Drawing The Long Bow?

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32032, 5 July 1969, Page 12

Drawing The Long Bow?

Sir, —“Robin Hood” should know that Edward 111 made a law requiring all ablebodied men of the villages to cease playing football and instead to go to the churchyard and perfect their archery. Up and down the shires such men, from 16 to 60, learned to drive the clothyard shaft fletched with grey goose feathers over 200 yards, six to the minute, into the target without fail. This constant intimacy led to a love of their weapons such as few modern soldiers can have known. Archers got to know their arrows individually. This one tended to swerve six inches to the right at 30 yards; this one was a trifle heavy in the head and needed a higher lift Such men knew other things besides their

weapons. They could read the direction and power of breezes in trees or banners, or at the end of wet fingers held in the air. Men who had lived their lives with bows could judge distances at a glance, knew at what range an arrow would fly dead straight, and at what range and height it would rise before coming back again to the level.—Yours, etc., LITTLE JOHN. July 4, 1969.