Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Third - Life in the Mediæval Castle Fee - Appendix: Let's Make an Arrow

As my next talk will involve the use of the English longbow, I feel that those of you so inclined might want to make a longbow arrow so here's how to do it.

You'll need a straight stick, around three-and-a-half feet long, a bagful of tools and a credit account at Mister Tanner's, Mister Horner's the smithy and the armourer.

From the Anarchy through Crécy to Agincourt the pre-eminent super-weapon of the English was the legendary longbow. Developed from the hunting longbow by the English and Welsh during the Norman occupation, they were originally four-and-a-half to five feet long and drawn only to the chest, which was fine for short-range work or for arrow-storming, but no good for delivering heavy, lethal arrows accurately at great distance.

The interweb can actually be a pretty handy place to find stuff.

Enter the famous bi-coloured yew longbow. The average length of those recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose was six feet, six inches. They were cut from the junction between the sapwood and heartwood of mature English yews and carved to a 'D' section; the front of the bow being of sapwood and almost flat, the back being of heartwood and curved. This natural lamination made the longbow tremendously powerful.

The freshly cut yew wood was air-dried in open sheds for two years and then slowly worked into shape for up to another two years. These things were for life and often got passed down through generations of archers.

The mediæval longbow had a draw strength of an incredible 100 to 180lbf (compared to a modern hunting bow of 50 to 60lbf) and archers were trained up from childhood, leading to the development of the unequal arm bones and musculature found on skeletons of archers of the period. One arm like Popeye, the other like Olive Oyl.

Instead of holding the bow straight and pulling back on the bowstring, longbow archers would hold the bowstring at their right shoulder and lean forward into the bow using their whole body weight, releasing their arrows with such devastating force that they would travel accurately for well over three-hundred yards and would pierce plate armour and thick, underpadded armour at closer range.

The yew longbow was such an incredible weapon that by the late 1200s England and Wales were depleted of mature yew trees. Henry the Fourth gave his bowyers the right to enter anybody's private land and cut down their yews. The demand was so great that by 1472 every ship coming in to an English port had to bring with it four yew bowstaves for every tun carried (a tun was a wine, oil or honey barrel holding 252 gallons of liquid volume).

Arrows fletched using grey lag goose wingtip feathers.

Bowstrings were made of hemp, flax, or occasionally silk if you were rich enough. The tips of the bow were protected with ox-horn nocks (Mister Horner's work, you'll recall), slotted to take the bowstring.

Arrowheads came in all manner of shapes and sizes with a variety of wide, barbed points for hunting. War arrows, however, usually had either a "short bodkin point" which was designed for piercing armour plate or driving chain mail deep into flesh, a "broadhead" for cutting through flesh and deforming armour, or a small, barbed point for use against horses or infantry.

By the late 1400s the fearsome-looking "plate-cutter bodkin" arrowhead was introduced to rip through heavier plate armour and do massive internal damage.

Compared with the time-consuming yet basically simple process of making bows from bowstaves, the making of a war arrow involved a lot more processes and people. In 1351 the crown ordered 51,530 bowstaves each with twenty-four arrows; a total of 1,232,400 arrows, each one hand made.

The arrow shafts were most commonly of aspen, birch or poplar. These would have been cut to square sections and then carved to a particular profile using a hand plane. Each was around thirty to thirty-six inches long.

While modern arrows are parallel along the shaft, designed for target archery or hunting, longbow arrows had a 'bobtail' profile, with the thickest part of the shaft just behind the arrowhead, tapering down toward the nock. This helps in distance, accuracy and hitting power.

Considering the massive draw strength required for a classic English longbow, the arrows needed reinforcing at the nock. This involved slitting the nock end of the arrow shaft and forcing in a sliver of cow or ox horn (again bought from our Mister Horner), leaving a short section protruding behind the shaft. The groove for the string was then cut against the grain of the horn, making a very strong nock. The nock would be gently eased into the shaft to prevent the wood from splitting further and then clamped and glued.

Next up, a trip to the smithy to pick up a bucket of arrowheads. Depending on how evenly these were made a varying degree of sanding and shaping of the shaft would need to be carried out to ensure a tight fit before gluing.

Now you've got your pointy end and your tail end, the arrow shaft must be waterproofed (if you're headed across the Channel to Agincourt you don't want to get there with soggy, floppy arrows). This would be done using flax or linseed oil, which was first boiled with lead oxide in yet another smelly and dangerous process. Two coats were applied, just to be sure.

Fletching for longbow war arrows was very long and slim, around seven-and-a-half inches in length and a flat triangle in shape about an inch from the shaft at the apex.

Archæological evidence indicates that longbow war arrows were fletched with grey-lag goose wing tip feathers, each arrow with feathers from the same wing to force the arrow to spin and improve accuracy.

These were fixed to the shafts with hide glue (from Mister Tanner's yard) and verdigris, scraped from copper plates by the local armourer. It appears that the verdigris was used to prevent rodents eating the glue while the arrows were in storage or transit.

Modern fletchers tend to cheat and use templates and double sided carpet tape to hold and cut their feathers before fixing them to the shaft, but a mediæval fletcher would be skilled enough to cut the feathers once they were fixed in place.

Silk whipping to the feathers.

To reinforce the glue the feathers were "whipped". This involved hand-winding linen or silk thread around the shaft and between the barbs of the feathers, separating the barbs with a knife before wrapping the thread. This helps keep the feathers in good shape and ensures they fly aerodynamically.

Once the thread was tied off (from the Mary Rose arrows this was done by wrapping tightly for six turns and then gluing), the whipping itself was glued and waterproofed, again using Mister Tanner's hide glue mixed with verdigris from the armourer up at the Castle Fee, who would leave sheets of copper to tarnish in his yard for this purpose.

Now off you toddle and make yourself an arrow.

Sources:

The Worshipful Company of Fletchers and The Worshipful Company of Bowyers

Weapons of Warre: The Ordnance of the Mary Rose (Vol.2): Portsmouth: Mary Rose Trust

Archery in Mediæval and Renaissance Europe: E. Roth: 2012