six hundred years

25 October, 2015

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Six hundred years ago today, on the morning of the 25th of October 1415, a small band of English archers commanded by Henry V won a great military victory in France in the Hundred Years War. It was known as the Battle Of Agincourt, and it has been celebrated ever since in English history as perhaps the greatest underdog story ever, a tale of English grit over French arrogance. The legend was most famously retold by Shakespeare in Henry V, from where we get the phrase ‘band of brothers’.

Agincourt remains the greatest moment for archery in military history. The era was notable for English armies with ranks of thousands of longbowmen able to hold off approaching armies at hundreds of yards. The effectiveness of massed longbows had been tested at the Battle of Crécy almost a hundred years earlier, but Agincourt, where the sky was “dark with arrows” incapacitating a much larger French army – just how large, has long been debated – remains the high point for the weapon. It was a brutal, grimly violent encounter, but without the longbows, there would have been a massacre. Soon afterwards, gunpowder would spread across the world, and the longbow would rapidly leave the armouries of England.

There are news articles aplenty about Agincourt in most UK newspapers today, and dozens of books on the subject, but you can start with the Wikipedia page and work from there. For a deeper focus on archery, you should probably read Robert Hardy’s classic ‘Longbow‘ which has an extensive chapter on the battle. My favourite bit of writing on Agincourt remains ‘The Bowmen Of England’ by Donald Featherstone, a couple of pages of which I have reproduced below.

You could have a look at what the Agincourt 600 movement has organised.  In London, at the Tower Of London, there is an extensive exhibition running until the end of January featuring an overhead ‘shower of arrows‘ (below). Am intrigued by the novel written by this lady too.

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Right, I’m off to the south coast to loose some arrows towards France. Who’s with me?

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the oldest bow in the world

22 October, 2015

Holmegaard bow

 

It lies quietly in a glass case on the ground floor of the National Museum of Denmark in the centre of Copenhagen, just a couple of hundred yards from the Christianborg Palace where the World Archery Championships were held in July 2015.

In four pieces, it’s 64 inches long and a glowing, deep brown colour, resting next to a wooden paddle and a skeleton of a prehistoric horse. 

It is known as the Holmegaard bow, and it’s one of several bows found during WW2 in the peat bogs of Denmark. At first glance, it’s not the most incredible sight in the world, for something so important to history. The small sign on the wall doesn’t really do it much justice, and there are hundreds of other things to draw the eye in the ‘Prehistory’ section and all over this interesting museum. 

Because this is the oldest bow in the world. Or rather, it’s the oldest complete bow, and the oldest existing bow we know about, and the oldest thing that is unquestionably a bow. As a piece of technology, it’s striking how modern it looks – elegant and symmetrical. The second bow found is even longer (170cm / 66in), and there are fragments of more.

It is dated to around 7000 years BC, in the Mesolithic period. This date is not particularly in question, but it was based upon the layers it was found in. The heavy formaldehyde preservative it was treated with after its removal from the safe, oxygen-free confines of the bog has hindered any further attempts at chemical or carbon dating. 

Bows and arrows obviously existed for many thousands of years before the Holmegaard bow, but this piece of dark elm is the ‘stop date’. No one knows exactly when bow and arrow technology was first invented. Some scientists believe it was invented closer to 70,000 years ago, which would put it towards the tail end of the Paleolithic.

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I spoke to research fellow Lasse Sorenson after my visit: “The bow was found in 1944, during the second world war. There was a shortage of coal, and people started digging up the peat bogs on the island of Zealand for fuel.”

“These bows were made and used by people of the Maglemose culture. They were sophisticated nomadic hunters who had jewellery, domesticated dogs and decorated dugout canoes.”

“But they have found triangular worked flints which are almost certainly arrowheads from the Solutrean period in Europe, over 20,000 years ago.”

“So this was a piece of technology that had probably already gone through thousands of iterations already. It’s really a very sophisticated machine.”

Many bowyers have produced reproductions of the Holmegaard bow, and it is regarded as one of the classic European wooden self bows of antiquity along with the Mollegabet and Meare Heath bows. It has a characteristic design with wide, tapering limbs and a cutaway handle, which Sorenson believes would have been wrapped in leather. It is an efficient weapon even today.

“At the time Denmark and much of the rest of northern Europe would have been covered in dense forest. There would have been plenty of large animals: aurochs, red deer, wild boar, fish. It would have been a good place to hunt.” 

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The bow communicates across the millennia. It tells us, in an almost mystical way, something about what people were thinking. The culture that built the Holmegaard bow was contemporary with and archeologically related to a site in Britain – then still just about connected to mainland Europe by a land bridge –  known as Star Carr. This site is most famous for the extraordinary headdresses made out of red deer skulls, one of which I photographed in Cambridge earlier this year.

Whoever the craftsmen who built the Holmegaard bow were, they were likely part of a culture who bound hunting, religion and magical thinking together in ways that it is almost impossible to imagine now. The bow, and possibly the bowyer, may have been a source of great power and infused with a deep magic, as humans stumbled into the Holocene. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Some other pics of the Holmegaard and other ancient Danish bows here

that’s one way to deliver a message

13 October, 2015

Apparently, at various times during Japan’s long history of military archery, messages once travelled through the air in the form of yabumi (literally: ‘arrow text’),  a folded letter attached to an arrow that acted as a speedy – if dangerous – message delivery service.

This echo of a distant age seems to still have a lot of resonance in Japan, and you can find the yabumi image of a lengthways-folded message tied round an arrow frequently used as a metaphor or a historical bit of fun.

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Anyway, someone has revived this tradition using an arrow with a strong magnet on the end – no bow required – and you may be able to buy it here if you can negotiate the process in Japanese. Although it should be pretty easy to make your own, or borrow someone else’s plans.

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More information here!

the old and the new

8 October, 2015

 

#TBT: archery on primetime British TV, as a strong historical VT segment on the re-enactment of the battle of Agincourt in northern France bleeds into a slightly dumbed-down live piece featuring GB internationals Becky Martin (recurve) and Jo Frith (para compound) ‘against’ Nick Frost‘s local darts team. The whole thing overseen, for some reason, by Geena Davis, who has several well-known connections to archery, but wasn’t shooting – she was in town to talk about something else.

The Agincourt piece is pretty strong (NB am going to write an extended piece for publishing on the anniversary on the 25th), but the ‘dartchery’ piece I have problems with.

I’m always a bit torn with TV exposure like this. On the one hand it’s going to expose archery to a lot of people, some of whom might make it part of their lives. On the other, the dumb, jokey format reinforces the popular public opinion that it’s more a frivolous pastime than a serious Olympic sport that can change your life. Like archery is the ‘giant chess set‘ version of darts, played in the pub back garden. In the long run, I think this is detrimental to the sport, because it diminishes popular respect for it.

It should be pointed out that this has nothing to do with Becky or Jo, who did a great job, and everything to do with the lazy TV researchers who decided to go with the first dumb idea in their heads. Enjoy.

UK readers can watch the full episode here for a while. 

 

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2015 Aquece Rio Olympic Test Event

22 September, 2015

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Bernardo Oliveira

So, the archery test event for Rio 2016 happened at the Sambódromo – although they didn’t test the TV cameras and there wasn’t a shred of footage, much to the disappointment of archery fans around the world. It’s notable how much international standards had increased since the last test event in London in 2011. In that qualification round, in the men’s competition if you shot 650 you placed 34th – in Rio, you’d only be 42nd. In the women’s competition: 650 would have got you 2nd place in London – in Rio only 18th. It’s remarkable how many nations have produced elite level archers in just four years.

There was controversy early on with a scorecard incident involving none other than Olympic champion Oh Jin-Hyek, who apparently forgot to total the second half of his qualification scoresheet during the ranking round. Despite an aghast appeal from the Koreans, he was dropped to last place and also took the men’s team – who must have been at least even money to win here – out of the competition. This was just one of several high profile incidents this year involving scorecard mistakes, including a disaster for the USA men’s team in Copenhagen. It’s not ‘fair’, no, but the rules are not a secret – everyone knows them and everyone knows the consequences. It seems unlikely that a movement to change the scorecard-last rule is going to appear anytime soon, at least before completely foolproof universal electronic scoring appears sometime in the distant future.

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via @OttonBaquerizo

None of the big Asian archery nations disappointed. The Korean men may have been gone, but the women’s team – despite apparently finding it difficult to get used to the food – scythed through the field and took gold without losing a single set point. In hot conditions, China were almost as dominant on the men’s side, and Chinese Taipei continued their podium-level runs in all competitions. Choi Misun took individual women’s gold, and world champion Kim Woojin took the men’s title, holding off a spectacular silver medal run from Sjef Van Den Berg, capping an extraordinary season for the Dutchman that saw him nearly destroy an entire field at the European Games. The big shoulders of Marcus D’Almeida may need further reinforcing over the next year after he finished a creditable ninth, there was another strong showing from Mackenzie Brown keeping USA hopes up for next year, and the Canadian men surprised.

Most athletes seemed to praise the sea-of-green setup in Rio, although the temperatures seemed to trouble a few. In under a year, the ‘big dance’ beckons.

All scores and results here. Pics here.  Thanks to Chris Wells and Andrea Vasquez for all the reportage. 

take my money already!

21 September, 2015

From http://www.wired.com/2015/09/bow-indie-game/