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The Medieval Archer

The Medieval Archer by Jim Bradbury (Boydell)

A thematic tour through the medieval archer. What we know about his weapons, background, social position and his life in warfare together with a number of useful chapters on how he practised his trade. Bradbury's general approach is to explain the "party line" and then question whether the sources for a particular battle actually follow this line. They often do not do so in quite the way those who construct theories would like. The role of the archer as a killing machine is once more downgraded to a necessary part of a combined arms operation.

Most interestingly to me is his conclusion about why English archery stops bringing home the bacon in the mid 15th Century - he reckons the French had also acquired sufficient reasonably good archers to allow them to practice the same system. English archers might remain the best, but they were not the only, practitioners. He also queries the Welsh origin of the weapon. Arguing that the sources indicate that famous archers were as common in Scotland and England as in Wales, but in all cases the best archers came from communities with a strong forest link (most of which have a Celtic background, but that means nothing since the woods are where all marginalised people, be they classes or peoples first retire).

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© Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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