarm. They had no idea how many men, or the extent of the threat, but made the decision to escape immediately on foot, grabbing only their rifles.

Ritter had sent a patrol to find them, hoping to stop them before they could report their sighting of the German presence to the Sledge Patrol headquarters at Eskimonæs. Their orders were to bring them back - alive or, if necessary, dead.

March 13, 1943:

Fortunately, after their narrow escape, Marius Jensen and his men did make it back. They had slogged nearly 100 miles across ice and snow in two days.

Summing up the setback, Kurt Olsen, a senior member of the Sledge Patrol based at Eskimonæs , managed to radio the following message to Governor Eske Brun in Nuuk:

“We have suffered a severe loss. Half of our dogs and three fully equipped sledges. Fritz also got his hands on Marius’s journal, so he could not be better informed of our whereabouts.”

RAID

March 23, 1943:

Ten days later, in the early evening, the Sledge Patrol’s command base at Eskimonæs was attacked. Lt. Ritter had sent a squad with submachine guns, as well as rifles and revolvers. It was a carefully planned assault.

Compared to the simple trapper’s huts on the trails, the station at Eskimonæs was luxurious. The red-painted house had a large living area in the centre with a roaring stove, comfortable chairs and tables. This was ringed with six bedrooms and radio room, together with a generator room. Surrounding the exterior wall of each were storerooms, doubling as outer layers of insulation.

When the Germans arrived, there were only five men at the base. Days earlier, some had been sent to the radio station at Ella Island, whilst Marius Jensen and Eli Knudsen had been despatched north to look for another patrolman, Peter Nielsen, who they thought did not yet know of the German presence.

On hearing their approach (those brilliant dogs again!) the camp commander, Ib Poulsen, stepped out - his rifle loaded - to ask the Germans what they wanted. After some initial distantly shouted exchanges, the Germans inquired:

“Do you intend to offer armed resistance?”

Poulsen responded succinctly:

“Jawohl” (“Yes”)

The Germans opened fire! Somehow, in the hail of bullets that ensued, Poulsen managed to escape. He ran into the cold night, without his arctic-weather gear, save for his trousers and sealskin boots. Miraculously he survived. At a hidden supply mound he found a tent, which he cut into a makeshift anorak and then walked 230 miles to Ella Island. The others also escaped, faring better because they had a moment to grab their polar clothing.

The base at Eskimonæs did not survive. The Germans torched it and in a spectacular, crackling blaze against the snow, it burned to the ground.

AMBUSH

Meanwhile Marius Jensen and Eli Knudsen had found Peter Nielsen and the three were now travelling back to Eskimonæs. Eli Knudsen had the better dog team and had pulled far ahead of the others. He headed for Sandodden hunting station to get some rest.

March 26, 1943:

After the raid on Eskimonæs, Ritter’s patrol had also headed to Sanodden. When Eli Knudsen arrived they were lying in wait.

As the soldiers rose, like apparitions, from the snow, Eli mushed his team to make a run for it. Ritter ordered his men to ‘shoot the dogs’. Several fell in the first burst, dragging as the sledge continued. Then in the second burst, Eli Knudsen was shot and killed.

It was unintended; the gunner’s aim was off because of a jam. Hermann Ritter later recalled that he deeply regretted Knudsen’s death and that he had recurring nightmares about it.

Ritter was an ‘old school’ soldier, doing his duty as best he could, but he had no sympathy for the Nazi cause. Before this command he had at one time been investigated by the Gestapo for some of his remarks. More senior officers, who had regard for him, spoke up and saved him. He was here partly because of his polar expertise and partly to put him out of the way.

The dead dogs were swept under the snow, the rest of the team were staked out and the sledge drawn up outside the hut. The stove was lit.

When Marius Jensen and Peter Nielsen arrived a little later, they expected to see Eli Knudsen inside. Instead they were ambushed by Ritter’s men. Outnumbered and outgunned, they surrendered.

CARDS, CONTEMPLATION AND COMRADESHIP

As prisoners of war, Jensen and Nielsen were taken to Ritter’s HQ at Hansa Bugt on Sabine Island.

With the German location on Greenland having been detected, Ritter assumed it was only a matter of time before U.S. bombers would be called in. His job was to survive and save his men, until the sea-ice melted enough for a rescue ship to dock and evacuate them.

To that end he launched a campaign of reconnaissance to seek out places to hide and to find and destroy any Allied communications centres.

He recognized that Marius Jensen not only had innate knowledge of the topography, he was also something of a dog whisperer with the oftentimes quarrelsome Greenland dogs. Their power and pull was unmatched but they were aggressive and independent, requiring expert handling - something many of his men struggled with.

Jensen and Nielsen were unshackled and unguarded, having given their word not to escape. In the evenings, Ritter and Jensen played cards, discussed philosophy and shared their mutual passion for the Arctic. They formed a friendship and deep regard for each other, despite also retaining their sense of patriotic duty.

Marius Jensen was even able to persuade Ritter to let Peter Nielsen take a sledge back to Sandodden to buttress Eli Knudsen’s grave, protecting his corpse from scavengers like arctic foxes. In exchange, he agreed to co-operate, to show Ritter the routes and to drive his sledge.

This takes us to that stage of the story where we started, at the Myggebugten hut on the morning of April 19th; with Ritter staring down the barrel of his own rifle and Jensen saying:

“Now you are my prisoner”

This followed, if you remember, Lt. Ritter sending a squad of soldiers to destroy the radio station at Ella Island

THE RACE FOR ELLA ISLAND

Jensen feared that the German soldiers Ritter had sent to Ella Island would kill the personnel there. Consequently, he left Ritter in the hut and set off alone, determined to beat them and to warn the Danish radio crew.

At 31-years-old, Jensen was in his physical prime and the arctic wilderness was his natural habitat. He was deeply bonded with his crack dog team and he had given the Germans a map that followed circuitous trails around the fjords. He knew a shorter route across the ice!

To make his sledge lighter, he unloaded a large amount of the supplies and left them in the hut with Ritter. There was no need to bind his prisoner; he was confident that he would not escape.

Ritter, assuming that Jensen had headed off to his own safety, had no choice but to stay where he was, and await the return of his patrol. It, at least, afforded him an opportunity to rest and restore his strength a little; something that he would all too soon be required to draw upon.

Greenland was sparsely populated by humans but it had a sizeable population of polar bears and musk oxen. To have ventured far from the hut would have been suicide.

April is calving season for musk oxen—a month when the bulls are even more protective and aggressive than usual. If a bull senses danger, it will charge. That is 600 lbs (270 kgs) of bone and muscle, armed with a dense plate of horn across the forehead, together with powerful hooking horns hurtling at you with no sense of mercy. These meat juggernauts can reach speeds of 25–30 mph (40–50 km/h) with terrifying acceleration from a standing start.

Matadorial agility is limited when swaddled in thick polar gear and avoidance nigh impossible. Without his rifle, Ritter would not have stood a chance against a musk ox. Similarly, it would have been fatal to venture unarmed into polar bear country. Polar bears were by far the most dangerous animals out there and they can sprint at 40 mph (64.4 km/h).

Marius Jensen arrived at Ella Island before the Germans but found that the crew there had already evacuated to Scoresby Sound. This was the southernmost terminus for the Sledge Patrol and a key radio station. It was also an administrative base, where the local official, Poul Hansen, still flew the Danish flag over government buildings and a safe harbour, where the US Coast established their Greenlandic foothold.

Scoresby Sound was south of Ella Island. Myggebugten was north. In his report Governor Brun noted:

“The obvious thing under these circumstances would be to continue directly to Scoresby Sound. But as Corporal Jensen thought it would be inappropriate to arrive empty-handed, he first sledged 150km back to Myggebugten…”

That is a journey of between 5 and 7 days, depending on the weather.

A POLAR BEAR WITH A GUN

April 30, 1943:

A week of waiting alone in the arctic silence, broken only by screeching winds, even to a seasoned hunter like Ritter, must have been agonizing. Would his patrol return? Would Jensen return? Would anyone find him before supplies were exhausted?

Finally, late one morning, he heard dogs outside. For a moment, a deep breath of relief stilled his mind. He went to the door. Head bowed to shield from the blinding light outside, he heard the familiar click-clack of a bolt-action rifle chambering a round. Upon opening the door he was confronted, not by one of his men, but by the surreal and menacing sight of a polar bear with a gun.

This fleeting mirage was in fact Marius Jensen. As well as holding Ritter’s rifle, he was wearing the standard kit of the Sledge Patrol – polar bear trousers.

Polar bear hair is hollow, buoyant and warm. More importantly, it is naturally water-repellent. So if a patrolman were to fall through the ice, it wouldn’t soak up water as fast as wool; potentially saving him from immediate hypothermia.

It was a sight that must have been at once terrifying and comforting. In many ways the men had become friends, valuing the ‘code of the arctic’ above the laws of nations. Ritter must have realized that Jensen had ‘come back for him’, as much to save him from certain death as he had to deliver him as a prisoner of war.

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THE LONG MUSH TO ALLIED HQ

May 1, 1943:

After only a single night’s rest, Jensen loaded the sledge with all supplies then; with his captive at gunpoint, set out on the 300-mile (480 km) trek south to Allied HQ at Scoresbysund - a journey that required astonishing physical and mental endurance.

Marius Jensen rode the runners of the sledge. Hermann Ritter - the walking prisoner - was obliged to keep up on skis. To prevent the sledge from being bogged down in soft snow, Ritter often had to break trail in front of the dogs, or push the heavy cargo from behind.

Sledges only work on compacted snow or ice - the trappers’ trails - but if it veered into a drift at the side of a trail it had to be bumped and levered to set it back on the trail. Manhandling a heavy sledge on harsh sliding terrain was strenuous, grinding labour.

The great enemy of effort in the arctic is sweat. When you sweat, moisture fills the warm air pockets created by the insulation of furs. As soon as you stop to rest, your body temperature drops, and that moisture freezes into a layer of ice against your skin, risking fatal hypothermia.

Polar travelers move with a deliberate, slow trudge, constantly monitoring their exertion to ensure they don’t break a sweat. If they feel themselves getting too warm, they vent their clothing (opening collars or cuffs) to let the heat escape before it turns into moisture.

Both men had oilskin anoraks that worked well for this. Their hoods were lined with wolverine fur - the only fur that doesn’t hold frost from your breath; you can just brush the ice crystals away.

We don’t know the exact route they took, but clearly there were a lot of fjords to cross. For much of the year these are frozen safely solid, but in May, when they were travelling, it was beginning to become treacherous. A layer of ice might look two feet thick and perfectly white, but could be honeycombed with internal melt-channels. This is known as rotten ice.

Marius needed all his skill to navigate the best route; to keep the journey as short as possible, but also to avoid rotten ice, and in addition, to take advantage of the trapper’s huts on solid ground for overnight stops. Overnighting on the ice could only be done with a tent.

A trapper’s hut was typically no more than ten feet square and there was no separate room for a prisoner. Sleep was obviously essential, but could Jensen trust Ritter not to turn the tables once more?

These two rugged outdoorsmen had found a common bond, but the fact remained that their countries were at war, and Ritter was a prisoner of war on his way to be handed over to the enemy authorities. It was conceivable that Ritter could take the rifle, while Jensen slept and force him to turn back for the German base on Sabine Island.

At night Jensen put the rifle’s bolt in a bag tied to his body.

Despite this precaution, their mutual dependence on survival triumphed over any suspicions. Hermann Ritter was unlikely to kill the only man who knew how to navigate the dog team back to safety. He had done his duty, as he saw it, but was privately glad for a way out of a war he disapproved of.

For Jensen and Ritter, their world was an endless horizon of frozen white, prismed only by the coruscating frost on their goggles, but there was another world outside their solitary existence - a world at war. There were still German troops at Hansa Bugt on Sabine Island, and they were still operating the radio station there.

SABINE ISLAND IN FLAMES

May 14, 15 1943:

Alerted to their presence there by Marius Jensen’s initial discovery, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) launched a long-range bombing mission from their base in Iceland. A flight of bombers strafed the buildings and dropped bombs, leaving the station in flames.

ARRIVAL

May 22, 1943:

Three weeks after setting out, with his dogs almost dropping in their harnesses, an utterly wearied Marius Jensen pulled in to the Allied-controlled station at Scoresbysund. Even more drained and spent was Lt. Hermann Ritter.

Jensen handed over his captive to the U.S. authorities. It was a bittersweet moment; both a release and a strange way to bid farewell to a comrade with whom he’d shared so much adversity.

Ritter reportedly asked only for a bath and a long, undisturbed sleep; both requests were granted. At last, for him, the war was over.

He was taken to the United States, where he spent the rest of the war at Camp Clinton in Mississippi. He was well treated. For a man who had spent so much of his life in the frozen, desolation of the Arctic, the humid heat of Mississippi must have felt like another - and very strange - planet.

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AFTER THE WAR

In 1945, Hermann Ritter returned to Austria, where he lived the remainder of his life with his wife. Although he avoided the limelight, he always spoke of Marius Jensen with profound admiration. He viewed him not as an enemy who defeated him, but as a fellow man of the ice who had saved his life by taking him prisoner. Hermann Ritter died in 1968 at the age of 76.

After the war, Marius Jensen remained in Greenland, working as a trapper for a few more seasons, but eventually returned to Denmark. He died there in 1991, at the age of 80. For his wartime services, he was awarded the US Legion of Merit Medal and the King Christian X Liberty Medal from his native Denmark.

LEGACY

The Greenland Sledge Patrol was disbanded at the end of the war, but re-established in 1950, under the dark clouds of the ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Union. It continues to this day as an elite unit of the Danish Navy, though under a different name. They still use dog sledges (rather than snowmobiles) to patrol because dogs have greater ‘mechanical’ reliability and their early warning capabilities against polar bears are unmatched. Today they are called the Sirius Sledge Patrol (Slædepatruljen Sirius) - a nod to the common nickname of Sirius - ‘The Dog Star’.

Frederik X, the current King of Denmark, served in the Sirius Patrol, when he was Crown Prince during the early 2000s. During that time he once completed 2,200-mile trek through Northern Greenland.

However, perhaps the greatest legacy of this story is that, even when fate throws good people onto opposing sides, they need not hate.

In the end, the DUEL ON THE ICE was not between enemies, but between the harshness of the Arctic and the resilience of the human spirit. Both Ritter and Jensen, bound by duty and survival, proved that even in war, honour and respect are indispensable kindling for the warm fire of friendship.

BASICS FIRST - THE SLING

A sling consists of a pouch with cords connected at each of two sides. These cords extend the length of the thrower’s arm, and so extend its lever length, giving mechanical advantage – in other words; you can throw further with a longer lever! By letting go of one of the cords at the apex of the throw, the missile is released from the pouch. In skilled hands the sling can be used with precision accuracy and great force.

A SLING ON A STICK - THE FUSTIBAL

The lever advantage of a basic sling could be increased by mounting it on a wooden stave. These devices, in widespread use during the middle ages, were called fustibals or staff slings1. They were particularly useful for naval warfare - to fling pots of fire or quicklime onto enemy ships.

The hafts of staff slings varied between one and two metres in length, and the slinger used two hands to throw them. One end of the sling was secured to the staff and the other was looped over an angled hook at the top. The shape of the hook was such that, at the exact point that the sling reached its apex, the looped cord would detach itself and so send the missile flying.

A trebuchet operates on exactly the same principle; except that, in this larger iteration, the staff is substituted with an enormous beam. At the throwing end of this beam is the same cleverly curved hook, enabling one of the sling’s cords to self-detach at the optimum moment.

A SLING ON AN EVEN BIGGER STICK

The first trebuchets, called traction trebuchets, appeared in China around the 5^th century BCE. The beam was pivoted in a tall upright frame. One end of the beam had to be pulled down, in order to see-saw the throwing end upwards. In a traction trebuchet, this was done by soldiers pulling down, in unison, on ropes. These ropes hung, like the ropes in a belfry, from the forward end of the beam. A small traction trebuchet could be operated by half-a-dozen men but very large ones might need 50 or even 100 men.

Mechanical advantage was multiplied by the lever arm ratio. The fulcrum of the pivot was set to have a short length of beam at the manpower end and a very long length on the throwing side of the beam. This lever ratio produced greater speed at the tip of the long arm - it had to travel further through the air during the same time that the short end was pulled down - thus transferring greater energy to the projectile.

COUNTERWEIGHT TREBUCHETS

Towards the end of the 12^th century an improvement to this design appeared in the Middle East2. This was the counterweight trebuchet.

Instead of a dangle of ropes, the counterweight trebuchet used the power of gravity, employing a wooden hopper of stones suspended at the front end of the beam.

As the rear of the beam is pulled down, the hopper end is hoisted into the air. When released, the hopper drops, rotating the beam and sending the sling end into the air. The greater the weight in the hopper, the faster the speed of the rotation and the greater the velocity of the projectile and the further it flies.

The challenge was how to get this massively heavy hopper into the air. One answer was with huge treadwheels. Like giant hamster-wheels, these were turned by people walking inside them. On a large trebuchet, it would take two people in each of two treadwheels, to lift the load.

These treadwheels connected to either side of a broad wooden axle. A rope, attached to the throwing end of the beam, wound around the axle, so that, as the treadwheels turned, they spooled the rope. This ‘in turn’ pulled down the sling end of the beam and so lifted the hopper.

I’ve served my turn on many occasion in the great wheels of the magnificently massive trebuchet at the Middelaldercentret in Nykøbing in Denmark; it is gruntingly hard labour.

An alternative means was a ratcheted horizontal winch; a geared windlass mechanism turned by levers.

Once the hopper was dangling high with weighted menace, the drawn-down end of the beam was secured with a sturdy iron pin that latched it to a stanchion.

Once the beam was secured, the sling was laid in a greased slide that sat in the bed of the frame and its detachable end was hung onto the gently curved hook that allowed it to self-detach.

Next the stone was heaved into place and tucked into the pouch of the sling. When the hopper dropped, and the throwing end of the beam raced upwards, the wooden trough kept the sling in alignment as the stone was dragged along horizontally, before suddenly being lifted into the air.

To release the formidable power of the machine, the gynour (medieval term for the ‘siege engineer’ who operated a trebuchet) pulled on a cord that pulled out the pin. Whoosh!

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AIMING

These seemingly ungainly giants were capable of extraordinarily precise aiming both for range and line.

Line - fine-tuning for left and right - was adjusted by small movements at the tail end of the slide. Just a fraction of an inch to the right, angled the shot so that the stone might land several feet to the left at the end of a 300 yard flight.

There were two ways to calibrate for range. Altering the length of the sling was one and, of course, adding or removing weight from the hopper was the other. It was trial and error, but a practised eye had a good idea of what was needed to dial it in.

All of this was entirely dependent on the ammunition being of a consistent size, shape and weight. Trebuchet stones were made, not found. Masons chiselled them into roughly spherical shapes, passing them through a metal gauge to ensure they were all the same. Stones of different calibre or geometry flew differently to each other. Uniformity was the key.

To make an impact against a castle’s walls, trebuchet shot had to be produced from hard rocks. This often meant that the ammunition had to be transported to the siege on wagons from afar. If the walls were made of granite, a chalk ball was not ideal.

However, if the local stone proved suitably hard, the attackers would quarry it on the spot, and for week after week, all the besieged population would hear was the incessant chip, chip, chip of masons fashioning hundreds of trebuchet stones. That would unnerve even the stoutest hearts.

The trebuchet was a long-distance hammer and castle walls did not crumble from a single hammer blow. Striking exactly the same spot on a wall was required in order to have an effect. In order to get a wall to fall there was a formula to hit three strategic points on a section of wall repeatedly.

Depending on the type of stone being used, trebuchet stones could also be flung over the walls. Here they might strike interior walls, against which they would shatter, sending a shrapnel burst of flint-sharp splinters to cause death and injury to the inhabitants.

OTHER AMMUNITION

Trebuchets were also used to throw all manner of things from beehives (full of bees) to rotting carcasses that spread disease within a besieged town.

They also hurled fireballs – large wooden balls wrapped with flammable material – in order to set alight the wooden buildings that populated a town or castle compound.

As a weapon of psychological warfare, the trebuchet was used to throw the dead bodies of enemy captives back over the walls - not necessarily in one piece.

DEFENCE

A defining feature of a castle is that it is immobile. Castles cannot move out of the way and so must rely on their architecture for protection. Round towers are far more resistant to trebuchet strikes than square towers; more frequent towers make the connecting walls less vulnerable. A glacis (an acutely angled stone slope at the base of the wall) not only makes the lower wall thicker, it also creates a repelling angle. Surrounding earthworks force attackers to build their siege engines at a greater distance from the walls.

However, the most important defence against the thudding impacts from a trebuchet was walls built with a sandwich construction. Both the inner and the outer skin was built with thick, faced stones, but in between was a very wide gap, filled with rubble and mortar. This gave the walls a certain amount of elasticity to absorb repeated percussive shocks.

Another way to create this cushioning effect was…well, with a cushion. A large paliasse - a fat, rag-and-straw-stuffed mattress - could be lowered over the wall on ropes to hang over the spot where the stones were striking.

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WAR WOLF

Trebuchets were often given names, with characteristic military humour. ‘Malvoisin’ (Bad Neighbour) was the name given to a towering trebuchet, erected by the crusading army, during the Siege of Acre in 1191. The defenders inside the city built a counter-trebuchet of their own and, riposting with wit as well as wallop, named it ‘Mal Cousine’ (Bad Relation). It was targeted to try and destroy the French engine.

However, the most famous of all trebuchets was one called War Wolf. This enormous engine was deployed during Edward I’s siege of Stirling castle in 1304. It has been estimated to have stood 50-60 feet (15-18 metres) tall3 and it had to be assembled in situ - an undertaking that took three months.

Records show that 30 wagons were required to transport the heavy timbers to the siege location. In charge of its construction, was the engineer Maître Jacques de Saint-Georges. He had been the architect of Edward I’s castle-building programme in Wales, including Conway, Harlech and Caernarfon. Maître Jacques knew how to build them and he knew how to knock them down. Overseeing the works on War Wolf, he supervised a crew of 5 Master Carpenters and 49 labourers.

War Wolf was capable of launching stones weighing up to 300 pounds (approx. 136 kg), which probably had a range of around 220 yards (200 meters). The sheer size of the weapon was so intimidating that the defenders offered their surrender before the first stone was hurled.

According to legend, Edward I, determined to see it in action, refused the surrender until the trebuchet had launched a few shots, which quickly breached a section of the wall.

Suitable raw materials, whether the timbers or the stones, were seldom available at a siege site, so as with War Wolf, most trebuchets had to be prefabricated, and the parts transported on wagons. Counterweight Trebuchets in particular required a great deal of quality lumber, which was a scarce resource.

For this reason Traction Trebuchets remained in widespread use, long after the invention of their more muscular cousins.

During the Crusades, trebuchets were stored in arsenals in Damascus and other strongholds in the region. A modestly sized Traction Trebuchet could be carried on one or two camels; lighter versions were ported on the shoulders of the infantry. These were mobile and rapidly deployed.

Trebuchets were fashioned in a wide range of sizes. It is the giants that catch our attention, but in many situations, the smaller versions offered the advantage of swift mobilization.

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WILLIAM MARSHAL

One famous story, involving a trebuchet and the potential use of a human projectile, originates during ‘The Anarchy’- that period of civil war in England caused by Stephen and Matilda as rival claimants to the throne. It is a tale told of William Marshal – aka ‘the greatest knight that ever lived’ – when he was a child.

In 1152, William’s father, John Marshall, an ally of the Empress Matilda, was defending Newbury Castle against King Stephen. A truce was agreed and young William Marshall, aged just six years old at the time, was handed over to Stephen as a hostage.

John Marshall broke the truce, using the lull in the fighting to reinforce the castle’s garrison. A furious Stephen declared that he would execute his hostage by flinging him over the castle walls by means of a trebuchet. When King Stephen sent word of this threat, John Marshal reportedly replied that he

“did not care about the child, since he still had the hammer and the anvil with which to forge still more and better sons.”

Stephen was further enraged by this and had the young lad taken to the trebuchet. According to William’s contemporary biographer, William demonstrated his innate phlegm and courage by declaring

“Gracious me! What a swing! It would be a good idea for me to have a swing on it.”

Stephen was so moved by the child’s apparent fearlessness that he spared his life. William remained a hostage of the crown for many months before being released when the civil war ended.

This early, dramatic incident is a key part of the legend of William Marshal. Perhaps it is just a far-flung tale? It may have a grain of truth; it may be entirely apocryphal.

L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal (The History of William Marshal), where the story appears, was commissioned by his eldest son, shortly after his father’s death in 1219. The biographer, a French cleric known to us only as ‘Johans”, undoubtedly knew the power of such a yarn in establishing the character of the man he was employed to flatter.

This piece has been written to serve as a companion source of information to a rhyme I have written about trebuchets. You can find that, along with some other rhymes about medieval life, here:

Rhymes about knights and the middle ages

NOTE: There is a video link at the bottom of the Trebuchet rhyme page, where you can see some trebuchet action!

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Romance

There is nothing that makes an archer’s heart soar more than the joy of shooting an arrow high into the air; then watching it fly a great distance. It is a poetic act; giving wings to our earthbound spirits. It is empowering; exceeding the puny limitations of our biology by punching further than we can see. It is fun. No wonder it is such a seductive trope.

In both film and illustration, it has become standard for battlefield archery to be portrayed with massed archers loosing volleys of arrows high into the air to fall upon a distant enemy.

In this scenario, the good yeoman labours hard on the battlefield, shooting showers of arrows that select victims by divine lottery; judgement descending from above. Somehow this casts him in a more innocent, more romantic, role than if we see him as a stone-hearted killer, deliberately picking a target and shooting at blood-spatteringly close range.

However, did shooting massive volleys of high-arcing arrows make military sense and to what extent was it done?

This is one of those questions that causes deeply divided opinions. Conclusive answers are elusive, not least of all because the circumstances of different engagements call for varying tactics. Undoubtedly there were situations in which some longer range shooting was the best choice, but I don’t believe it was the norm, nor the best use of limited arrow supplies. I think we have the paradigm wrong.

I believe that the English longbow was most effective when it was used at ranges comparable to those of the smoothbore muskets that followed it; that is at distances between 30-80 yards, with optimal stopping power at nearer ranges. In the case of the longbow, because it is far, far quicker to re-load, it maintained utility as close as 10 yards, before needing to reach for your sword or cudgel.

So where is the evidence that English longbowmen shot successive volleys of high-arcing arrows at a far-off foe?

Art

Manuscript illustrations, murals, tapestries, paintings and other art are just one of several sources by which we can understand the medieval world. Surely there are some answers here?

There are hundreds of depictions of battlefield archery in medieval art. I have yet to see a single one that shows the archers shooting in elevation - that is angling their shots at 45° or more. It is a curious absence, don’t you think?

We do see archers shooting at high angles during sieges, so medieval artists had no problem with such naturalistic representations; so if this was the standard method of archery warfare, why do we never see it represented in battlefield images?

Often we see two armies facing each other, their proximity condensed in order to fit them both into the frame without a massive expanse of empty space between. Where this is the case, the image may not ‘read’ if the archers shot in the air. They are shown shooting directly at each other. This is a perfectly reasonable artistic decision that proves nothing either way.

It could be argued that, despite contracting the distance between the armies, the artist opted to show the individual archers in a attitude that would be recognizable as the standard form for battlefield shooting. I don’t know; I merely offer the hypothesis.

Although it is true that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’; it is equally true that it is not evidence of presence either!

I do not deploy the ‘art argument’ to underpin the idea of archers shooting at closer ranges; simply to point out that medieval art cannot be used to advance the belief that their default mode was to shoot at long range. You will have to find other sources for that.

The only images that we have that support the notion of archers, in a battlefield context, shooting high into the air are from more modern graphic arts, the cinema and their offspring - the video game.

Precipitation metaphors

Medieval chroniclers often used richly poetic phrases to describe the ferocity of English archery. Phrases that conjure up the idea of an arcing shower of arrows. These figures of speech are frequently cited as ‘evidence’ that medieval archers shot into the air, but I’m not so sure.

Perhaps the most famous of these precipitation metaphors comes from Jean Froissart’s description of the Battle of Crécy (1346)

“Then the English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so wholly and so thick, that it seemed snow.”

It is vivid language, evoking the intensity of the onslaught, but it need not imply the literal interpretation that the arrows fell downwards from the sky. I lived in Scotland at one stage and I recall that snow can very often be a horizontal event. There are only so many times you can write ‘the arrows came thick and fast’ without resorting to a weather analogy.

Also what are we to make of the mention that the archers stepped forward one pace?

The lines of the English archers at Crécy were interspersed with men-at-arms and, crucially, spearmen; an elongated spiky hedgehog of obdurate hindrance.

Imagine a French cavalry charge stalled before this bristling hastile array; the knights, pressed from behind, are wheeling and jostling 10-yards or so from the English line. Each looking for a moment, a half-gap, where he can spur forward and break through. This, I believe, is the moment when the archers stepped forward between the spearmen to deliver aimed shots of maximum power.

If the archers were shooting in the air, there would be no need to step forward. A single step hardly speaks to seeking greater range.

At Crécy the English held slightly higher ground, so there may be a sense that the arrows were shot down upon the enemy. This is a very different idea though to lobbing them up in the air and letting them fall on the enemy at a distance.

We find the ‘step forward’ again in a description of the Battle of Agincourt (1415) from the contemporary Gesta Henrici Quinti (The Deeds of Henry V):

“The English archers took a step forward and loosed off a hail of arrows”

Isn’t it curious that if we read of a hail of bullets, nobody jumps to the conclusion that the bullets were fired up into the air and then fell down on their targets. It is an accepted metaphor. I don’t believe that the language of the chroniclers tells us anything about the angle of the shots, only that they had the relentless sting of a blizzard.

What about the edicts to practice long range shooting?

In 1542, Henry VIII issued the ‘Act for the Maintenance of Artillery’. It stated:

That no man being above the age of twenty-four years shall shoot at any standing mark, except it be at a butt, bank, or prick, of eleven score yards distance or above, with any prick arrow…

A ‘prick arrow’ was a lighter arrow for flight shooting or target practice and its mention here is to distinguish it from the heavier type of livery arrow that would be used for war. In other words the Act required any male over 24 to be able to shoot a war arrow a minimum distance of 220 yards. There were hefty fines for non-compliance. Stronger archers might be able to exceed this distance by as much as another 100 yards, so it was a reasonably attainable feat.

Although this was a Tudor law, issued in the mid-16th century, it is frequently cited as evidence that England required long range archers for the medieval battlefield, which is a bit of a stretch. None of the earlier edicts concerning archery - Edward III (1363), Richard II (1388) and Edward IV (1477) - made any mention of distance. They simply proscribed certain distracting games (such as football) and made target practice at the village butts compulsory.

Is it possible that Henry’s injunctions for archers to be able to shoot a certain distance denoted something else?

Today we calibrate bows according to draw-weight but there are no records indicating that this method was used during the middle ages. Draw-weights for English longbows have been calculated solely on the physical evidence of the bows from the 16^th-century warship, The Mary Rose. It is a fair assumption that these approximate to medieval bows.

This lack of draw-weight records seems very strange to us. Certainly other cultures gauged the prowess of their bowmen according to the draw-weight. Records from 1736 in China, where archery remained a key battlefield skill, show test results for the elite Hangzhou banner corps. The top men proved their capacity to use bows between 147lbs and 173lbs. However the majority shot bows of between 80lbs and133 lbs. This range of draw-weights is probably pretty similar to those of English longbowmen.

The technology to measure draw-weights is rudimentary (clamp a bow horizontally and hang weights from the centre of the string until it reaches full draw). Medieval Commissioners of Array were perfectly able to do this, but it seems that they chose not to. Perhaps instead they followed the principles set out in Henry VIII’s 1542 statute.

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Mandating that archers should be able to shoot a certain distance, with designated equipment, was an alternative way of measuring an archer’s ability to draw bows of adequate military power. It carried the added advantage of also testing his ability to deliver the full power of the bow with good shooting technique. A more useful metric than draw-weight alone.

It was a metric that was also used by the Ottomans. The Constantinople Guild comprised of four classes: ‘the Seniors’, ‘the 900s’, ‘the 1000s’, and ‘the 1100s’. These numbers represented the distance, measured in gez1, that each class was able to shoot. In yards we might call them the 610-yard-men, the 680-yard-men and the 750-yard-men (they shot much lighter arrows!). An archer had to continually prove his ability to shoot at a designated distance: failure to do so meant that he was downgraded.

I think it probable that Henry VIII’s edict drew on earlier custom, similar to the Ottoman system, by grading archers according to their ability to shoot a livery arrow a certain distance. It was a mark of their proficiency; a simple method of measurement.

Nevertheless, the legally compulsory practice for medieval archers remained ‘shooting at the butts’ - target practice for accuracy at considerably shorter ranges.

Yes, they also ‘roved’, ‘shot at the clout’ and ‘shot at the marks’. These were all forms of recreational archery practice that included an element of shooting at long ranges, often with high, arcing shots. However, there is no record that proficiency at these was a requirement for military service.

There was, of course, military utility in an archer being able to range his shots. He needed this skill in siege warfare. However, it does not automatically follow that because he had to shoot upwards at an enemy on a wall, he would do so at a faraway enemy on a battlefield.

Confirmation Bias

Though precipitation metaphors and recreational long-range shooting both play into into ‘confirmation bias’, they are hardly hard evidence for stating that it was standard practice for English archers to send continuous massed volleys high into the air to fall upon a distant foe. Cinematically, the image is irresistible, but factually, not irrefutable.

The strongest arguments in favour of this idea seem to be ‘It is what I would do’ and ‘The longbow has a range of around 300 yards, so why wouldn’t you use it at that distance?’

They are both fair and persuasive points. Long range shooting was undoubtedly possible, and on rare occasions expedient. We just don’t have strong direct evidence for it. On the other hand we do have several considerations that contradict why it may be a good idea.

Archer’s Stamina

One of these is conserving the stamina of the archers, so that they are ready for the closer range shots, when it really counts

It matters little how many arrows an archer can shoot in a timed minute, when that minute sits in the middle of a restful day. What counts is how many arrows can he shoot over a period of several hours during the duress of battle. Do not underestimate the grunt, sweat and drain required to shoot a heavy bow repeatedly.

Archery historians used to give a shooting rate of 10-12 arrows per minute, but that was before so much serious work had been done on shooting heavier bows. I have certainly been guilty of perpetuating that number both in print and on film. Sorry!

We now presume that medieval warbows were significantly heavier than supposed previously. This is partly from the evidence of the bows on The Mary Rose (between 100lbs and 180lbs) and partly from the growing legion of modern heavy warbow shooters, who have developed both the physique and technique to be able to shoot these monsters on a regular basis, and thereby demonstrated what is possible.

When shooting a war-weight longbow, the figure of 10-12 arrows per minute is overly-ambitious for most and inconceivable for anyone to keep up for minute after minute. Realistically you have to drop that figure down to around half — 5-6 arrows per minute.

Moreover, that would be in moments of emergency, when the enemy are engaging your front line, hammering at your front door. In between there would be a need to conserve stamina. You cannot go to the gym and do your maximum bench-press 5 times a minute, every minute for the two or three hours that you might need to shoot a bow in battle. It is all about the possible number of repetitions and the duration of rest periods, not what you might be able to do for a single peak moment.

We are still learning about what may be possible but there can be no doubt that commanders would have to factor in the stamina of their archer corps. Perhaps there was a rotation system, whereby frontline archers stepped back after every burst of 10 or 15 arrows, and the rank behind stepped forward (is that the step forward that the chroniclers allude to?).

Perhaps for every 10 arrows shot, an archer rested for 20, 30,40 or even 50 arrows. A 1:5 ratio of the archer corps shooting at any one time. You can make your own permutations and calculations; it certainly makes sense of why English armies required archers in such vast numbers. This may all be conjectural. What is not, however, is that no archer could sustain shooting a heavy bow for minute after minute and hour after hour.

Stamina had to be conserved as preciously as ammunition supplies. This is one of the reasons to be cautious about expending energy on long-range shots. Archers need to be ready to shoot, and shoot rapidly, when the enemy was on the verge of breaking through; a moment of crisis when every arrow counted. Although fun to do, chance distance shots would drain that resource.

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Impact

Arrows hit much harder at closer ranges. I’ll leave discussions about armour penetration for another time but it must be obvious that the harder the hits, the more punishing the result; whether it be to penetrate armour or stun with blunt trauma. Thump, clout and wallop carry the day.

An arrow loosed at a high angle will slow dramatically at the apex of its trajectory, relying almost entirely on gravity for impact. That strike is not negligible, it may still cause damage, distress and disruption. However, even with gravity assist, the force of the strike is substantially less than a direct hit from a powerful bow at 10, 20 or 30 yards. These are the ranges when the power of the longbow really counts.

If you have a finite supply of arrows, does it make sense to risk them on a chance hit of reduced impact at 250/300 yards, or to save them for the certain punch of an aimed shot at far closer ranges? Every long-range arrow that missed, or failed to take a man out of combat, was a wasted resource.

The Supply Argument

Medieval war arrows were an elaborate form of ammunition, with numerous time-consuming phases of manufacture2. They could not be made readily by an army on campaign. Consequently resources were finite. When they ran out, they ran out!

It was serious news for the chamberlain of Chester to discover in 1356 ( the year of the Battle of Poitiers) that,

‘no arrows can be obtained from England because the king … has taken for his use all the arrows that can be found’

Packed in casks and trundled on carts, the quantities of arrows taken on campaigns represented staggering feats of logistic procurement. We don’t have precise numbers, but between one and two million for campaigns like Crécy or Agincourt are widely accepted estimates.

Bear in mind these were not just for a single set piece battle; they were for the entire campaign. That meant arrows for sieges, arrows for skirmishes and arrows for chevauchées3. Moreover, we know of measures to punish suppliers of sub-standard arrows, which hints at a certain percentage being unusable4.

Even with revised estimates about the rate of shooting, stocks could be depleted at an alarming rate during a battle. If we take Crécy and an estimate of 7,500 longbowmen, with the ability to shoot 6 arrows a minute then there was the potential to loose 45,000 arrows in a single minute.

You can play with the maths but, given the other demands on arrow supplies, Edward III probably had less than half his original inventory by the time the battle started. The battle lasted around five hours, with the French attacking the English line 15 times. surely each of those resulted in 5 minutes or more of intensive fighting at the front line?

A commander also had to consider that this may not be his last battle before being able to board his army on boats and set sail for home. The careful rationing of arrow supplies was essential and ordering volleys of thousands of arrows into the air might be considered a reckless use of these precious resources.

An uphill struggle

I do not doubt that there were circumstances when longer distance archery was employed. One such occasion was at Homildon Hill in 1402 an English army faced a Scottish force who had the advantage of significantly higher ground. Both were equipped with archers.

“Without delay, our archers, drawn up in the dale, shot arrows at the Scottish schiltron... In reply the Scottish archers directed all their shots at our archers; but they felt the weight of our arrows, which fell like a storm of rain, and so they fled.” Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana

Clearly with the English archer force on the lower ground, there had to be a degree of elevation to shoot up at the enemy; though I suspect that the parabola was shallower than it would be shown in a modern film or video game.

Similarly the Norman archers at Hastings were shooting uphill, although probably not with longbows. I shall save that discussion for the next article in my ‘Unpicking The Bayeux Tapestry’ series - be sure to be up to date with that, so that you are ready when the next installment is released.

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Parting shot

The stirring whoosh of a volley (courtesy of Hollywood S/FX), the delay as the airborne missiles head towards their target, before finally descending in a cloud of destruction, serve dramatic narratives so well that I doubt we’ll see this motif changing anytime soon. It simplifies the role of the longbowman into a single powerful image and I confess to doing my share of staging such sequences in the past – before I’d fully thought it all through.

I love longbows - I rejoice in the aesthetic beauty of their elegant lines and the colour and patina of the wood. They are a delight to hold and a joy to shoot. However, it was neither a super-weapon nor a magic stick. Like the musket, longbows were range weapons and, like the musket, far better deployed at medium to close ranges. Understanding this can give us a more nuanced view of the English longbowman, his skills and his courage.

The chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, writing about the battle of Agincourt reported that:

‘the French began to bow their heads so that the arrow shots would not penetrate the visors of their helmets’

This surely implies that the arrows were being shot directly, horizontally, at the knight’s faces. They had to bow their heads, not only to avoid their visors being pierced but also to give maximum opportunity for the steeply conical crown of their helms to deflect this terrifying onslaught.

I’ll leave the last word to Iolo Goch, Bard to Owain Glyndwr, in the ate 14th century. He wrote:

“I would shoot such a shot, so strong and deep drawn, so sharply loosed, so low in flight, that it would be not better for my enemy if he wore a breastplate and a Milan hauberk than a wisp of fern, a kiln rug, or a herring net.”

It emphasizes the idea that in addition to a long draw, a powerful bow, and crisp loosing technique, a flat trajectory was considered to deliver greater impact.

THE HEIST

In the early morning-mist hours of Sunday, April 21, 1946, a black Rolls Royce purred softly across the drawbridge at Hever Castle. At the time, this gloriously beautiful and enchanting 16th-century castle - the childhood home of Anne Boleyn - was privately owned by Lord and Lady Astor.

Lady Astor was asleep in her room. The security guard, George Scholis, assumed that the car was transporting Lord Astor, returning home after a riotously late evening in London.

He was mistaken; the car carried four masked robbers and they swiftly overwhelmed poor George, wrapped him up in a tablecloth and locked him the pantry.

They presumably required several more tablecloths to bundle up the 1,500 priceless treasures that they then proceeded to loot. These ranged from prayer books to portraits and included what was, at the time, believed to be a glittering, jewel-encrusted, Ottoman dagger, once owned by Henry VIII.

THE DAGGER

Subsequent scholarship, based on 18^th-century drawings of the dagger, has ruled that it was made in the late 16^th century, after Henry’s death. Nevertheless it was a pretty piece and it ended up in the collections of the idiosyncratic writer and politician Horace Walpole (1717-1797), whose London home, Strawberry Hill House, is currently putting on an exhibition about the dagger.

Undeterred by the fact that none of the stolen goods, including the dagger, have ever been recovered, the curators of the exhibition are substituting with SIX ‘similar’ Ottoman jewelled daggers, making a fair stab at what it may have looked like.

Certainly the story is too good not to tell. The dagger was sold by Walpole’s daughters. At one stage it was bought by the celebrated Shakespearean actor Charles Kean (son of the better-known Edmund Kean) in 1842. It is almost certain that he used it in his stage productions - perhaps even as the dagger that MacBeth saw before him. It was subsequently acquired by Lord Astor.

The exhibition is titled “Henry VIII’s Lost Dagger: From the Tudor Court to the Victorian Stage” and it opened on November 1st, 2025.

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THE BOUNDER

Owing to lack of evidence, the chief suspect was never arrested. This was Victor Hervey (pronounced Harvey), the son of the 5th Marquess of Bristol and the future 6th Marquess of Bristol. Hervey was a notorious jewel-thief, the ringleader of a gang, known as the Mayfair Playboys. He was jailed for three years in 1939 for stealing jewellery and fur coats.

Hervey had been educated at Eton and, as the sinister clouds of fascism began to sweep over Europe, he began his officer training at The Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Shortly afterwards, he was asked to leave on account of his ‘temperament’.

He turned to arms dealing, running guns to both sides in the Spanish Civil War; even though he was notionally a supporter of Franco. Deals went disastrously wrong and he was declared bankrupt in 1937; a downfall that was doubtless the springboard to his career as a jewel thief.

Victor Hervey inherited the title the Marquis of Bristol in 1960. He sat in the House of Lords, where the larcenous lord seems to have turned over a new leaf (which made a change from turning over houses) and went straight. During this phase of his life he accumulated, and spent, extravagant wealth as a legitimate and highly respected art dealer. He moved to Monaco as a tax exile in 1979, dying in 1985 at the age of 69.

Why hasn’t there been a film about him??? Who would you suggest to play the lead?

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In Part 3 of this series, I suggested that the solitary Saxon archer on the Bayeux Tapestry is shooting a wooden short-bow of the Waterford type: the standard hunting bow of the day. In fact I’m quite sure that all the Saxon archers, albeit few in number, used this style of bow.

Despite irregularities in how the bows are portrayed, I ventured that the same type of bow might have been used by the Norman archers, especially if these were feudal levies, bringing their own bows.

However, at the outset of ‘Unpicking The Bayeux Tapestry #3’ , I also wrote:

“It is as if they were trying to portray something that had been described to them, but that they had never seen.”

Now please hold that thought, because even though the wooden short-bow theory has much merit, we can’t get away from the fact that many of the bows are extravagantly wiggly. The makers of the Tapestry seem to be trying to portray recurved bows, and if that is the case, it has a significant bearing on the overall story.

Let us assume that the wooden short-bow was a familiar hunting weapon, both to the person who pricked out the outlines with charcoal and also to the embroiderers whose threads gave his markings body and life. That simple shape remains the basis of most of the bows. However some are undeniably more elaborate. Why?

Could an eyewitness of the battle have been called to visit the needlewomen’s atelier? Imagine the scene: As the old soldier recalls seeing these strange, curly bows, he describes their shape in the air with a slow, serpentine wave. Some of the younger needlewomen might have blushed, witnessing a male hand suggesting such curvaceous contours. Even so, a few were bold enough to attempt an interpretation with their yarn; others were not. Artistically, the whole question has been fudged. So we must turn to other clues.

Who are these guys?

Although the visual evidence for the bow types is inconclusive, the status of the Norman archers shouts at us. If the group of four featured in the main panel are anything to go by, they seem to be a pretty spiffy bunch.

Most conspicuous is the archer wearing a full mail hauberk. He is not only a high-status archer, but also one equipped for close-quarters fighting. His bow may be illustrated as a clunky stick but he and his fellows are thrillingly dynamic.

Master Wace1, describing the landing of the invasion fleet, wrote the following about the Norman archers:

“The archers were the first to disembark, the first to make their landing, each one with their bow at the ready, their different quivers at their sides…they all wore short clothes designed for attacking as well as fleeing, turning right round as well as simply stepping to one side. They reconnoitered right along the coastline without encountering a single armed man.”

This versatility and agility, together with their ability to shoot on the run, hints at a style of archery we most associate with composite-bow archers from the Middle East. Such archers were clearly useful, as skirmishers, in the first wave of an invading force. They could be equally useful on the battlefield - running in alongside the horses and keeping the doors of the shield wall closed, so the cavalry could close in to throw their spears.

That idea is further boosted by the fact that our armoured man holds four arrows in his bow-hand. This is standard practice in Eastern cultures, facilitating rapid reloading for an especially fast rate of shooting. It is known as burst-shooting or shower-shooting. I use this ‘arrows-in-the-hand’ method myself for horse-archery; it works very well.

Burst shooting is what you need when closing with the enemy - rushing in and shooting continuously every step of the way. Our armoured man is not shown carrying a sword or axe, but I’m fairly sure he would have had one. He is an assault archer, armoured to engage in close combat if need be.

The others in the group also look quite expensively turned out; not your average levies. The one at top left is wearing very fancy pants indeed. They are in disciplined formation and shooting on the move, creating a wave of rotating harassment in between the heavy infantry and cavalry. I’d say these are crack troops, part of a carefully integrated combined-arms system.

In contrast to the single, undersized, Saxon archer, these four energetic and flamboyant fellows proclaim the paramount importance of archery to the Norman playbook. They also hint at an archer contingent in greater numbers.

However it is the lively legion of archers in the lower border that really conveys their numbers. Here we see 30 archers - all nimbly shooting on the move. There is a general consensus among modern historians that the Norman archer corps at Hastings consisted of between 1,000 and 1,500 bowmen, as part of a total fighting force of 7,500 - 8,000 men.

The military importance of William’s archer corps is further conveyed in the less literal depictions in the borders. Here the bows often seem to be larger than life. It is also here that we see stronger hints at depicting recurved bows.

What is a recurved bow and why does it matter?

When a recurved bow is unstrung, the tips curve away from the archer; when strung, the curvature reverses to form a distinctive serpentine shape. This pre-stressed geometry allows the bow to store and deliver elastic potential energy far more efficiently than a simple wooden bow. This means a recurve is significantly more powerful, pound-for-pound of draw weight, enabling greater velocity and range.

Wooden bows can be given some curvature from steaming but a real recurve bow, with extreme bends, can only be produced from laminations of composite materials -horn, sinew, wood, and crucially, a special type of glue. Their manufacture was complex and took many months. Compared to simple wooden bows, composite bows were extremely expensive. In addition, they required skilled hands both to shoot them and also to tame them; a composite bow needed constant careful maintenance.

A composite bow was a super-springy, big-ballistic, flex-elastic, bow-plus! It was an elite bow for elite archers.

Recurved composite bows were the weapons of nomadic horse archers and for both horse and infantry archers in the Middle East. So how is it possible that archers with composite bows could have been part of William’s army?

The French Connection

The Normans were Vikings who had settled, by force, in territory ruled by the western Franks (roughly present-day France) – lands once part of the realm of Charlemagne and his Carolingian successors.

Our understanding of the Norman invasion force must therefore take into account, not only the maritime mastery derived from their Norse ancestry, but also the 150 years (911 to 1066) of adopting and adapting the Frankish military model.

The most commonly told story is the transition of the Norman elite warriors from infantry to cavalry - the birth of the mounted knight. However there is another story; the tactical importance of combined arms, and especially the role of archery.

In the 9th century Utrecht Psalter, we find vivid images of Carolingian archers. Recurved composite bows feature heavily - and they are unmistakable! The Franks were no strangers to the composite bow. For centuries they battled against marauding Avars, a horse-archery people from the Steppe and it seems they adopted their bows with relish.

Through their contact with the Franks, the Normans were not only aware of the military effectiveness of archery, they were also aware of the additional punch offered by composite bows.

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The Feudal System

The feudal system for raising and equipping an army was also something the Normans copied from the Franks and Frankish armies placed great store by the bow. Capitularies (royal decrees) from as early as 808, under Charlemagne, stated that each man serving in the levy was required to have a bow with two strings and twelve arrows along with a spear and a shield. The type of bow is not specified and I dare say that many of them were simple wooden bows.

Around half of Duke William’s invasion force was recruited from beyond the boundaries of Normandy. He mustered troops from Brittany, Picardy, Poitou, Burgundy and Aquitaine - all forged in the Frankish model.

We can be certain of the value that the Franks placed on military archery, we can be certain that Frankish nobles used composite bows, at least for hunting, but we just don’t have the evidence to support the idea that the lower orders of the levy would have had composite bows in significant number.

Perhaps some of William’s archers were from French lands but, if not, where else might they have come from?

The Italian Connection

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (Song of the Battle of Hastings), written in 1067 and attributed to Guy of Amiens lauds the Norman archery poetically,

“Apulia, Calabria, Sicily — whose flying darts swarm!”

Here we have it (if not a smoking gun, then perhaps a flaming arrow); the most contemporary primary source that exists (written within a year of the battle) refers to a specialist archer corps recruited from Sicily and the boot of Italy.

These areas had been under East Roman (Byzantine) governance since the 6^th century and the recurved composite bow was a core component of Byzantine armies. An archer corps from that area would most definitely have been using recurved composite bows.

At the time of Hastings, the Normans controlled most of Apulia and had completed their conquest of Calabria. Their conquest of Sicily, begun five years earlier, was still in progress but by 1066 they already controlled the key port city of Messina.

It seems highly probable that a substantial contingent of mercenary archers from this region fought on the Norman side at Hastings.

The Varangian Connection

There is another possibility. The Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada, who led an invasion force in the north of England a few days before William’s landing, was formerly a commander of the Varangian Guard.

The Varangian Guard were an elite corps of ‘Viking’ veteran troops, employed as mercenaries by the East Roman (Byzantine) army2. They also served as the personal bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperors. Varangian soldiers were trained to operate within the broader Byzantine military doctrine of combined arms - that meant the fierce Varangian infantry fought alongside Byzantine archers - archers who shot with composite bows.

Before becoming King of Norway in 1046, Hardrada was a freebooting warlord, fighting for power and plunder. His military adventures included campaigns in Sicily, where he would also have witnessed first-hand the skill and striking power of composite-bow archers.

Hardrada was defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge (1066) but we might conjecture that if he had brought with him some of the archers from his Varangian Guard days, these could have fled after the battle and found employment with Duke William’s forces in the south. Highly speculative of course, but taken together with the composite bow cultures in France and Southern Italy, it speckles additional pigments to a picture in which we see Normans well acquainted with recurved composite bows.

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Arrow carriage and supply

Most of the archers are shown with side quivers; with the exception of fancy-pants, who seems to be wearing the same type of quiver but slung over his shoulder. There’s always one! Apart from this figure, shoulder quivers are conspicuously absent from medieval art; albeit a mainstay of historical fantasy genres. Side quivers were well suited for the task: they allowed a shooter to quickly grab a handful of arrows on the move and pass them into the bow-hand, or to simply nock rapidly one at a time. Crucially, they were also easier to restock with arrow re-supplies.

Shower-shooting, using rapid-reloading methods, places enormous demands on arrow supplies. The old capitulary requirement for archers to bring 12 arrows apiece would have been exhausted within a couple of minutes of battle being joined. For the tactic to be successful, there needed to be a continual central supply.

In the lower margin we see large free-standing arrow bags. I think these represent re-supply systems, probably run out onto the battlefield by lowly levies. The idea of an archer’s caddy is also implied in a detail from the Utrecht Psalter.

The Horse Archer

In the Tapestry’s final, climactic sequence, as the Saxons are routed from the field, we see a group of Norman horsemen in pursuit. Among them is a figure both unexpected and revealing: a horse-archer!

His bow is perhaps the most ill-drawn (in the artistic sense) of all the Tapestry’s bows. It is a stout, stumpy stick that would not function as a bow, which is confusing because this is where we might expect to see the highest status composite bow. That is not to say you couldn’t shoot a wooden longbow from a horse; I have done so many times. It is just that horse-archers are most commonly associated with composite bows and such bows were familiar to the Franks, if not also to the Normans.

As far back as Charlemagne’s capitularies, a Frankish horseman/knight was expected to carry a bow and quivers with arrows in addition to his spear, sword, and shield. Although it is not specified, a composite bow would be more likely for someone of that status. We certainly see horse-archery with composite bows in the Utrecht Psalter; appearing in images of the rout and the hunt. Frankish nobles, it seems, favoured the composite bow.

Was there a dedicated horse-archer contingent? Maybe, but I doubt it. Did the archers from southern Italy mount up for the rout? The figure on the Tapestry is unarmoured, so that is possible. Most probably, however, I think the Tapestry’s horse-archer represents a Frankish ally; a nobleman who has taken to his horse, bow in hand, for the ‘sport’ of the rout.

The harrying Normans on the Tapestry consist of three mounted swordsmen, one mounted spearman and one horse-archer. It’s up to you how you extrapolate those ratios into actual numbers. I picture a terrifying horde of several hundred horsemen; hot-blooded and hot-headed. Among them I imagine a band of nobles, armed with their recurved hunting bows, riding after the desperate fugitives as if they were chasing down a stag.

To the victors, for whom the Tapestry was made, it is an image of exultant triumph, but one which only thinly veils the wretched brutality of conquest.

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Summing up

The argument that the bows on the Tapestry were poorly stitched representations of wooden short-bows, brought along by his ducal levies, is persuasive (and easy to swallow) but I can’t get away from the niggles of the wiggles. They are trying to show something here but not quite pulling it off.

We can’t ‘know’ of course but I believe there are enough clues to suggest that Duke William’s archer corps was a professional, multinational, and technologically advanced force, trained in combined arms tactics. If so, they are key to understanding William’s victory.

Recurved composite bows, armoured assault archers, burst-shooting techniques, significant numbers, organized field re-supply systems; all point to the idea that the archery at Hastings was central to Duke William’s tactical plan - a plan that broke the Saxon shield wall and allowed him to seize the crown of England.

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NEXT ON ‘Unpicking The Bayeux Tapestry’…

SHOOTING IN THE AIR and THE CROSSBOW QUESTION

I’ll address the issue of whether, or not, the archers at Hastings shot in the air, or simply uphill. Also, although crossbows do not appear on the Tapestry, the key contemporary accounts - the Carmen and William of Poitiers - mention them in detail. Why then are they missing from the Tapestry and what role might they have played in William’s army?

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The Bayeux Tapestry features 36 bowmen— thirty-four Norman infantry archers and one solitary Saxon archer; plus a single Norman horse-archer. Given the general artistic excellence and detail elsewhere in the tapestry, you might think it a simple thing for such a talented atelier of embroiderers to have rendered the shape of a bow accurately. But no; the images of bows are childishly poor and conspicuously inconsistent. It is as if they were trying to portray something that had been described to them, but that they had never seen.

This could very well be the case if what we are talking about are recurved composite bows - and if so, it means that William’s archer corps were an elite and prestigious fighting unit of crack troops, not a rag-bag of villainous villeins.

I will come to that idea in the next article in this series (because I do think that is what they are) but first, for those who consider such a notion too outlandishly exotic, let’s examine the case for them being wooden ‘short bows’, which, to be fair, they may well be.

SHORT BOW vs LONG BOW

With regard to a simple wooden bow (composite bows are different), the mechanical distinction between a longbow (roughly 1.8 - 2 metres) and a short bow (roughly 1.2 - 1.7 metres)1 is that a longer stave allows you to draw the string back further before the thing snaps. The further the string is drawn, the more energy is stored and the bow shoots with greater force; having greater range and impact.

In the case of the English longbow of the 100-Years-War, that meant drawing to the ear. In the instance of a short bow, that meant drawing only to the centre of the chest, which of course is what we see on the Tapestry. In fact, this repeated representation of the short draw is the main driver for the ‘wooden short bow’ argument.

Although the quartet of archers in the main panel (image at top of this page) are armed with unmistakably short bows, the bows in the margins appear overly large. It may be that this is an artistic choice. Throughout the Tapestry, the images in the margins serve as allegory and commentary to the main narrative in the central panel, so these outsize bows may simply be telling us just how important a role the archers played in this invasion force; a commentary on their military value.

Rather than taking the inconsistent form of the bows as our main clue, it is the manner of their use that suggests a short bow - and that short draw is shown throughout.

Short bows are definitely a thing. In other parts of the world, we have stacks of evidence for functioning wooden short bows. They were, for instance, a primary hunting weapon for many Native American tribes. When stalking at close range, the short draw is an advantage because, requiring less movement to operate, there is less chance of spooking the game. Not as powerful as a longbow, but at 50lb - 60lbs, the draw weight of these bows has sufficient wallop to bring down a deer at close range.

A chest draw also makes it significantly easier to shoot on the move, whether walking or even at a slow jog. We see the archers doing this on the Tapestry - they are an agile mobile force, quite different from the stake-bound bowmen at Agincourt. Bringing a powerful longbow to full draw behind the ear can only be accomplished by a standing archer. Circumstantially, the argument for short wooden bows seems compelling. They might be something a low-status levy could muster with and they could be useful enough for short range skirmishing on the battlefield.

THE WATERFORD BOW

Although there is no definitive archaeological evidence for the short-bow surviving in England, Viking, or pre-Conquest Norman contexts, there are examples from the 1100s in Ireland. Among several fragments of bows discovered at Waterford, was one complete bow that was stable enough to be fully excavated. Made from yew, it measures 1.26 metres (4 feet 1.6 inches) from tip to tip. It is a bow of substantial girth and unlikely to have been for a child. The assumption is that shorter bows like this, used by ordinary folk for hunting, co-existed with longer bows that packed a heavier punch for military use. Test shooting with a replica of the Waterford Bow, beautifully made by Jeremy Spencer, who followed the exact dimensions, has indicated a bow with a 60 lb draw weight when using a short chest draw2. Unearthed alongside the bow was an intact arrow, measuring 60cm (23.6inches), including its bodkin head.

EVIDENCE IN ART

Until the discovery of the Waterford Bows in the 1980s, the existence of early medieval short bows was inferred entirely from their appearances in art - a primary example of which is the Bayeux Tapestry, and we can hardly cite the work itself as evidence of its own veracity.

However there is a 12th-century manuscript illustration, depicting the Martyrdom of St Edmund in 869, which strongly supports the idea of such bows. The Passio Sancto Eadmundi tells the story of St Edmund, King of East Anglia3. Not only do his executioners use identifiably short bows and a chest draw, their bows also show the distinctive style of nock (string groove) that we see on both the Waterford bow and the Bayeux Tapestry.

The bow extends for a notable length beyond the nock. This feature offers no mechanical advantage to the bow’s performance, though it may function to give extra leverage when stringing. While a bit of a mystery, it serves as a useful identifier.

On the Tapestry, a short bow with this style of nock is clearly depicted in use by the figure of the Saxon bowman. He appears in the main panel, dwarfed alongside some burly housecarls. The distorted proportions of his size, together with the fact that only one Saxon archer is shown, probably signals that the Saxon army contained very few archers and that they were considered of low status.

For our Saxon, a simple fyrdman, I would conclude 100% that he is using a wooden short bow in the style of the Waterford bow - a type of bow that was familiar to the Canterbury needlewomen. It is possible that the Norman bows were of a similar pattern but I don’t think so.

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THE VIKING CONNECTION

The Normans (Norsemen) were of Viking descent. In 911 they began their settlement of the lower Seine valley in Northern France. They were led by their chieftain, Rollo. Duke William was Rollo’s great-great-great-grandson. There had been more than a century of assimilation by the time of William’s invasion, but it is not unreasonable to assume a continuity of certain weapon types.

There have been longbows since the Neolithic period. The longbow wasn’t a new concept that suddenly emerged in the later middle ages. The Vikings certainly had longbows. The most complete example is the magnificent Hedeby bow from Denmark, which measures 1.91 metres (6’ 2”) and has been dated to between the 9th and 11th centuries.

It has been calculated that the Hedeby bow would have a draw weight of around 100 lbs. That is a significant military advantage over the 50 - 60lbs we might expect from a short bow.

So could the confusingly rendered Norman bows on the tapestry have represented Viking style longbows? Yes - it is possible and equally possible that there were a mixture of types. However, if this were the case, surely there would have been little problem in illustrating them clearly.

More significantly, any potential power advantage of a longer bow is completely nullified by that short chest draw. So the question now becomes - would a 50-60lb short bow have an adequate martial application on the battlefield?

THE SWINGING DOORS OF THE SHIELD WALL

The effectiveness of battlefield archery depends on what you want it to achieve. A 60 lb bow with a short draw (the draw length is a big factor in this regard) probably has a maximum range of no more than 165 metres (180 yards) - but, unless it hits you in the eye (!) - it would be of little consequence at that distance. Its effective range (ie being able to deliver significant thump) is far closer.

Even at extreme close range, a bow of this draw weight is unlikely to have penetrative power against either shields or hauberks. However, that does no disqualify its usefulness. A constant barrage of hard, stinging hits is more than a mere annoyance. Even hardened warriors would need to defend themselves against the wearying effects of such an onslaught.

The Tapestry shows the shields of the Saxon shield wall bristling with arrows like a prickle of porcupines. In great number they would make the shield awkward to use. More importantly, defending against such a shower of shafts, forces the shield wall to keep its doors closed; that is keeping the shields held squarely in front.

This matters because it limits the range that spears can be thrown at the enemy. Of course it is possible to throw a spear and still keep your shield directly in front of you but to impart any meaningful power, you need to rotate the body. start with your left shoulder forward and then swing from the hips with all your might to bring the right should forward and the right arm fully extended in front of you - it opens the door; your shield pivots to one side.

It may seem counter-intuitive but, during the throwing war phase, it was beneficial to the attackers to force the defenders to keep the doors of their shield wall shut. This limited the range at which the front line could hurl their spears.

Norman cavalry, men-at-arms and archers worked together for a combined forces attack. It wasn’t a staged offensive, with an arrowstorm from distant archers followed by the cavalry - they attacked together. In this way the archers were instrumental in hampering the Saxon’s ability to repel the missile cavalry, who were able to ride in close and throw their spears over the front row and into the ranks.

It is questionable whether, with short-draw, short-bows, the archers could have any effect with high, arcing shots, which is not to say that they didn’t at times shoot with a modest amount of elevation.

ARROW IN THE EYE – OR NOT?

Was the image of the arrow piercing King Harold’s eye present on the Tapestry at the time of its creation? Possibly not. Some believe the arrow was a later addition by conservators during the 1842 restoration, seeking to conform the visual record to what had by then become the popular story.

Earlier 18th-century sketches of the scene show the same figure holding a spear above his head, not an arrow in his eye. The hand position works for either scenario. So there is a question – was the spear unpicked and replaced with an arrow? Perhaps current conservation and modern analysis will give us a definitive answer.

There is another issue. The embroidered inscription telling us the scene shows King Harold being killed - ‘Haroldus Rex Interfectus Est’ - is predominantly framing the man being hacked down by a Norman knight, immediately to the right of the figure with the arrow in the eye. This is more likely to be Harold and being cut down by a Norman knight aligns closely with the contemporary account in the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio.

The Carmen (The Song of the Battle of Hastings) was written in 1067 and has been attributed to Guy of Amiens. It is the closest account we have to the date of the battle. I shall be looking at it closely in the next essay in this series, together with the account from William of Poitiers, who wrote his report within five years or so of the battle4.

Henry of Huntingdon

The main textual support for the ‘arrow in the eye’ story comes from Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote his Historia Anglorum some 60 years after the battle. It is conceivable that he had access to a primary source, now lost to use, but equally probable that he made the whole thing up. He is known for his penchant for dramatic licence5. The incident is not cited by either William of Poitiers or in the Carmen. Huntingdon wrote,

“a shower of arrows fell round King Harold, and he himself was pierced in the eye.”

It was also Huntingdon who wrote,

Duke William commanded his bowmen not to aim their arrows directly at the enemy, but to shoot them in the air, that their cloud might spread darkness over the enemy’s ranks; this occasioned great loss to the English.”

I think this too is false. He may have thought it helped to embellish the arrow-in -the -eye story but overhead volleys are not a necessary condition of being shot in the eye. The Norman bowmen were fighting uphill, so that would deliver quite enough lift. If the case is for short-draw short-bows, then Hollywood style arrowstorms from above are not plausible.

THE CASE FOR THE COMPOSITE BOW

Although I remain open to the idea that the Norman bows at Hastings were wooden short-bows, I believe that there are some equally compelling clues to suggest that they were high-end, recurved composite bows. There are plenty of extremely wiggly ones that tease the idea. That they are poorly depicted could be explained by imagining that the artist has only seen wooden short bows but has had these new-fangled recurve, composite bows described. The result is a confused muddle.

If you’d like to read my ‘case for the composite bow’ and my take on the Bayeux horse archer, be sure to subscribe so that you receive a notification, when it is available.

Throughout the ancient world and during the early medieval period, a clash of armies involved a preliminary phase in which combatants threw things at each other: spears, stones and axes – augmented by archery (which I will cover in Part Three) and insults. It was usually only after a sustained period of hurling things that people got stuck in to hand-to-hand fighting.

This skirmishing phase served various purposes. It was an opportunity for young warriors to display dash and dare and also for reconnaissance; getting close to the foe’s front line to gauge strengths and weaknesses. Further it could frustrate enemy troop movements as they were being marshalled into tactical positions. However, the primary purpose of ‘the throwing war’ was to soften up the enemy and create weak spots where an assault might break through.

At the Battle of Hastings, as portrayed on the Bayeux Tapestry, we see that there is a lot of throwing from both sides and that, in the case of the Normans, this pugnacious pitching is predominantly the job of the cavalry.

CAVALRY TYPES

By far the greater number of horsemen depicted on the tapestry have distinctively long and slender throwing spears1. These can be classified as Missile Cavalry. They were analogous to horse-archers, operating in a similar fashion by thundering up to the enemy’s ranks, discharging their projectiles, and then retreating in a repeating cycle of hit-and-run.

However, among a total of roughly three dozen cavalry depicted in the Hastings sequence, we also see three horsemen who can be described as Heavy Cavalry or Impact Cavalry - that is riders armed with much thicker spears: ones that have pennons attached. Attaching a pennon renders a spear impractical to throw. This, and the manner in which they are held, clues us to the fact that these are intended for direct impact, in the manner of later medieval cavalry.

These heavier spears are carried with the hand in supination (palm up) and clamped against the body by the elbow. This is the beginning of what we call the couched lance ( later tucked higher, under the armpit). The shaft was locked against the body so as to form a solid linkage between spear, man and horse - delivering an unstoppable impact that combined the speed of a charge with the weight of a horse and armoured rider.

When riding hard behind a swarm of missile cavalry, casting a storm of spears to decimate the Saxon shield-wall, these shock troops could sweep into the disordered ranks before they could regroup.

In a couple of instances we see a pennon attached to a stick-thin spear. I would describe these as Light Cavalry, akin to lancers in the Napoleonic era. Instead of using a ‘couched lance’ like the heavy cavalry, the lancer used his lighter lance held out on an extended arm; most useful for harrying scattered forces.

Today though, it is the overwhelmingly larger number of missile cavalry that I’m interested in. Why were their spears so skinny?

SKINNY SPEARS

The impact force of a spear is a factor of both its weight and its velocity. Whatever the variable power/speed of a thrower’s arm, a hunky, hefty haft adds to the force. So why do the tapestry spears have such a narrow diameter?

A potential answer to that question is to be found in a couple of earlier artworks. The first is the Utrecht Psalter. Created in Reims around the mid 9th-century, this manuscript is populated with fabulously lively pen-and-ink drawings. It is an excellent reference for Carolingian arms and armour2. The Normans were Norsemen (Vikings), who had settled in Northern France, and who were greatly influenced by the weapons and tactics of the Franks. This is where they learned the value of cavalry and this is where we can see the genesis of their cavalry spears.

The spear hafts depicted in the Utrecht Psalter are drawn with a single stroke; a lightly pressured quill nib thick. They are strikingly similar to those on the Bayeux Tapestry. The image below holds a clue to why these narrow spears were preferred. We see warriors holding two of them in the shield hand - they have a fistful of ammo.

Although this is not shown on the tapestry, I believe that Duke William’s missile cavalry also carried a reserve one or two spears in the left hand. Diameter was critical because this hand was used to hold the reins and to support the shield. It was nonetheless possible with slim enough spear shafts.

When you think of the cost of an armoured knight and his horse, together with the effort and the risk of galloping up to the enemy’s battle line, just to launch a single spindly stick; the trade-off seems poor reward. Much better if he can at least heave two or three of them while he’s there.

A second manuscript supports this idea. The Valenciennes - a composite codex from Northern France, closely contemporary with the Bayeux Tapestry - also shows multiple spears being held in one hand by a horseman.

Having determined that narrow was a good design choice in order to carry multiple missiles, the lack of mass, and therefore impact force, could be compensated for by making the spear longer. The added length gave it more weight and thereby greater thump. It also delivered versatility. These long spears were primarily for throwing but in an instant they could be switched to stabbing spears — with the overhand grip, their long reach made them ideal for stabbing down over a shield wall — or turned in the hand and used as light lances. This combination of greater weight and versatility made them a better option than the alternative of lightweight, short javelins.

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BARS AND BARBS

Like those illustrated in the Utrecht Psalter and the Valenciennes, some of the spears in the Bayeux Tapestry are also characterized by having one or two transverse bars, a few inches behind the spearhead. What purpose do these serve?

The usual explanation is that they act as a stopper to prevent excessive penetration. This belief persists because that is precisely the function of such bars on a spear intended for hunting dangerous game like wild boar. A heavyweight boar, charging at great speed, must be stopped before it runs through the spear and gores you. However, these spears are not for hunting and I believe the bars on them served an entirely different purpose.

Certainly a wound does not need to be particularly deep to cause maximum injury, nor does it need to drive right through a shield. Shields with spears sticking in them become instantly unwieldy. They have either to be dropped or there is disarray while the spears are pulled out. In all these cases, a minimum depth of penetration has adequate military effect.

When stabbing, a shallow puncture can be advantageous; with the horseman being able to retrieve his weapon and continue fighting, without stalling the momentum of his horse. In this context a ‘stop bar’ helps the projectile to be pulled out more easily.

By contrast, with thrown spears, deeper penetration poses no problem. There is no need to have a penetration limiting device on these projectiles and the tapestry shows many spears without them.

If we look at the spears being loaded for embarkation (above), we can see that they have large barbed heads. This means they are not intended to be extracted; quite the opposite. Not all the spears in the tapestry are the same. Many have plain heads and no cross bars. Undoubtedly there was considerable variation.

However, if the bar was to limit penetration so that the spear could be withdrawn easily, then it makes no sense for it to have a barbed head. This contradiction suggests that limiting penetration was not the true purpose of these cross bars. I propose an alternative explanation.

Cross-pieces are shown both singly and, more curiously, as double parallel bars. Many years ago I had the legendary historical smith Hector Cole make me a facsimile of one of the barbed versions, with twin bars. It was a fearsome thing.

Carrying it on horseback with the point down, ready to raise it aloft to throw, juxtaposed those very nasty, very sharp barbs perilously close to the horse, just one spook away from inadvertent contact. Fortunately the bars instantly suggested their true purpose. The spear could be stabilized by resting the bars on the base of the stirrup. A single bar would sit on top and be held firmly in place with a little downward pressure; my double bars slotted perfectly above and below the narrow outer rim of the stirrup’s footplate giving absolute security.

The cross-bars, then, were not about limiting penetration at all, but about managing the weapon from horseback.

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SHIELDS

No - I am not suggesting that shields were thrown, though they undoubtedly work well as an auxiliary weapon when scythed horizontally. The reason that I bring up shields in the context of missile weapons is that they were the primary defence for such onslaughts and their design suggests something about the tactics of Norman missile cavalry.

Several forms of holding straps (technically enarmes) are represented in the tapestry. I once made a replica of a horseman’s kite shield, opting for the version that has just a single horizontal strap. All these shields have to be used with a long shoulder strap (a guige) and so when using a single hand strap, you simply create tension between the guige strap and the strap on the back of the shield to hold it in place steadily. When carrying it like this, the strap on the back of the shield takes on a slightly serpentine configuration - and guess what; that’s exactly what we see on the tapestry. What detail!

The most important thing to note about these shields is the angle of carriage. If you try to ride fast with one held vertically in front of you, as you may imagine a jousting knight, you will discover that the Norman kite shield is a very large sail and you will be spun sideways in the saddle.

It wasn’t intended to be held in front of you; rather it was carried at an angle alongside the horse and rider. Here it created a deflective surface, protecting both horse and rider against the constant barrage of missiles. The strong-armed Saxons also cast projectiles; in abundance.

Horses are large, soft targets and cavalry are at their most vulnerable when they turn broadside in front of the enemy, prior to retreating and regrouping. As you turned at the end of your run, it was crucial to maintain the shield angle, causing projectiles to glance off.

This was also the moment that you were closest to the enemy, with the best chance of a power throw. Norman knights must have cast their spears across their body, over their shields, in order to maintain cover. Technically harder to do but quite possible. The key thing is to keep your shield side towards the enemy at all times.

Even in the initial approach, I doubt that missile cavalry attacked the Saxon front line squarely. I think they would have swept in from the side - diagonally - maximizing the protection offered by their large, deflecting shields. If viewed from above, the pattern created by this would look more like a semi-circle (riding in and riding out), rather the than a jumbled back and forth on straight-lined corridors at right-angles to the foe. A wheeling attack would be altogether more flowing.

TAILPIECE

One missile weapon that is conspicuously absent from the tapestry is the sling. Slings were highly effective projectile weapons, known to have been used by Saxons armies at around this time and so it is strange that they are neither depicted here nor mentioned in contemporary accounts of the battle.

Nor are there depictions of franciscas - small, precision throwing axes that assisted shock attacks, used by Franks and Saxons alike. Offsetting these omissions is the unusual sight of a throwing club in flight. Known also as throwing sticks (or in Australia, boomerangs - they weren’t all of the returning variety) such weapons had been used since antiquity for hunting small game.

I’m not sure if those represented here were simply knobbly sticks, fashioned from a hardwood like hawthorn, or whether they consisted of a wooden haft and a stone head.

Earlier, as the invasion fleet sets off, the tapestry shows a great comet with a fiery tail, presaging great change in the world3. The flying club reminds me a little of a mini-comet with its tail and, to my mind, it is a visual nod, a bookend, possibly a motif to the comet story.

© 2025 Mike Loades. You’re welcome to share excerpts with attribution and a link back to the original.

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Part Three of these ponderings will cover the archery in the Bayeux Tapestry. If you haven’t read Part One yet, go to the History or Archive tabs and you should find it.

An athletic youngster, who loved to shoot his bow and tilt at the ring1. A precocious intellect versed in many languages, having (by the age of 13) an informed grasp of international affairs and complex economics; Edward VI, son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, was an extraordinary young man. I don’t know if he was kind or funny, so I don’t know if I would have liked him. I just know that he was impressive and that we share some passions: archery and equestrian skill at arms.

I’ve never really thought about him much. He has always seemed a shadowy figure, eclipsed betwixt better-known Tudor titans: his father Henry VIII and his half-sister Elizabeth I. For most, he's just a genealogical byline. His tragic death from illness at the age of 15, along with the chaotic succession that followed - from Lady Jane Grey's nine-day reign to the subsequent, turbulent rule of his half-sister Mary - have only cast deeper shadows over his legacy. The popular misconception that he was always a sickly boy lingers. He had a bout of a malaria-like fever (quartan) when he was four but that was it; he was otherwise a strapping and vigorous lad, who enjoyed riding, running, and shooting his bow.

Peeping from behind this veil of relative obscurity is a small book, full of intriguing insights. Edward kept a diary. He called it his Chronicle. Others referred to it as his Journal. Written in his own hand, he began it in 1550, when he was just 12-years-old, three years after his coronation (yes - he became king at 9!). The initial pages are a retrospective account of his life, starting with his birth in 1537. Then, from March 1550, it turns into a detailed daily record. He maintains this until November 1552, when he fell ill with what is thought to have been a form of pulmonary tuberculosis; a condition that led to his untimely death in July 1553.

Because of his age, Edward’s kingdom was governed by a regency council, first led by his uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and then by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Scheming and intrigue were daily fare and yet the young king seems to have had a cool head above it all. His summaries of daily events - domestic, foreign and religious - reveal a sharp, independent mind with a clear grasp of the issues of the day.

He is especially concerned with the Crown’s debts, constantly bemoaning the Fuggers. That is not a typo - the Fuggers were an all-powerful banking family from Augsburg who had lent Henry VIII vast sums of money to finance his wars. Young Edward was drowning in debt. Weighty matters rested on these young shoulders.

Moreover his troubled family history must have affected him psychologically. Displaying a detachment from feeling, reminiscent of his father, he recorded in stark, matter-of-fact terms the execution of his maternal uncle, Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley (accused of treason in 1549):

The lord Sudeley, admiral of England, was condemned to death, and died the twentieth of March

He offered an equally sanguine report of the execution of his other uncle (the one who had been his governor and Lord Protector of the Realm), Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, in January 1552:

The duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the morning.

Intermingled with these dark episodes and the great affairs of state are entries detailing his sporting activities. You can sense the joy he had in having a day off.

Martial Exercises

On March 31st 1551, Edward wrote that he had issued a challenge from himself, together with “sixteen of my chamber” to “seventeen gentlemen in court”. Both groups were part of the Royal Household but the second were simply staff - not ‘in’ with the in-crowd. The challenge was to “run at base, shoot and run at ring”.

‘Running at base’ was a game played by all stations of Tudor society. Each team had a home base and aimed to tag opponents, taking them captive there. A player leaving base was safe from anyone already out, creating fast-paced tactics, while captives could be freed by a tag. It involved a great deal of running around and dodging, as well as an awareness of who was coming from where at all angles; an awareness one might require on a battlefield. Edward recorded that the competition began on April 1st with the king’s team winning the running at base.

Archery #1

The archery events were held several days later on April 6th. Edward entered the following in his diary.

“I lost the challenge of shooting at rounds and won at rovers.”

‘Shooting at rounds’ was straightforward target shooting in the manner you might imagine it today, using round targets, constructed from a spiral of tightly-bound straw. He does not specify how many arrows were shot, nor the distances, but traditional target shooting competitions, such as the ‘York Round’ require 144 arrows to be shot; several dozen each at 100, 80 and 60 yards. With a powerful bow, that is strenuous exercise.

Whilst I admire that a king was able to lose - it suggests a healthy absence of fawning -I am pleased that he at least won at ‘rovers’. Rovers, to my mind, is the most socially bonding of all archery activities. It is informal, it is fun and it usually involves a lot of casual banter. A group of archers walk through a stretch of countryside. One archer picks a target - a distant twig, leaf or patch of darker earth. The others strive to shoot an arrow closest to it. Whoever is the closest picks the next target - distances can be long or short. Given his upbringing and position, Edward must have been a lonely youth. I can think of no better tonic for that than a day shooting bows in the company of others.

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Running at the Ring

Roger Ascham, who we will meet more in a few paragraphs time, wrote that,

“ to run fair at the ring was one of the necessary skills for a courtier to use.”

This, the third event, was held on May 3rd. Edward adds the lively visual detail that his team were “in black silk coats pulled out with white silk taffeta….and the other side came in yellow taffeta.” Once again his team lost:

“At length the yellow band took it twice in 120 courses, and my band ‘tainted’ often – which was counted as nothing – and took never – which seemed very strange – and so the prize was of my side lost.”

His reference to his team ‘tainting’ means that they hit the ring, knocking it off, but were not able to pass the lance through it cleanly to pick it up. This is a common frustration; points are only scored if you take the ring on your lance. His remark that it was ‘strange’ is strange. Is he implying some deliberate misses by his team? Not sure what to make of that.

Archery #2

On June 14th 1551, we have the most intriguing entry of all. The occasion was a visit of a French delegation to Edward’s court. In the preceding year, England and France had signed the Treaty of Boulogne, with England selling the city of Boulogne back to France, alleviating some of the Crown’s debts. There were murmurings of a marriage alliance, but peace remained extremely fragile. France was still a rival and allied with England’s enemy (at the time) Scotland. So the report of what follows seems to have been akin to one of those military parades; one that is all pomp and pageant on the surface but which is really designed to show that you have military forces not to be messed with.

There mustered before me 100 archers, two arrows apiece, all of the guard, who afterward shot together, and they shot at an inch board, which some pierced quite and stuck in the other board; divers quite through with the heads of their arrows, the boards being very well-seasoned timber.

A massed corps of elite archers may seem like an antiquated choice for 1551 but the message of seeing 100 strong men shooting ‘together’ (is a volley implied here ?) would surely not have been lost on a French delegation. Short of wearing tabards embroidered with ‘Remember Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt’, the signal could not have been less subtle.

What really interests me though is this reference to shooting “an inch board”. At first encounter, we may think this indicates ‘wand shooting’. This was a popular form of archery at the time, whereby archers shot at very narrow vertical staves of wood, seeking to split them. An inch was extreme but possible; more usually a wand would be 2 - 3 inches wide. If they were shooting at wands, I think that is the term Edward would have used (it was in common use) but I don’t think that is what is meant here.

Edward emphasizes the depth of penetration and explains that the boards were “very well seasoned”. In other words they were extremely hard wood and difficult to penetrate (possibly oak/possibly ship’s planking?). I think the “inch” refers, not to the width, but rather to the depth of these wooden boards. He references that some arrows went clean through one board and stuck in the boards behind. This is power shooting, intended to impress.

In the Turkish archery tradition there is a long history of shooting at hard objects, from iron ploughshares to dense blocks of wood. It is called ‘darb shooting’ and it existed in its own right as a particular archery exercise. I know of no references to anything similar in the entire lexicon of English archery literature2. It makes perfect sense of course - a way of demonstrating an archer’s power. I say archer rather than bow because it is not only the draw-weight of the bow but also the technique of the archer that matters when achieving either great distances or shudderingly deep penetration.

I shall write of the glories of the bows of the Mary Rose another day but, in brief, their relevance here is that they are all Tudor bows and they have all been evaluated to be of enormously high draw-weights; the most powerful longbows we know of - ever. The Mary Rose was Henry VIII’s flagship, which sank in the Solent in 1545, just 6 years before the event under discussion. I think we can be fairly confident that these were the sort of bows being used on this occasion.

Big bows and brawny bowmen were Edward’s deterrent of choice. A few days later, on July 19th, 1551, he entertained a very high-ranking French dignitary, The Maréchal de Saint-André. The next morning, Edward writes:

“He saw me shoot and all my guards shoot together…..he dined with me and heard me play the lute.”

It is not recorded whether Edward’s archery or his lute playing was the more disconcerting. However, once again wheeling out the guards for a massed archery demonstration smacks of what I call, ‘longbow diplomacy’ - a display of England’s martial might akin to gunboat diplomacy. Just in case M le Maréchal was in any doubt, the entry a week later declares:

“M. Le Maréchal dined with me; after dinner he saw the strength of the English archers.”

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A Royal Tutor and the Art of Archery

The earliest book in English to describe how to shoot a bow appeared in 1544 (the year before the Mary Rose sank). It was called Toxophilus and it was written by Roger Ascham. It is a splendid book; having sound, practical instruction that continues to resonate with longbow archers today.

Roger Ascham was a prominent humanist scholar and the principal private tutor to the Princess Elizabeth (later Elizabeth I). As well as instructing her in Latin, Greek and Philosophy, he taught her archery.

Edward’s private tutors were Sir John Cheke and Richard Cox but both Edward and his half-sister Elizabeth spent their early years in the same household. It therefore seems inconceivable that Edward was taught to shoot a bow by anyone else, other than Roger Ascham. No wonder he had such a passion for the art of shooting the longbow.

Ascham went on to serve Edward VI as his Latin Secretary, and as an important member of the Royal Household, he was in a position to influence the young king’s thinking as well as his activities. Edward’s love for archery fitted with a cultural and intellectual movement, championed by figures like Ascham, that viewed physical prowess and intellectual discipline as two sides of the same coin. This idea was at the heart of Renaissance ideals.

A Grim Amusement

An earlier reference to archery in the Chronicle occurs on June 4th 1550. Edward was not one of the shooters on this occasion but he witnessed it, reporting:

“Following the marriage ceremony of Sir Robert Dudley to Amy Robsart… certain gentlemen did strive who should first take away a goose’s head, which was hanged alive on two cross posts.”

Even by Tudor standards, this seems a wretchedly cruel practice3, but it is remarked upon as if it were perfectly normal. The rationale for such debased target practice is that, when shooting large birds for the table, the goal was to decapitate them by shooting them through the neck. In this way the eating-meat was left undamaged. Presumably the requirement for the bird to be alive was that the poor creature writhed its neck in distress; presenting both a slender and a moving target. Today, in countries such as the United States, where bowhunting remains both legal and popular, those going after turkeys with a bow still value the achievement of shooting them only through the neck.

Why do I mention such a gruesome detail? I do so because it reinforces the notion that Tudor society put great store on precision shooting with the bow; whether for hunting or war. Although the mid-16th century sits well and truly in the age of gunpowder, archery remained at the heart of England’s martial heritage and central to national identity.

Those Fuggers Again

Strong bow-arms and stout bows weren’t just something to parade before potential enemies; they may also have been a reminder to Edward’s creditors that England had reserves of skilled archers; archers that could defend the nation, whether it had gunpowder artillery or not.

The Fuggers, as well as being financiers, had carved out a monopoly of the entire supply chain for cannons and other gunpowder weapons; owning mines, foundries and warehouses. This gave them leverage against states not paying their dues. It seems to me that keeping up the appearance that England could hold its own with bows and arrows alone was intended to send a message that the Crown was not to be cowed by threats of firearms sanctions.

Henry VIII had issued statutes in 1515 and 1541, making the ownership of longbows compulsory, mandating regular practice and banning distracting games (more about these statutes in later articles). Both of these built upon earlier laws. A key passage from the 1541 charter declared that:

“All Men under the Age of sixty Years shall have Bows and Arrows for shooting. Men-Children between Seven Years and Seventeen shall have a Bow and 2 Shafts. Men about Seventeen Years of Age shall keep a Bow and 4 Arrows.”

Queen Mary also issued an edict in 1547, compelling widespread longbow ownership. Elizabeth I legislated about the cost of imported bows. I would suggest that these measures weren’t, as is often assumed, merely sentimental nostalgia for past military glories; rather they were part of an ongoing diplomatic strategy.

Longbows had greater range, power and rate of shooting than did an arquebus ( the musket of the day). They remained highly effective weapons. Their drawback was that they needed large numbers of expert archers to shoot them and an army of skilled bowyers to manufacture them. Both required many years of training.

The reality was that England’s armies went to war with gunpowder weapons, not bows; they were modern armies4. However, by maintaining a strong archery culture, underpinned by law, that had the potential to call up thousands of bowmen, England announced to foes and financiers alike, that its military power was self-reliant and independent of foreign capital.

Epilogue

Edward’s Chronicle is full of little nuggets, tucked away from mainstream accounts. For instance the entry for 24^th June 1551 reads:

An earthquake was at Croydon in Surrey – but no harm was done.

Mostly it records affairs of state and the evolving theologies of the era but it also gives fanfare to great tournaments and fantastical entertainments on the Thames with mock castles being besieged, as well as the wonderfully human moments of having fun with a bow and arrow. It is well worth dipping into. Right now though, my fingers itch for a bowstring; so I’m off to shoot. Thanks for reading.

© 2025 Mike Loades. You’re welcome to share excerpts with attribution and a link back to the original.

The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story leading up the Norman victory at the battle of Hastings in 1066 – the beginning of the Norman Conquest. 960 years later, in 2026, this astonishing masterpiece is to be exhibited at The British Museum in London. It will be on loan from its French home, while that museum is refurbished. Despite it technically being an embroidery1, I’ll continue to refer to it as the ‘tapestry’ because it is far too late to change this familiar nomenclature.

Admittedly the tapestry is the victor’s account, doubtless biased, but its glorious action-images have always thrilled me, offering an unrivalled visual reference for this period. It features 190 horses, 35 dogs and 626 human figures. These include Duke William (aka William the Conqueror) who led the invasion, seizing successfully the English crown and his rival, King Harold, whose crown he seized.

Over the years I’ve come back to marvel at it again and again, captivated by its vivid imagery and its mode of storytelling; in awe at its scale. The serial narrative by means of sequential captioned scenes unfolds with such compelling momentum that it is almost self-animating. When reproduced in a book, it is a page turner. As for the real thing: when you walk along the full 75 yards of this continuous frieze, it is an immersive experience like no other. It is a little like watching a film but, frame by frame, you are the engine of the replay speed. The more you know it, the more you can fast forward or slow down. I find endless delight in trying to understand all the details. It is chock-full of intriguing information and tantalizing clues.

Historical images, whether daubed or stitched, also hold a treasure chest of clues about the worlds they portray. We have to be careful how we interpret them. Many contain misleading information, arising from poor draughtsmanship or lack of first-hand observation. We also have to understand the stylistic conventions and symbolism of the era. Deductions from art are more convincing when supported by other evidence but, where that is lacking, we can sometimes turn to experimental experiences. There! I have a segue.

Wave after wave - Norman cavalry at Hastings

At some point in the late 1980s several friends and I filmed some sequences for a television documentary about the Battle of Hastings. We were depicting the Norman cavalry. When facing a defensive formation - in this instance the sturdy bulwark of the Saxon shield wall - a signature Norman tactic was to ride up to the enemy’s front line and throw things at them. Duke William’s horsemen needed to soften it up; to create gaps. That meant successive waves of cavalry assault - galloping up to the front line and hurling their spears into the dense ranks of King Harold’s hardy housecarls, holding the loyal fyrd around them2 .

Filming is frequently a tiresomely repetitive process, repeating actions so that cameras can capture them with different framing and at different angles. On this occasion art imitated life. That was exactly the experience of William’s riders. Time and time and time again they had to regroup, grab another spear, wait for the signal and then hurtle forwards on their steeds once more to throw their missiles.

After a while we noticed something

We had taken great care to ensure that our kit was as authentic as possible. Among the details we were careful to put on our leg bindings correctly. The Saxon word for these is winigas; today they are more commonly called puttees. Winigas, worn by Saxons and Normans alike, were long strips of woollen fabric, around 2 inches wide, which are wound spirally around the lower leg to create a covering. It is essential to get the tension just right. They offer support, similar to a compression bandage, and they protect against abrasion. Infantry wind their winigas by starting at the ankle and working upwards. Cavalry do so by starting just below the knee and working downwards. This is because it reduces the risk of the winigas unwinding owing to friction of the leg against the horse.

It reduces it but it does not eliminate it. After an hour or so of hard riding, we noticed that our winigas were beginning to unravel. Not with any risk of coming undone but simply that, instead of being tidy turns in symmetrical spirals, they were now higgledy-piggledy and criss-crossed. Our winigas had become woefully wiggly.

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And that is exactly what we see on the Bayeux Tapestry!

At the beginning of the battle, and in earlier scenes, the leg wrappings are all in good order but as the battle at Hastings progresses, as successive attacks thunder up that hill, the winigas on the cavalry on the tapestry become dishevelled; in an identical manner to our experience just over 900 years later.

A possible exception

Whilst I’m fairly convinced that, for the Hastings sequence at least, the leitmotif of unravelling winigas was a deliberate artistic choice, it should be noted that various styles of winigas are shown in the work. In an earlier falconry scene for instance we see two versions (Figs. 7 & 8). It may be that, once again, the artist is wishing to convey time and hard-riding or, it may be that the criss-cross over the knee (Fig 8. below) was a style favoured by hunters. Of course we cannot be sure but it is intriguing to weigh the possibilities.

Who made this artistic choice?

First the connection with Bayeux in France - why the ‘Bayeux’ Tapestry and not the Hastings Embroidery? Duke William’s half brother was the warrior monk Bishop Odo - he is seen in the tapestry brandishing a wooden club at the Battle of Hastings3. Odo was Bishop of Bayeux. After victory at Hastings, William made him the Earl of Kent - next to the king, the second most important man in England. It was Odo who commissioned the tapestry. It is named after his bishopric of Bayeux but it was created in his earldom of Kent - in Canterbury.

It is generally thought that a monk by the name of Scolland (the Abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury) was the primary artist - the man who drew the initial outline of the sequences. These sketches are technically known as a cartoon4. Whether it was Scolland or another, the markings were picked out by nimble-fingered nuns with needles, pulling vari-coloured threads, to give his line drawings body and life. Was it Scolland himself or the saintly sewing sisters who had the idea? The idea of conveying the passing of time, of the fatiguing grind of repeated effort, by representing the leg bindings at incremental stage of unravelling. Whoever it was, it was a wonderful idea; an idea that was presumably ‘readable’ to people who had a greater literacy with this format of storytelling than we do.

This is a level of detail, a level of knowing, of deliberateness, that I find extremely compelling. It is a reminder, a caution, for us not to dismiss out-of-hand so many of the puzzling clues the Bayeux Tapestry holds, simply because we don’t yet understand them. Of course it is probable that the piece contains some errors, either gaps in knowledge or lapses in technical execution, inconsistencies even; however it was also created by dint of meticulous observation. We should pay attention to that. There is allegory in the borders, not intended to be reality, there was a technical challenge of representing mail armour in this medium that they didn’t quite crack, but there is so much that is right. Yes, of course it is not a photograph but it is extraordinarily good and I plan to write a few more essays about little details that intrigue me for future substack articles.

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The Bayeux Tapestry is scheduled to be exhibited, on loan from Bayeux, at The British Museum from September 2026 to July 2027. However at the time of writing it should be noted there are protests and concerns about the work being stable enough to survive transportation without damage. There is also a very good, full-size copy in Reading Museum. It was embroidered by some Victorian ladies who felt that England ought to have its own copy. If you get the chance though, I recommend seeing the real thing in person. It’s fab!

© 2025 Mike Loades. You’re welcome to share excerpts with attribution and a link back to the original.

4

A cartoon (for paintings or embroideries) was a preliminary drawing on paper to the exact size of the finished work. To transfer this design onto the canvas or fabric, the paper was placed over the blank surface and pricked with tiny holes. A dusting of charcoal powder then revealed the pattern for others to follow - in this case the embroiderers.

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I am fascinated by wolves. I am drawn to them with their mystic and hypnotic eyes. I see the wolf in every dog I meet. I love dogs and I love wolves. I feel bound by an ancient bond and I rejoice at the many successes of re-introducing wolves to the wild. They are apex predators that are key to restoring an ecologically sustainable balance in nature and I plan to write more about this in future articles on Substack. In this essay however I’m going to look at the roots of the enduring, and ill-founded, prejudice that first gained momentum during the Middle Ages.

CHARLEMAGNE

In the early 9th century CE, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne1, mandated a co-ordinated campaign to eradicate wolves from much of Europe. Every maior villae2 was required to appoint two full-time lupiari (wolf hunters). They were paid well and exempted from other civic obligations, including military service. This last was a big deal at a time of frequent military mobilization and it put the work of the lupiari to exterminate wolves on a par with the defence of the realm against human enemies.

Methods ranged from trapping, poisoning (‘venomous powders’) and hunting with dogs. Lupiari were required to tally their successes by sending bundles of wolfskins to the Royal Court, centralizing accountability; albeit funding for the undertaking was borne by a tax on local freemen. When deemed useful an entire village could be conscripted, under sanction of punishment, to participate in a wolf hunt. A big drive to flush out a wolf-pack might require hundreds of people, with nets and dogs. They were marshalled to surround many square miles of woodland to funnel the wolves towards the huntsmen. It was a costly operation, with people having to abandon their duties in the fields, mills and forges to play their part in the war on wolves. Much of our information about the ways wolves were hunted derives from a 14th-century hunting treatise called ‘Le Livre de La Chasse’ 3.

This push towards extinction had a devastating impact on European wildlife; one that continues to have consequences. Although complete eradication did not occur for several centuries in some places (and in others not at all) the decimation of wolf populations throughout Europe during the Middle Ages4 had a catastrophic effect on ecosystems and the European landscape.

SHEEP

Despite its many benefits, the rewilding of wolf populations remains controversial; primarily because of concerns for predation on livestock. There are many ways to mitigate this, particularly with livestock guardian dogs (another topic for future articles); however it was in part the economics of livestock husbandry that drove medieval societies to persecute the wolf to the extent that they did. Wool was the big business of the day and a rapidly increasing larder of domesticated sheep made for convenient ready meals.

It wasn’t just the vulnerability of snackable sheep that changed people’s attitude to the wolf, there were other influences. Not least of which was the spread of Christianity. Even though written as allegory, medieval folk took most Bible references literally. Numerous references to wolves preying on the flock5 and metaphors of Jesus as the good shepherd led to the poor wolf being demonized as representing evil. A trope encouraged by a church that owed much of its wealth to landholdings sustained by sheep-rearing. Abbeys were a major source of employment for professional wolf-hunters.

Several silly, unscientific superstitions were pervasive. In the 15th-century hunting treatise The Master of Game6 a false rumour was started that a wolf’s bite is poisonous: “Their biting is evil and venomous on account of the toads and other vermin that they eat.”

WOLVES IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Prior to the Middle Ages wolves were seen differently. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the wolf was mostly admired and, at times, venerated. For context, wolves were also known to be a threat to livestock and bounties were paid in situations of predation. However wolves were not reviled. To the contrary, they were respected for their power and majesty. Both Zeus and Apollo were given the epithet Lykaios, meaning wolf-like, as a status upgrade. For the Spartans, wolves embodied their martial ethos. They saw themselves as a "wolf pack" - hierarchical, loyal, fierce, strong and adept at tactical co-operation. The name of Sparta’s legendary founding lawgiver, Lycurgus, is derived from their word for wolf.

The myth for the founding of Rome is based on the story of the eponymous Romulus and his brother Remus being reared by a benevolent she-wolf and the wolf remains an important symbol of Italian identity to this day. Wolves were never hunted for pleasure by the Romans, nor were they a feature of the wretched beast hunts in the Colisseum. Rome’s battles began with heroic young skimishers - velites - displaying their bravery in daring forays against the enemy’s front line. These velites wore a wolfskin as a symbol of their courage. So too did a legion’s aquilifer - the bearer of its sacred eagle standard. Such symbolism of the noble wolf is a long way from the medieval view.

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?

Unprovoked wolf attacks on humans are extremely rare. Wolves generally avoid humans. The ‘big bad wolf’ of later fairy tales7 is a bogus characterization, probably originating in medieval folklore. An exception is rabid wolves and there are numerous accounts of rabid wolf aggressions against humans during the medieval period, particularly in France. The problem was not wolves per se but rabies. Even so, such instances helped to fuel the anti-wolf dogma of the time. This was compounded by stories of wolves scavenging battlefields. The dead were often left unburied and wolves certainly have a strong scavenging instinct for carrion that does not exclude human flesh.

A contemporary account8 of the aftermath of the Battle of Fontenoy (842CE) reports that as the heaps of dead lay untended, “vultures, crows and wolves devoured their flesh”. Studies of later conflicts, particularly during the hundred-years-war, show correlations between wolves feeding on human remains after major battles and instances of wolf attacks on humans9; the idea being that some wolves, exposed to these opportunities, develop a taste for human flesh. These tragic instances further fanned the flames of lupine prejudice. We may hope that in a future world, where we once again make peace with the wolf, we do not offer such distorted dietary choices.

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Superstition, fear and precautions against livestock predation were only part of the story. One of my favourite stories about Charlemagne is that when Persian ambassadors visited his court, he took them bison hunting. Yes, bison10 once freely roamed the forests of Europe. Charlemagne and his nobility and the monarchs and nobility of all subsequent medieval dynasties had a passion for hunting bordering on obsession. Wolves preyed on the game animals they loved to hunt - bison, deer, wild boar. Considerations for the shepherd, though of some economic benefit, were greatly outweighed by the desire to provide an over-abundance of game for the nobility to hunt.

As the middle ages progressed, sheep farming increased exponentially, as did the appetite of the nobility for good hunting. Throughout Europe, rulers were able to address the economic concerns of their agrarian subjects together with the desires of their nobles for privileged pleasure by maintaining the war on wolves. This was certainly the case in England and Scotland.

A MULTITUDE OF EDICTS

In 950 King Athelstan11 imposed an annual tribute of 300 wolfskins on the Welsh king Hywel Dda. Around 1070, William I ( a.k.a ‘The Conqueror’) granted the lordship Riddesdale to Robert de Umfraville, on the specific condition that he defend the land from both the king’s enemies and wolves. In 1215, King John offered a bounty of 5 shillings for every wolf’s pelt - a sizeable sum of money at a time when it might take a labourer 10 weeks to earn that much or you could buy 6 or more full grown sheep. In 1281, Edward I commanded Sir Peter Corbet to “take and destroy all the wolves he could find” across the western counties of England, specifically Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire.

The thirteenth century in England was a notable time for outlaws (many of the Robin Hood legends date to this period) and it is written into British law from as early as the 11th century that an outlaw is deemed “Caput lupinum” - a ‘wolfshead’ . When someone was decreed a ‘wolfshead’, then that person lost all legal rights. Anyone could kill a wolfshead without legal consequences. According to one 14th-century legal textbook12 , an accused felon who avoided appearance in court three times would also be declared a wolfshead. It states, “Wolfshead shall be cried against him, for that a wolf is a beast hated of all folk; and from that time forward it is lawful for anyone to slay him like a wolf."

In 1427, James I of Scotland decreed that all lairds (landowners) must arrange a minimum of three wolf hunts a year; between St. Mark's Day (April 25th) and Lammas (August 1st). Tragically, this was a period when wolves had young cubs, so cruelly amplifying the effectiveness of the cull. All the laird’s servants were obliged to participate or face a fine of one sheep. His great, great, great granddaughter, Mary Queen of Scots is known to have participated in a wolfhunt in 1563. Five wolves were found and killed over a period of some weeks.

Timelines differ but wolves had more or less died out in England by the late 15th-century and became fully extinct at some point during the 16th-century. The last Scottish wolf was killed by Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel in 1680 near Killiecrankie, Perthshire.

THE RETURN

Today we are beginning to re-evaluate our relationship with the wolf and the benefits of restoring the ecosystems of our wilder places to a healthy balance. In Spain and Portugal the Iberian wolf ( a slightly different sub-species) has numbers of between 2 - 3,000. Italy has a population in excess of 3,000 and in Charlemagne’s previous heartlands of France and Germany there is a combined population of around 2,700. Poland and other Eastern European countries have even larger numbers.

The introduction of wolves to Scotland remains an ongoing debate. I hope that it will happen one day. On the other side of the world, in the USA, there have been staggeringly beneficial consequences to nurturing natural wolf populations in Yellowstone and elsewhere. To many Native Americans the wolf holds profound spiritual significance. The scale of the American wilderness, the scope of its prey species and the manner of ranching offer quite different opportunities and challenges to those in Europe. I plan to come back to these in future articles but, for now, I simply wanted to offer some context to the medieval purge.

Wolves are not our enemy. With the right wildlife management, we can live in peaceful co-existence. We owe wolves a lot - they gave us the dog and we must be forever grateful for that ! Moreover, insofar as they can set in motion the return of carbon-sequestering woodland and a greater diversity of wildlife, they still have a lot to offer us. Its complicated, not without dangers, but I remain a big fan of recruiting the wolf to help us reclaim much of our lost natural world.

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12

The Mirror of Justices

© 2025 Mike Loades. You’re welcome to share excerpts with attribution and a link back to the original.

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In nearly all instances gladiator armour is the exact opposite of legionary armour. Legionaries have good quality defences for the torso, protecting vital organs; gladiators have bare torsos. Legionaries mostly have bare arms and upper legs, affording maximum freedom of movement for athletic fighting; gladiators’ limbs are often wrapped with thick padding like mummies. What is going on?

My contention is that a major part of the design approach was to create visual and audio effects.

STOCK CHARACTERS

Another element in the design was the ready identification of stock characters. Gladiators were first and foremost entertainers, trained to delight the thrill-seeking crowds in the Roman amphitheatre. Theatrics were central to the proceedings. Barbarity was undoubtedly present, but it was there to serve the drama. For combat to succeed as theatrical entertainment, an audience needs to have an emotional investment in the outcome. A sense of jeopardy is key to engaging them but to feel the frisson of jeopardy, you must first have someone to root for. Gladiator fights were combats with a story and stories need characters. To recognize them – relatively small specks if you were sitting high on the bleachers – these characters needed starkly different appearances.

You are all familiar with the main ones: the Retiarius with his net and trident; the Murmillo with his gigantic helmet, single arm guard (manica) and greave on one leg; the Thraex (Thracian) also with an enormous helmet but wielding a sickle-sword; the Secutor with his distinctively snug, rounded helmet; the Dimachaerus , often lightly clad and brandishing a weapon in each hand (sword, dagger or sica). Others included the Scissor, the Provocator, the Hoplomachus et alia. Some were the light and nimble, others hefty and steadfast. There was contrast, there was attitude; there was instant recognition. All of that informs part of gladiator armour design but it is by no means the whole story.

MYTH AND MARVEL

Identifying characters by their weapons or armour has a long and continuing tradition. Such accoutrements have also long been emblematic of secret powers.

Zeus had his thunderbolts and his magical aegis (shield). Athena too had an enchanted aegis, together with her helmet and spear. Poseidon had his trident. Hermes had his winged shoes – he could fly. Medusa turned people into stone with her gaze. Thor had his hammer (Mjolnir) and the mighty Odin had his magical spear (Gungnir). Arms and armour with super-power attributes abound in Greek and Norse mythology. Similar attributes exist in other mythologies from China to the Americas (Aztecs and Incas among others).

Skip forward a few thousand years and we see the echoes of these Myths in the Marvel Universe of superheroes and villains. Many can fly (Superman), many have special abilities (Spiderman) and powers (the Hulk has the strength of Hercules) and many have special weapons (Catwoman has her whip and clawed gloves and Wonder Woman her lasso). The list need not be exhaustive to make the point.

Undoubtedly the need to create visually identifiable characters was an important driver for the different styles of armour. Whether evoking a dramatic tension between a lightly armed fighter (e.g. retiarius) against a more heavily armed combatant (murmillo) or whether alluding to Rome’s omnipotence by kitting out some as conquered enemies (Samnites and Thracians). Gladiatorial costume armour was a theatrical device layered with inbuilt story. It was a visual shorthand that worked as well as any comic-strip artist’s designs today.

However all of that would still have been possible by adhering to the standard principles of armour design – deflective, glancing surfaces; greater protection over vulnerable areas (viscera); modulating the best trade-offs between vision, ventilation and movement – but they didn’t. They largely ignored these ideas and went for something very different. Why?

SOUND EFFECTS

Rome’s arena entertainments were elaborate. The area beneath Rome’s Coliseum (the hypogeum) had a tangle of tunnels, shafts, winches, counterweights and trapdoors that enabled scenery, gladiators and animals to be catapulted into the arena with a showman’s flair for dramatic surprise. Imperial impresarios had a developed understanding of how to put on a lavish spectacle, but they lacked the ‘close-up’ power of cameras and lenses and fast-cut edits - tools that are essential today to make action look exciting. The Coliseum didn’t have a Jumbotron.

In such circumstances, seeing action at a distance, sound becomes a crucial element to carry suspense and thrill. Clangs! An audience can react to clangs – wincing, oohing and oofing with every strike. Without them, they cannot be sure a blow has landed. The helmet of a heavy fighter like the Thraex, with its exaggerated brim, is part armour and part percussion instrument. Not only are the brims of such helmets far wider than on military helmets, they turn up - creating catchment areas rather than deflecting blows away from the head.

A cascade of wallops around the head could produce a stirring symphony of belligerent cacophony with minimal martial detriment to the occupant. The crowd couldn’t tell if they were ‘damaging hits’, they simply heard a peal of dinging rings and that is what they wanted. Yes, the design evoked the helms of antique Thrace (a former enemy of Rome), but in its gladiatorial form this helmet was more cymbal then symbol. Augmenting the broad brim was a towering crest. This too could be struck to audible effect without risk of much damage to the wearer. In short, I am suggesting that the design choice was strongly influenced by the theatrical need to create sound effects. This was acoustic armour.

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Compare the two helmets below. On the left is a classic Imperial legionary helmet. Note that the brow reinforce is flush with the skull of the helmet. On the right is the Hawkendon helmet, found in Britain, and thought to have been used by a gladiator in the amphitheatre at Colchester. Note that the brow-plate here stands away from the helmet, fixed only by pins at its terminals. Admittedly this may also be a practical defensive improvement, in that the gap helps to diffuse the force of a blow, but think how differently it would sound. This gladiator is wearing a cowboy’s dinner triangle on his head - ding, ding, ding, ding!

The neck-plate is also slightly larger, turning up a little, rather than deflecting and it sweeps further round to the sides than does the legionary example. Like the Thracian helmet it gives plenty of surface on which to land ringing hits that pose no injury to the man inside.

Even the most scantily clad of gladiators - the net and trident man - had a distinguishing piece of armour - the galerus - which had dual function as a handy percussion instrument. Made of bronze or hardened leather the galerus was a large concave plate attached to the upper left arm, sweeping up to cover a portion of the face. Here was a target where an opponent’s sword might land a satisfying dink or thunk. Imagine the design team conversation:

“It will look really scary if we have him almost naked with no protection”

“Yes but how do we get a sense of him being hit”

“Easy, just put a whopping great gong on his left shoulder”.

For the swordsman the most natural of blows is the one that starts high and descends diagonally from right to left; quite easy for him to ring the gong every so often.

Now think about the latticed grill on the face guard of Murmillo’s helmet1. Excellent for breathing but a ‘catch-zone’ when it comes to thrusts to the face from spear, sword or trident. Rule number one is to understand and trust your equipment, though it must have been extraordinarily intimidating to be the receiver of such blows. The flare of a trident’s barb would prevent it passing through the holes of the grill far enough to reach the face but the tip of the point could lodge and with that make a loud clank as it rocked the man back with a crowd-pleasing stagger. It was the equivalent of a powerful punch to the face but without risk of penetration. The sound of the knock, its volume, was key in conveying the power of the strike to the audience.

Fight scenes on tv look quite silly with the sound turned down – audio carries the story. If you doubt the importance of sound in ‘selling’ a fight as entertainment, then look no further than the silent medium of the comic strip. Where would Batman be without “Kapow, Ooof, Bam, Biff and Zap”? Not only does sound register the delivery of a blow, a cadenced rhythm of repeated blows creates a musical score that drives the drama, having the ability to build to crescendos of onslaught. As well as clangs to armour, the percussion section included banging blows on wooden shields and the thumping thud of shields slamming into bodies. There were also blocks and deflective parries with all manner of weapons; from the ring of sword on sword to the chop of a sica on the haft of a trident.

VISUAL EFFECTS

Relying on these audio effects, gladiators could make the combat last a little longer, keeping a crowd on the edge of their seats, without incurring fatal wounds. Visual effects were another consideration. Most obvious is the shudder-inducing peril created by exposing large areas of vulnerable flesh. Areas susceptible to mortal wounds - guts, heart and lungs - were entirely unprotected in most (not quite all) gladiator panoplies. Similarly, although the lower leg was usually defended , the upper leg was more often bare.

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It is well recorded that gladiators ate a predominately carbohydrate vegetarian diet (mostly barley and beans) with only a little meat protein. They were not muscle-men. The theory goes that a good layer of subcutaneous fat offered some protection to both organs and ligaments, allowing for a certain amount of blood-letting with minimum risk of disabling damage to these valuable commodities; which is what they were to their owner/trainer.

Thighs and torsos provide a good canvas for dramatic streaks of blood but a collective intake of breath would be more reliably triggered by a near miss. These could be hard to see at a distance, but the sound-cues from wallops to adjacent areas carried the narrative. A swipe landing on an arm might mean that if the arm hadn’t been in the way, the attack might have torn open the torso. A mail or plate manica (armour for the arm) would sound differently to the ringing knell of a helm, giving variety to the musical register, but there was also another material, unique to gladiator armour, which echoed with a duller thwack. This was the padded wrap.

In many gladiator set-ups, wrappings of linen, with wool and felt padding, were bound around either arms or legs. Certainly textile armour has been a feature through the ages but these wraps are of outsize proportion and frankly look a little silly. They are not something ever seen in battlefield armours. Secured by means of concentric leather straps, they present a corrugated covering that is the very antithesis of a deflecting surface

Until they fail, by being hacked away, these padded wraps would give good protection to limbs, allowing for a timpanic torrent of blows – a soundtrack not dissimilar to the repetitive thudding of pads in a modern martial arts dojo. As a bonus effect, when sliced with sharpened swords, these wraps would disintegrate gradually, charting a visual timeline of jeopardy as they hung in streamers like unwound bandages. Should a blade strike deeply enough to draw blood, perhaps from repeated attacks to the same spot, then an expanding red stain on the white linen would amplify its effect.

Not every gladiator armour fits this template precisely – the Secutor’s armour, for instance, has notably smooth surfaces (though the one on the Colchester vase does have a prominent crest to ding). The received wisdom is that this general lack of protruding elements is a defensive design so that he is less easily entangled by the net of a retiarius. Possibly, but I would argue that the smooth contours exist not so much to avoid snagging but rather to facilitate the visual satisfaction of seeing the entire slippery fish entrapped by the net. It is an instance where the desire for a visual effect is prioritized over a sound effect. However I think that once we allow the idea of audio-augmented armour , we will continue to discover little details which fit a design brief that uses sound to sell the action.

PARALLELS

This notion recalls the tradition for acoustic effects in the ‘Commedia dell'Arte’2. Like gladiators the commedia relied on ‘stock characters’. Knockabout combats were a recurring part of the act. Unlike gladiatorial contests, these were entirely for comic effect, but to ‘sell’ the fight to the audience they carried a device to hit each other with. It was a baton comprising two pieces of hinged wood – it was called ‘a slapstick’. It made a noise!

Armour designed to highlight crowd-pleasing effects is not exclusive to the Roman arena. Jousting shields are usually convex, sometimes with a raised lattice, to assist in catching the lance, rather than deflecting it. What was required was a resoundingly good hit. At the court of Maximilian, one style of joust involved the use of a spring loaded shield. When struck by the opponent’s lance it shattered into a spectacular shower of metal shards. I once rode with a replica of one of these for a television programme. It worked splendidly but that is a story for another time.

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2

Commedia delle’Arte was an early form of theatre, that flourished in Italy from the 16th to 18th centuries. Stock characters included Pantalone, Harlequin, Punchinello and Scaramouche.

© 2025 Mike Loades. You’re welcome to share excerpts with attribution and a link back to the original.