archery practice in early tudor england

ARCHERY PRACTICE IN EARLYTUDOR ENGLAND*

In 1545 Roger Ascham, humanist scholar and educationalist,published Toxophilus, a dialogue in which an enthusiast for thelongbow expounds to a sceptic the many benefits of archery forpersonal development and national defence. Ascham was worriedthat archery practice was in catastrophic decline. He claimed thatin the great town where he set his dialogue, ‘there be a thousandegood mens bodies, yet scarse x [tha]t vseth any great shoting’.1

Ascham’s concern was neither idiosyncratic nor novel, but howjustified was it? And if archery was in decline, how accurate wasAscham’s diagnosis of the causes?

Concern to maintain archery went right to the top of Englishsociety and dated back to at least 1363, when the first of a suc-cession of ordinances and parliamentary statutes had com-manded that Englishmen should spend their Sundays andholidays not in pointless amusements such as football, bowls,tennis and dice, but in shooting at the butts.2 By the mid fifteenthcentury it was accepted by political writers such as Sir JohnFortescue and George Ashby that national security dependedupon the populace being ‘much exercised in shooting’, somethingto which ‘By law every man should be compeled’.3 Henry VII andHenry VIII defended the longbow with statutes banning the pos-session of crossbows and handguns by the lower orders; theypromoted it with further statutes ordering every householder tokeep bows, not only for himself, but for his servants and children,and commanding every adult and adolescent male to use them.4

* I am most grateful to Tracey Sowerby and David Trim for helpful comments anduseful references, to Sarah Gunn for assistance with the Figure, and to David Ashtonfor help in searching part of the run of King’s Bench files cited later.

1 Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, the Schole of Shootinge Conteyned in Two Bookes(London, 1545, STC 2nd edn 837), sig. Diiiv.

2 Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy, The Great Warbow: From Hastings to theMary Rose (Stroud, 2005), 199; 12 Rich. II, c. 6; 11 Hen. IV, c. 4; 17 Edw. IV, c. 3.

3 Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood(Cambridge, 1997), 108, 109 n.

4 19 Hen. VII, c. 4; 3 Hen. VIII, c. 3; 3 Hen. VIII, c. 13; 6 Hen. VIII, cc. 2, 13; 14 &15 Hen. VIII, c. 7; 25 Hen. VIII, c. 17; 33 Hen. VIII, cc. 6, 9.

Past and Present, no. 209 (Nov. 2010) � The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2010

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Under Henry VIII proclamations reinforced the message, re-peatedly commanding local officials to do all in their power topromote archery and suppress the unlawful games that threat-ened to supplant it.5 In 1528 Henry drove the point home witha reminder that it was archery practice that had enabled theEnglish in the past, ‘with a mean and small number and puis-sance, in regard and comparison to their enemies’ to do ‘manynotable exploits and acts of war’, such that past kings and indeedHenry himself had won

great and triumphant victories against their enemies to the great honor,fame, renown, and surety of his and their noble persons, and of this hissaid realm of England and subjects of the same, as also to the terrible fearand dread of all outward and strange nations attempting anything by theway of hostility to the hurt or danger of this his said realm.6

The proclamations’ complaint that longbow shooting was ‘soreand marvelously decayed and in manner utterly extinct’ wasshared by the social commentators of the age.7 In his BokeNamed the Gouernour of 1531, Sir Thomas Elyot asked rhetoric-ally: ‘O what cause of reproche shall the decaye of archers be to vsnowe liuyng?’; it was a decay that ‘we all redy p[er]ceive, feare &lament’.8 Bishop Hugh Latimer observed crisply in 1549 thatEnglishmen had taken to ‘whoring in towns, instead of shootingin the fields’.9 And hard economic self-interest made the samecase as nostalgic social idealism, as the bowyers and fletchersof London and Shrewsbury petitioned for action to redress thedecline in their employment.10 It is complaints like these thathave led historians to the conclusion encapsulated by LindsayBoynton: ‘The sentimental view that all Englishmen were bornarchers or made themselves expert by casual practice at the village

5 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (NewHaven and London, 1964–9), i, nos. 108, 121, 138, 163, 183.

6 Ibid., no. 121.7 Ibid.8 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour (London, 1531, STC 2nd edn

7635), fo. 100r.9 The Works of Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555, ed. George

Elwes Corrie, 2 vols. (Parker Soc., Cambridge, 1844–5), i, 197.10 Barbara Megson, Such Goodly Company: A Glimpse of the Life of the Bowyers

of London, 1300–1600 (London, 1993), 61; Historical Manuscripts Commission(hereafter HMC), 15th Report: The Manuscripts of Shrewsbury and CoventryCorporations; the Earl of Radnor, Sir Walter Corbet, Bart., and Others, x (London,1899), 48–9.

54 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

butts of an afternoon has little foundation, at least as far as themid-sixteenth century is concerned’.11

Yet local records suggest that towns took seriously the need tomake provision for their inhabitants to practise archery. Lydd inKent can be found making butts periodically from the 1420s tothe 1480s, and by the last decades of the fifteenth centuryCoventry, New Romney, Plymouth, Rye and Walberswick wereall doing the same.12 The fuller records of the mid sixteenthcentury sometimes present a more detailed picture. At Bristolhalf a dozen men or more worked for the best part of a week oreven longer to construct butts in the town marsh most years be-tween 1540 and 1557. In the 1540s they were often led by theexpert ‘John Grene, butmaker’ alias ‘father Grene of Byrseltoon’,Brislington being a village about two miles away up the riverAvon. In 1542, for example, Father Grene had to be calledback in ‘to mend the greate buttis when the turves was settillyd’.13

At Ludlow a team half the size worked for two or three days toconstruct butts behind the castle most years between 1538 and1570, usually led in the 1550s and 1560s by Thomas Season, whofrom 1554 was also employed as keeper of the town conduits.14

Between the 1530s and the 1560s Barnstaple, Dover, Exeter,Eye, Faversham, Leicester, Lyme Regis, Poole, Reading, South-ampton, Warwick, Winchester, Windsor, Worcester and nodoubt many other towns made similar efforts to keep their buttsin good repair.15 By the mid 1550s some towns, such as Leicester

11 Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, 1558–1638 (London, 1967), 65.12 Records of Lydd, ed. Arthur Finn, trans. Arthur Hussey and M. M. Hardy

(Ashford, 1911), 19, 27, 76, 86, 88, 130–1, 163, 175, 189, 198, 203, 204, 216,296, 316; The Coventry Leet Book, or Mayor’s Register: Containing the Records of theCity Court Leet or View of Frankpledge, AD 1420–1555, ed. Mary Dormer Harris, 4 vols.(Early English Text Soc., cxxxiv–cxxxv, cxxxviii, cxlvi, London, 1907–13), ii, 572;Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone (hereafter CKS), NR/FAc3, fos. 97r, 113r.Calendar of the Plymouth Municipal Records, ed. R. N. Worth (Plymouth, 1893), 95;East Sussex Record Office (hereafter RO), Lewes, Rye 60/3, fos. 9r, 69v; WalberswickChurchwardens’ Accounts, AD 1450–1499, ed. R. W. M. Lewis (London, 1947), 47.

13 Bristol RO, F/Au/1/2, pp. 209–10, 357; F/Au/1/3, pp. 51, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 97,193–4, 198, 324–5, 331; F/Au/1/5, pp. 53–4; City Chamberlains’ Accounts in theSixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. D. M. Livock (Bristol Record Soc., xxiv,Bristol, 1966), 43.

14 Shropshire RO, Shrewsbury, LB 8/1/33; LB 8/1/35/76; LB 8/1/36/57; LB 8/1/38/2/6; LB 8/1/40/14/2; LB 8/1/41/7; LB 8/1/42/11; LB 8/1/43/38, 48; LB 8/1/45/79; LB8/1/46/96; LB 8/1/50/113; LB 8/1/52/76–7; LB 8/1/54/4.

15 Reprint of the Barnstaple Records, ed. J. R. Chanter and Thos. Wainwright, 2 vols.(Barnstaple, 1900), ii, 106, 142–3, 155–6; British Library (hereafter BL), Egerton MS2109, fo. 20r; Mark Stoyle, Circled with Stone: Exeter’s City Walls, 1485–1660 (Exeter,

ARCHERY PRACTICE IN EARLY TUDOR ENGLAND 55

(cont. on p. 56)

and Worcester, were experimenting with a sort of private financeinitiative by which the grounds containing the butts were leased toa farmer on condition he maintain the butts ‘substauncyally’, asWorcester put it.16

In rural parishes too, churchwardens’ accounts from Devon toCumberland show, individuals were sometimes paid for makingthe butts, or bread and ale was supplied to refresh the parishionersas they did it themselves.17 The dates of these payments suggestthat butts were often made at times of war or intense defensivepreparations — in towns and villages alike they were especiallyfrequent in the 1540s, that decade of almost continuous warfareand threatened French invasion — but significant activity inpeacetime suggests that archery practice was a constant activityrather than one solely linked to musters or wartime recruitment.Butts seem generally to have been made from piled-up turves: atleast seventeen cartloads of them at North Elmham in Norfolk in1547–8, three lighter-loads at Bristol in 1551–2, sometimes with

(n. 15 cont.)

2003), 43, 130; Suffolk RO, Ipswich, EE 2/L1/4; ‘Expenses of the Corporation ofFaversham, temp. Hen. VIII’, ed. F. F. Giraud, Archaeologia Cantiana, x (1876), 238;CKS, Fa/Z33, fos. 63r, 93v, 115r; Records of the Borough of Leicester, ed. Mary Batesonet al., 6 vols. (Cambridge and Leicester, 1899–1967), iii, 49, 84–5; Dorset RO,Dorchester, DC/LR/G1/1, p. 32; DC/PL/CLA23, p. 60; DC/PL/CLA48/3; DC/PL/CLA51(6); The Churchwardens’ Account Book for the Parish of St. Giles, Reading, ed.W. L. Nash (Reading, 1881), 67, 73, 77; Charles Kerry, A History of the MunicipalChurch of St. Lawrence, Reading (Reading, 1883), 68; The Churchwardens’ Accounts ofthe Parish of St. Mary’s, Reading, Berks, 1550–1662, ed. Francis N. A. Garry and A. G.Garry (Reading, 1893), 43; Southampton City RO, SC 5/3/1, fo. 118v; WarwickshireRO, Warwick, CR 1618/WA1/1, fo. 78v; Hampshire RO, Winchester, W/E1/58, m. 1;W/E1/72, m. 3; W/E1/73, m. 2d; W/E1/76, m. 4; Berkshire RO, Reading, W 1/FA1,fos. 12r, 53v, 54r; Worcestershire RO, Worcester City Records A 14/1, fo. 34r.

16 Records of the Borough of Leicester, ed. Bateson et al., iii, 84; Worcestershire RO,Worcester City Records A 14/1, fo. 63v.

17 Letters and Papers (Foreign and Domestic), of the Reign of Henry VIII, ii, pt 1, no.1369; J. J. Muskett, ‘Church Goods in Suffolk, no. xvii’, East Anglian, new ser., i(1885–6), 286; Ancient Churchwardens’ Accounts in the Parish of North Elmham, from1539 to 1577, ed. A. G. Legge (Norwich, 1891), 21, 45; Cratfield: A Transcript of theAccounts of the Parish, from AD 1490 to AD 1642, ed. J. J. Raven (London, 1895), 56;‘Early Churchwardens’ Accounts of Wandsworth, 1545 to 1558’, ed. Cecil TudorDavis, Surrey Archaeological Collections, xv (1900), 101; F. E. Warren, ‘Gild ofS. Peter in Bardwell’, Proc. Suffolk Inst. Archaeology, xi (1901), 120, 123; J. B.Phear, ‘Molland Accounts’, Repts and Trans. Devonshire Assoc., xxxv (1903), 227;N. M. Bower, ‘Extracts from Metfield Churchwardens’ Account Books’, Proc.Suffolk Inst. Archaeology, xxiii (1938), 146; C. M. L. Bouch, ‘The Churchwardens’Accounts of the Parish of Great Salkeld’, Trans. Cumberland and Westmorland Antiq.and Archaeol. Soc., new ser., xlix (1950), 135.


the addition of stones or timber.18 They might be surroundedwith ditches or rails, and civic pride could lead to quite elaboratearrangements.19 Bristol paid a painter 13s. 4d. to decorate theposts and vanes surrounding its butts in 1542.20 Warwick spent£5 on posts and rails to enclose its St Mary butts in 1563–4, and atFaversham in 1570–1 over half the cost of £2. 1s. 11d. for makingthe butts went on posts and rails held together with three hundrednails, two staples and two locks with keys.21

The law compelled individuals to own and use arms as well ascommunities to provide facilities for such practice. Elyot thoughtthe decay of archery was proceeding unchecked because of magis-terial negligence. ‘Who’, he asked, ‘effectuelly puttethe his handeto co[n]tinual execution of the same lawes and prouisions, orbeholdyng them dayly broke[n], wynketh nat at the offe[n]-dours?’22 Latimer too thought the justices were at fault, andhandbooks for magistrates reminded them to implement thearchery legislation.23 Ascham was kinder but no more optimistic.‘Many bye bowes bicause of the acte’, he thought, ‘but yet theyshote not: not of euyll wyll, but bycause they knowe not howe toshoote’.24

It is true that most towns and villages were much readier toforbid unlawful games, part of a policy of moral regulation andsocial control of the young or those employed as servants, cat-egories that often overlapped, than positively to encourage arch-ery.25 Stratford-upon-Avon was doing more than most when in1559 it added for the first time to its frequent instructions to itsinhabitants not to entertain themselves with dicing, bowling and

18 Ancient Churchwardens’ Accounts in the Parish of North Elmham, ed. Legge, 45–6;Cratfield, ed. Raven, 56; Warren, ‘Gild of S. Peter in Bardwell’, 125; Bristol RO, F/Au/1/3, pp. 79, 81, 83, 85; F/Au/1/5, pp. 53–4; Shropshire RO, LB 8/1/41/7.

19 Ancient Churchwardens’ Accounts in the Parish of North Elmham, ed. Legge, 45–6;Bower, ‘Extracts from Metfield Churchwardens’ Account Books’, 146; W. O. Ault,Open-Field Farming in Medieval England: A Study of Village By-Laws (London, 1972),134; Bristol RO, F/Au/1/3, pp. 79, 83.

20 Bristol RO, F/Au/1/3, p. 83.21 Warwickshire RO, CR 1618/WA1/1, fo. 78v; CKS, Fa/Z33, fo. 143v.22 Elyot, Boke Named the Gouernour, fo. 100r.23 Works of Hugh Latimer, ed. Corrie, i, 197; Jonathan Davies, ‘Painful Pastime

versus Present Pleasure: Tudor Archery and the Law’, Jl Soc. Army Hist. Research,lxxxv (2007).

24 Ascham, Toxophilus, sig. Miir.25 Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600

(Cambridge, 1998), 96–107.


so on the laconic qualification ‘but only Shotynge & archary’.26 Insome places, however, enforcement seems to have been takenmore seriously, apparently in response to a statute of 1542 andsuccessive proclamations focusing on the need for archery prac-tice by servants, apprentices and other ‘common poor artifi-cers’.27 Canterbury sought to enforce the statute in 1542, thesuburban Middlesex parishes of London in 1562, Exeter,Taunton and York in 1569, and the Essex quarter sessions in1573–4.28

More detailed evidence of enforcement survives for Ludlow inShropshire and Fordwich in Kent. At Ludlow, under the eyes ofthe king’s councillors in the Marches, twelve bursts of fines for notowning bows or practising archery in 1542–3, 1551–2, 1558,1564, 1568–70 and 1576 affected up to five dozen townsmeneach time and a grand total of 176 individuals.29 The archerytest seems to have been a genuine one — Richard Lloid’s finewas respited when the Six Men, who audited the borough ac-counts, testified that he was decrepit and maimed in his righthand and so could not be expected to shoot — and the fact thatnineteen men were fined twice, some as much as nine years apart,suggests a real effort at enforcement.30 The sums involved, at upto 6s. 8d. each, were not negligible. Those fined did includeforty-five servants or apprentices, while half a dozen otherswere convicted players or (more usually) hosts of illegal games,so at Ludlow encouraging archery and controlling misbehaviourreally did go together. But at least two of those fined rose to be

26 Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records,1553–1620, ed. Richard Savage et al., 5 vols. (Dugdale Soc., i, iii, v, x, xxxv, Oxford,1921–90), i, 98.

27 33 Hen. VIII, c. 9; Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes and Larkin, iii, no.197.5.

28 Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 2ndedn, 12 vols. (Canterbury, 1797–1801), xii, 633; Middlesex County Records, ed. JohnCordy Jeaffreson, 4 vols. (London, 1886–92), i, 42; Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed.Hughes and Larkin, ii, nos. 559, 586, 587; HMC, Report on the Records of the City ofExeter, lxxiii (London, 1916), 9; R. G. Hedworth Whitty, The Court of Taunton in the16th and 17th Centuries: A Study in the Legal and Social History of Taunton under theTudors and Stuarts (Taunton, 1934), 96; York Civic Records, ed. Angelo Raine, 8 vols.(Yorks. Archaeol. Soc., Record ser., xcviii, ciii, cvi, cviii, cx, cxii, cxv, cxix, Wakefield,1939–53), vi, 155; Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 68.

29 Shropshire RO, LB 8/1/36/7–8, 32, 71–2; LB 8/1/37/8; LB 8/1/41/38; LB 8/1/46/16; LB 8/1/49/49; LB 8/1/50/19, 38, 39; LB 8/1/52/51, 54; LB 8/1/53/13; LB 8/1/54/60, 62–3; LB 8/1/57/43–51, 55–6.

30 Shropshire RO, LB 8/1/41/37.


bailiffs of the borough, thirty-two were taxed in the subsidiesof 1543–72, some on as much as £10 or £20 in goods, andmost of those fined for keeping gaming houses were nevertroubled over archery.31 At Ludlow, it would seem, failure toshoot was not just another charge to throw at the poor or thene’er-do-well; local officials really did try to buck the trend ofchange and tackled the whole of urban society in doing so.

At Fordwich too the encouragement of archery went alongsidemoral regulation, as the town court regularly attacked gaming,scolding, suspicious lodgers and disorderly tippling houses.32

Groups of between two and fifteen men were presented forhaving no bows, or not using those they possessed, at fourteencourts between April 1553 and October 1569.33 On many ofthese occasions members of the presenting jury confessed them-selves at fault, but then self-incrimination seems to have comeeasily to the men of Fordwich, since at the court of October 1560the jury confessed themselves ‘all offendors for playing at unlau-full games & therefore ev[er]ye of theym at the am[er]cementaccording to the statute’.34 The magisterial negligence de-nounced by Elyot and Latimer was not a problem here. Amongthe seventy-two men presented were not just six or more servants,not just incomers to the town, not just jurors, but at least foursitting jurats (town councillors) and several other future juratsand mayors.35

So, local administrative records tell us that many towns andvillages made it possible for early Tudor Englishmen to do theirarchery practice, and that some urban and suburban authoritiessought to compel some individuals to do it. But the best evidenceof how early Tudor Englishmen did their archery practice comesfrom a different set of sources entirely. This is the series of reportson sudden deaths, starting in the 1490s, filed with the court ofKing’s Bench by coroners.36 These record fifty-six fatal archery

31 National Archives, London, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), E 179/166/155; E 179/166/182; E 179/166/187; E 179/167/9; E 179/167/11; E 179/167/44; E179/167/50; E 179/255/13.

32 Canterbury RO, U 4/20/1, fos. 63v–64r, 66r, 66v, 69v, 71v.33 Canterbury RO, U 4/20/1, fos. 8v, 32v–33r, 57r–v, 62r, 64r, 70v, 76r, 80r, 91r, 100r,

104v.34 Canterbury RO, U 4/20/1, fo. 57r–v.35 Canterbury RO, U 4/20/1, fos. 91r, 97r, 100r, 104v.36 For the administrative context, see Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1485–1558, ed. R. F.

Hunnisett (Sussex Record Soc., lxxiv, Lewes, 1985), pp. xiii–xiv; for a generally


(cont. on p. 60)

accidents between 1501 and 1575, located in thirty counties fromDevon, Dorset and Kent in the south to Cumberland, Westmor-land and Yorkshire in the north, and from Herefordshire andShropshire in the west to Essex and Lincolnshire in the east.37

They show us that many Englishmen were doing their archerypractice — just as accidents recorded in coroners’ rolls show usthey were as far back as the 1350s — and tell us a good deal aboutthe circumstances in which they did it.38

Ascham thought the winter unsuitable for archery for its‘roughnesse’ and the summer for its ‘feruent heate’; for himspring and autumn were best.39 Our archers roughly agreed,packing forty-one of their fifty-six accidents into the spring andearly summer, from April to July, and fitting eight more intoSeptember and October. Legislation prescribed Sundays andfeast days as the time for practice, and Sundays indeed producedtwenty of our accidents, church festivals on which work was dis-couraged nine and the eves of such holidays three.40 Those parti-cipating were drawn from a wide range of ranks and occupations.At one end of the social scale were twelve labourers and six hus-bandmen, at the other six gentlemen. In between came fiveyeomen, two butchers, two weavers, two shoemakers, a capper,a tailor, a carpenter, a cooper, a slater and a smith. Five were boysaged between eight and thirteen, exactly the group Ascham, him-self trained to shoot as part of his education in the household of Sir

(n. 36 cont.)

positive verdict on the reliability of coroners’ reports, see Carrie Smith, ‘MedievalCoroners’ Rolls: Legal Fiction or Historical Fact?’, in Diana E. S. Dunn (ed.),Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages (Stroud, 1996).

37 PRO, KB 9/423/26, 436/51, 442/94, 442/116, 446/62, 446/80, 448/72, 451/21,455/19, 459/112, 463/27, 469/86, 471/97, 474/35, 484/39, 484/89, 486/40, 519/73,537/130, 541/158, 543/16, 547/8, 548/58, 548/146, 552/178, 558/159, 574/135, 574/136, 576/264, 576/272, 578/76, 579/49, 579/108, 585/114, 589/210, 591/82, 604/99,604/222, 610/71, 610/128, 610/257, 617/163, 625/161, 629/244, 633/150, 1004/102,1004/141, 1013/82, 1014/166; KB 8/18/69; Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1485–1558, ed.Hunnisett, nos. 31, 41; Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1558–1603, ed. R. F. Hunnisett(Kew, 1996), no. 154; Calendar of Nottinghamshire Coroners’ Inquests, 1485–1558, ed.R. F. Hunnisett (Thoroton Soc., Record ser., xxv, Nottingham, 1969), nos. 126, 291,298.

38 Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England(New York, 1986), 26.

39 Ascham, Toxophilus, sig. Diiir.40 C. R. Cheney, ‘Rules for the Observance of Feast-Days in Medieval England’,

Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, xxxiv (1961); Barbara Harvey, ‘Work and Festa Ferianda inMedieval England’, Jl Eccles. Hist., xxiii (1972).


Humphrey Wingfield, wanted to see at the butts.41 As he argued,‘defence of the co[m]mune wealth’ required that ‘euerye bodyeshoulde learne to shote when they be yonge’, since archery ‘cannot be done mightelye when they be men, excepte they learne itperfitelye when they be boyes’.42 Other evidence confirms thatyoungsters were still learning to shoot in Ascham’s day. AtGrimsby in 1516 it was a ‘scoler’, John Atkinson, who acciden-tally shot a girl at the town butts, though fortunately the townsurgeons managed to heal her.43 The mayor and aldermen ofCanterbury watched ‘childerne shotyng’ in 1504–5, and theshooting games held at Great Dunmow in Essex in the 1540shad a separate section for ‘lads’.44

Archery practice was clearly a sociable activity. Men shot to-gether in groups of half a dozen, a dozen, or more, and at leastsixteen of our accidents involved injury to spectators, rather thanfellow-participants or those quite oblivious to the archers’ activ-ity. Other casualties, who may or may not have been watching,ran across between the archers and their targets at the wrongmoment, showing why some communities thought it best to railin their butts. Some, whether participants or observers, madefatal misjudgements, going to pick up arrows before others hadstopped shooting, or failing to take evasive action even thoughthey saw an arrow coming their way. Some brought their misfor-tune on themselves more doggedly still. On 2 June 1542Alexander Godbye was sitting on the churchyard wall at Lowickin Northamptonshire watching John Fryssby and his friendsshoot at targets next to the wall. They warned him several timesto get down lest he have an accident, but he would not do so.John’s arrow struck him on the left side of the head and he lan-guished for ten day before expiring.45 Others dared their friendsonce too often. Thomas Curteys of Bildeston, Suffolk, did takehis hat off and stand clear after calling to Richard Lyrence, whenhe met him in the road at about 9 o’clock one June evening in1556 and they fell to shooting together, ‘Nowe let me se howe

41 Ascham, Toxophilus, sig. Sivr.42 Ibid., sig. Biiiv. Young boys had bows and shot at targets from the thirteenth

century to the fifteenth: Nicholas Orme, ‘The Culture of Children in MedievalEngland’, Past and Present, no. 148 (Aug. 1995), 62–3.

43 Edward Gillett, A History of Grimsby (Oxford, 1970), 113.44 Canterbury RO, FA 2, fo. 413v; Andrew Clark, ‘Great Dunmow Revels, 1526–

1543’, Essex Rev., xix (1910), 198.45 PRO, KB 9/552/178.


thou canst shott at my hatt’. His fatal mistake was to egg Lyrenceon to a shot with his last, unfledged arrow. ‘Trulye that arrowewyll flye madlye, but I praye the hartelye shote it’, said Curteys.It did fly madly, and hit Curteys in the head.46

The coroners’ reports are not as forthcoming about the loca-tions of practice as about the times, but give some indicationsthat fit with other evidence and are particularly useful becauseof the difficulties of using place-name evidence to identify archerybutts.47 Some towns found space for butts inside their walls, as atNorwich, where Ascham recalled shooting ‘in the chapel feldewythin the waulles’.48 Several, such as Barnstaple and Truro,located them in disused castles.49 Sites near rivers or the seashoreseem to have been popular whether inside or outside the town, asat Poole, Shrewsbury, York, Stony Stratford, and on PlymouthHoe.50 Most towns just designated space outside the walls,Cambridge having its Butt Green beyond Jesus Lane, Leicesterrenting its ‘comen Buttes’ in Butt Close from the king for a sym-bolic arrow worth 4d. each year.51 One of our accidents took placeat the butts in the suburbs of Hereford and another next to themain road out of Oxford to the north, in the parish of St Giles.52

Londoners used Finsbury Fields, which the Honourable ArtilleryCompany and other enthusiasts filled with named targets by the1590s, St Martin’s Field and St Clement’s Field.53

46 PRO, KB 9/589/210.47 A. H. Smith, English Place-Name Elements, 2 vols. (English Place-Name Soc.,

xxv–xxvi, Cambridge, 1956), i, 65; E. A. Hart, ‘Tracing the Butts’, Jl Soc. Archer-Antiquaries, xxxix (1996), 14–15.

48 Ascham, Toxophilus, sig. Xivv.49 Reprint of the Barnstaple Records, ed. Chanter and Wainwright, ii, 106; The

Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith,5 vols. (London, 1906–10), i, 198.

50 H. P. Smith, The History of the Borough and County of the Town of Poole, ii, CountyCorporate Status (Poole, 1951), 35–6; Records of Early English Drama: Shropshire, ed.J. Alan B. Somerset, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1994), ii, 398; Ascham, Toxophilus, sig. Yir; SirFrank Markham, A History of Milton Keynes and District, 2 vols. (Luton, 1973–5), i,131; Calendar of the Plymouth Municipal Records, ed. Worth, 118, 123.

51 Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1842–1908), ii,131; Records of the Borough of Leicester, ed. Bateson et al., iii, 7, 30.

52 PRO, KB 9/548/58, 574/135.53 John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2nd edn,

2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), ii, 76–7, 370; Alain Holt, ‘The Elizabethan ShootingGrounds (the Shakespeare Connection)’, Jl Soc. Archer-Antiquaries, xxviii (1985),3–5; St. Martin-in-the-Fields: The Accounts of the Churchwardens, 1525–1603, ed. J. V.Kitto (London, 1901), 579; Sir John Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England,vi, 1483–1558 (Oxford, 2003), 767.


Archery in fields around towns might of course be rather dan-gerous to passers-by, and this may be why the Coventry author-ities insisted in 1468 and 1474 that archers practising in thesurrounding fields shoot only at butts and not at rovers, loosingoff arrows into the distance, hitting who knew whom and worsen-ing the town’s already difficult relations with the neighbouringpriory.54 In smaller communities too the fields were the mostcommon location for temporary butts, though closes, gardens,yards and parks were also used.55 Sites near churches may alsohave been thought suitable for communal recreation. At Lowick,as we have seen, the targets were next to the churchyard wall, justas Alphamstone’s in Essex were on the church green, Appledore’sin Kent in ‘the church lease’, Faversham’s in the parsonage closebeside the church and Fishtoft’s in Lincolnshire near the oldchapel of ease.56

No doubt some archers did choose rather unsuitable places topractise. Suburban butts set amongst cherry trees or pear treesposed dangers when arrows went slightly astray, deflecting off atree into the watching crowd or breaking off a branch that mightstrike a spectator.57 Thomas Egglesfield of Sutton-on-Derwent,Yorkshire, gentleman, must have rued his decision to shoot at awhite mark on the side of a house there when his arrow puncturedthe wall and struck Elizabeth Smyth who was inside the house,killing her instantly.58 At Norwich on May Day 1564 a fatal inci-dent was avoided, but only at the cost of an unseemly dispute.At about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, perhaps after some over-enthusiastic maying, Jeremy Gardener, a servant to the enthusi-astically Protestant alderman Robert Suckling, stood shoutingat the door of Christ Church and preparing to shoot at it. SirNicholas Smyth, priest, warned him not to shoot, ‘for you seepeople come through every minute of the hour’. ‘Why should Inot shoot here as well as others have done heretofore?’, askedJeremy. Warming to his theme, he threatened Sir Nicholas withthe words that brought him before the court of mayor and

54 Coventry Leet Book, or Mayor’s Register, ed. Harris, ii, 338, 389, 457–8.55 PRO, KB 9/463/27, 484/89, 537/130, 543/16, 604/99, 604/222, 610/71, 610/

257, 617/163, 1014/166; KB 8/18/69; Calendar of Nottinghamshire Coroners’ Inquests,ed. Hunnisett, no. 291.

56 PRO, KB 9/552/178, 576/272, 629/244; Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 68; CKS,Fa/Z33, fo. 137r.

57 PRO, KB 9/423/26, 548/58.58 PRO, KB 9/459/112.


aldermen two days later: ‘I will shoot here and axe thee no leave,thou old popish knave’.59

The duty to practise archery for the sake of king and kingdomwas often lightened by the excitement of competition, as atCanterbury, Chester, Great Dunmow and Shrewsbury, at theWhit Monday games at Burrough on the Hill in Leicestershireand the wrestling and shooting contests with graded prizes linkedto Bartholomew Fair in London.60 Here lay archery’s future, as asport rather than a military exercise.61 Competitive archery alsoenlivened the social relations between towns and their localgentry. The Scotts of nearby Scot’s Hall and their men came toshoot at New Romney in 1506–7, Lord Powis and his men cameto shoot at Shrewsbury in 1522–3, and Yorkshire gentlemen helda shooting match at York in 1555.62 Less in tune with archery’ssupposed moral superiority over games of chance was the habit ofbetting on one’s success. At Nottingham in 1496 one archer won5s. 10d. off another in shooting at the butts, and sued him in thetown courts to secure payment.63 High-rolling Londoners wentin for larger bets, like the 20s. William Cokkes and LancelotStrong bet each other in 1541 that Lancelot could not shoot anarrow 300 yards into the wind, which he proceeded to do in StGiles’s Fields while William Cokkes and Henry Smyth, holdingthe stake money, watched; things turned awkward only whenSmyth refused to hand him his winnings.64 Perhaps similar prob-lems lay behind the need for the Carpenters’ Company to appointfour of its members to arbitrate between three others in 1566 over

59 Depositions Taken before the Mayor and Aldermen of Norwich, 1549–1567, ed.Walter Rye (Norwich, 1905), 78; P. W. Hasler, The House of Commons, 1558–1603, 3vols. (London, 1981), iii, 464.

60 Ninth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London, 1883),148 (appendix 1); Records of Early English Drama: Chester, ed. Lawrence M. Clopper(Manchester, 1979), 23, 39–42; Clark, ‘Great Dunmow Revels’, 196–8; HMC,Manuscripts of Shrewsbury and Coventry Corporations, x, 32; Itinerary of John Leland,ed. Smith, iv, 20; P. E. Jones, The Worshipful Company of Poulters of the City of London: AShort History, 2nd edn (London, 1965), 154–5; G. A. Raikes, The History of theHonourable Artillery Company, 2 vols. (London, 1878–9), i, 26–7.

61 Martin Johnes, ‘Archery, Romance and Elite Culture in England and Wales,c.1780–1840’, History, lxxxix (2004).

62 CKS, NR/FAc3, fo. 116r; Shropshire RO, 3365/438, fo. 121v; York Civic Records,ed. Raine, v, 127.

63 Records of the Borough of Nottingham, ed. W. H. Stevenson et al., 9 vols.(Nottingham, 1882–1956), iii, 47.

64 Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust RO, Stratford-upon-Avon, DR 10/1781.


‘all mann[er] of matches and bargaines betwene them heretoforemade for and concerninge the arte of shotinge’.65

The lure of profit might lead to fearsome temptations, or so astory in Reginald Scot’s Discouerie of Witchcraft suggests. Anarcher at Malling in Kent in Mary’s reign shot so well that hewon two or three shillings a day in bets, but his preternaturalaccuracy raised suspicions that he was employing demonic assist-ance and he was severely punished.66 Gambling had worse con-sequences still when two London gentlemen went out beyondFinsbury to Hornsey to shoot in August 1499. Robert Tickhillshot his arrow further than Edward Plumpton, but Plumptonwould not believe him, saying ‘That he lyed falsely lyke a falseknave, that he had nott wonne the shott but that he lyke a boy hadtakon up his shaft and pyckyd it ferther’. Plumpton then hitTickhill on the head with his bow and, as Tickhill lay on theground, beat his body and arms so fiercely that the bow broke.Tickhill ran for his life, pursued by Plumpton, until he reached aditch and big hedge and found he could not cross it to escapefurther. So he turned and shot Plumpton in the neck, fatallywounding him in self-defence; or so Tickhill’s side of the storywent.67 Plumpton is better known as the young cousin and legalagent of the Yorkshire Plumptons, a regular correspondent in thePlumpton Letters. His widow tried to secure redress for his death byan appeal of murder against Tickhill, but King’s Bench confirmedthe self-defence verdict.68

Clearly many men in early Tudor England were practisingarchery, many even in comparison with other sports. Archerydeaths seem to have outnumbered deaths from football, wrest-ling, Cornish hurling, quoits, maypole-dancing, bell-ringingor ‘[Ch]r[ist]enmas games’ by a very large margin.69 Though

65 Records of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, iii, Court Book, 1533–1573, ed.Bower Marsh (Oxford, 1915), 85.

66 Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft (London, 1584, STC 2nd edn 21864),65.

67 PRO, KB 9/422/2.68 The Plumpton Letters and Papers, ed. Joan Kirby (Camden Soc., 5th ser., viii,

Cambridge, 1996), 330–1.69 PRO, KB 9/448/44, 490/54, 494/47, 610/263, 633/135, 639/135 and Middlesex

County Records, ed. Jeaffreson, i, 138 for football deaths; KB 9/451/11 for hurling;KB 9/489/63 for wrestling; KB 9/633/191 for quoits; KB 9/595(i)/80 formaypole-dancing; KB 9/635/220, 1014/290 for bell-ringing; KB 9/608/234 forChristmas games; KB 9/494/67 for an obscure but fatal Scottish pastime.


archery was more inherently dangerous than these other pastimes— some of the deaths were instant or nearly so, testimony to theawful damage arrows could do to an unarmoured head, throat ortorso — many victims expired days after a wounding, presumablythrough infection, just as they did from injuries incurred in theseother sports, and this reinforces the impression that a good deal ofarchery was going on.

Archery might nonetheless have been in decline, as Aschamfeared, if the proportion of the population involved were fallingor if the levels of skill attained were ever lower. Various forms ofevidence do suggest a decline in the number of Englishmen ableto shoot well. The proportion of men noted as competent archersin muster certificates fell from one in three in 1522 to one in fourin 1557.70 Of the skeletons found aboard the Mary Rose, only onein five showed changes to the shoulder blades consistent withpractice from a young age with the sort of very powerful longbowsfound on board the ship.71 Yet the decline seems to have beenslow. The number of bows recorded in probate inventories —never very high, so they may simply have been ignored by thoseappraising goods — did not decrease markedly over the sixteenthcentury, and many people still turned up at musters with bows aslate as the 1580s, when the elite trained bands included someeight thousand archers out of twenty-five thousand men fromfifteen counties.72 The number of fatal accidents recorded (seeFigure) likewise suggests a decline in archery practice, though it ishard to judge the exact path or causes of that decline. It mightappear that archery faltered in the 1520s, revived in the 1540s and1550s, perhaps under the impact of the 1542 legislation and thesort of enforcement effortswe have seen at Ludlow and Fordwich,and then declined finally in the 1560s and 1570s. But the revivalmay be an illusion caused by the improved efficiency of coronersin reporting accidental deaths of all sorts, some fifteen times more

70 Jeremy Goring, ‘Social Change and Military Decline in Mid-Tudor England’,History, lx (1975), 193.

71 Christopher Knusel, ‘Activity-Related Structural Change’, in Veronica Fiorato,Anthea Boylston and Christopher Knusel (eds.), Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of aMass Grave from the Battle of Towton, AD 1461 (Oxford, 2000), 105–9, 115–16; A. J.Stirland, Raising the Dead: The Skeleton Crew of Henry VIII’s Great Ship, the Mary Rose(Chichester, 2000), 118–34; Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 12–18.

72 Surrey Probate Inventories, 1558–1603, ed. D. M. Herridge (Surrey Record Soc.,xxxix, Woking, 2005); Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 298.


AR

CH

ER

Y A

ND

HA

ND

GU

N A

CC

IDE

NT

S 1

500–

1575

(SE

VE

N-Y

EA

R M

OV

ING

AV

ER

AG

ES

)

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.81

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.82

1500

1505

1510

1515

1520

1525

1530

1535

1540

1545

1550

1555

1560

1565

1570

1575

Accidents per annum

Arc

hery

acc

iden

ts

Han

dgun

acc

iden

ts

often recorded in the 1560s than in the 1510s; so the true picturemay be one of slow but steady decline.73

It is also hard to say whether the number of accidents testifies toincompetence. Early Tudor archers were not unambitious, formany of them are recorded as shooting at twelve-score pricks oreven thirteen-score pricks, targets set 240 or 260 paces away,comparable to the 250–300 yards reckoned as extreme bowrange in the Hundred Years War.74 Sometimes they shot overtheir targets, sometimes the wind carried their arrows offcourse, perhaps because they had not judged its force or directioncorrectly, a difficult task on which Ascham gave careful instruc-tions; sometimes an archer misfired through the ‘instability’ ortrembling of his hand or because his sleeve got caught in his bowor his bowstring in his torn glove.75 At least the most blatantlyincompetent archer to appear in the coroners’ reports was adanger only to himself. On 18 November 1552 Henry Pert,gentleman, went out for pastime with his bow and arrow atWelbeck in Nottinghamshire. He drew his bow so fully that thearrow lodged in the bow. Intending to loose the arrow harmlesslyinto the air, he released his fingers while leaning slightly over thebow and shot himself fatally in the head.76

Whatever the state of archery in the early and mid sixteenthcentury, by the century’s end there had clearly been decline.Local courts had long played a role in securing the upkeep ofthe butts, as of other communal amenities such as the stocksand the cucking-stool. At Wallingford in 1511, for example, thejurors in the borough court presented that the bailiffs were indefault because neither the butts nor the cucking-stool hadbeen made.77 From the 1550s and 1560s, however, differentcommunities at different times changed from paying to makeup their butts to paying a regular court fine for their default innot doing so.78 The same forlorn air hung about courts’ orders for

73 Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1485–1558, ed. Hunnisett, pp. xiv, xvii–xx; S. J.Stevenson, ‘The Rise of Suicide Verdicts in South-East England, 1530–1590: TheLegal Process’, Continuity and Change, ii (1987), 39.

74 Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 291–317.75 PRO, KB 9/423/26, 442/94, 442/116, 446/80, 448/72, 474/35, 547/8, 548/146,

576/272, 585/114.76 Calendar of Nottinghamshire Coroners’ Inquests, ed. Hunnisett, no. 298.77 Berkshire RO, W/JBc14.78 Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 67–9; Bower, ‘Extracts from Metfield Churchwar-

dens’ Account Books’, 146; Ancient Churchwardens’ Accounts in the Parish of North


(cont. on p. 69)

individuals to buy or use bows. Already at Fordwich in the 1560sthe sense of a losing battle was strong. The butts were repeatedlysaid to be in decay, many individuals were presented again andagain, even two of the jurats, one Leonard Harrys achieving thedubious distinction of eight fines in a row.79 The usual level offines declined over the decade from 6s. 8d. to 12d. or even 6d. andthe last round of fines in 1569 were ‘reservyd to the dyscreccion ofthe . . . mayo[ur] & juratt[es]’.80 By 1576 the jury was presenting‘the default[es] of ev[er]y man for not shotyng according to thestatute’ and by 1577 pointing out that the inhabitants were noteven ‘caled to bringe forthe ther bowes’.81 Similarly at Ludlowforty of the seventy fines of 1576 were for only 12d. and fourteenof the seventy were marked in the accounts for some kind of re-assessment or respite.82 By the time John Stow wrote his Survey ofLondon in the 1590s, he could lament that ‘the auncient daylyexercises in the long bow by Citizens of this Citie’ were ‘nowalmost cleane left off and forsaken’.83 His picture is confirmedby the fate of the London bowyers, twenty of whom made willsbetween 1500 and 1569, but none after that date.84 After 1600prosecutions under the statutes for maintenance of archery werestill sometimes mounted, but they had become the province of theinformer out for a quick profit rather than of the magistrate con-cerned about national defence.85

Contemporaries and historians have adduced various causesfor this decline. It is possible, first, that good bows could not behad at a suitable price. Legislation from the 1470s to the 1500s,reiterated in the 1570s, aimed to compel those trading with theContinent to import superior yew bowstaves, grown in colderwinters and hotter summers than England’s, at more reasonable

(n. 78 cont.)

Elmham, ed. Legge, 81, 83, 86; Liverpool Town Books: Proceedings of Assemblies, Com-mon Councils, Portmoot Courts, etc., 1550–1862, ed. J. A. Twemlow, 2 vols. (London,1918–35), i, 150, 265, 349; Whitty, Court of Taunton, 91, 96.

79 Canterbury RO, U 4/20/1, fos. 43v, 62r, 64r, 70v, 76r, 78r, 79v, 91r, 96v, 119v.80 Canterbury RO, U 4/20/1, fo. 104v.81 Canterbury RO, U 4/20/1, fos. 156r, 160v.82 Shropshire RO, LB 8/1/57/43, 47, 49–50, 55–6.83 Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, i, 104.84 Megson, Such Goodly Company, 63–6.85 See, for example, PRO, KB 29/250, mm. 8d, 14, 16d, 20, 28d. I am grateful to

Simon Healy for drawing my attention to these cases. It is telling that by this period, atleast in King’s Bench, prosecutions for illegal handgun ownership were apparently farmore numerous than those for failure to practise archery.


prices than they had been doing.86 Similar supply problems, at-tributable to the monopolistic ambitions of a Danzig trader, wereevident in 1547 in the north, to which Baltic bowstaves werebrought through Hull and Newcastle.87 Yet in the main trade,through London, and in the period of Ascham’s and Elyot’s com-plaints, there are fewer signs of such shortages. From the 1530sHermann Wolborn and Melchior von Muhlheim of Cologne sup-plied the English market with perhaps twenty thousand bow-staves each year, bought from the Nurembergers who held theHabsburg government’s monopoly, set up in 1521, on the ex-ploitation of Tyrolean and Lower Austrian yews.88 The pricesof bows bought to equip soldiers did rise over time, but notmore than those of other manufactured goods, indexed at 102in the 1510s, 127 in the 1540s and 218 in the 1560s.89 Averageprices paid for bows for soldiers in the 1550s and 1560s, at about2s. 10d., were only 48 per cent higher than those prevalent fromthe 1510s to the 1530s.90 This roughly matched the increase in

86 Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 16, 23–5; 12 Edw. IV, c. 2; 1 Rich. III, c. 11;19 Hen. VII, c. 2; 8 Eliz. I, c. 10; 13 Eliz. I, c. 14.

87 Gervase Phillips, ‘Longbow and Hackbutt: Weapons Technology and Tech-nology Transfer in Early Modern England’, Technology and Culture, xl (1999), 590;The Customs Accounts of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1454–1500, ed. J. F. Wade (SurteesSoc., ccii, Gateshead, 1995), 148, 150; The Customs Accounts of Hull, 1453–1490,ed. Wendy R. Childs (Yorks. Archaeol. Soc., Record ser., cxliv, Leeds, 1986), 207.

88 Claudia Schnurmann, Kommerz und Klungel: der Englandhandel Kolner Kaufleuteim 16. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1991), 125–47; Friedrich Walter, ‘Die osterrei-chischen Eibenholzmonopole des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- undWirtschaftsgeschichte, xxvii (1934).

89 C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700, 2vols. (Cambridge, 1984), i, 50.

90 Worcestershire RO, BA 1006/31b/319; Huntingdonshire RO, Huntingdon,2449/25 (unfoliated); Durham University Library, CCB, B/31c/220204/4, fo. 115v;Huntington Library, San Marino, California, BA 277; HMC, Report on theManuscripts of the Corporation of Beverley, liv (London, 1900), 174; BL, Egerton MS2093, fo. 29r; Southampton RO, SC 5/1/32, fo. 29v; Wiltshire and Swindon HistoryCentre, Chippenham, G 25/1/21, p. 135; Charles Welch, History of the WorshipfulCompany of Pewterers of the City of London, 2 vols. (London, 1902), i, 138, 150, 180;Cratfield, ed. Raven, 49, 55, 71; Reprint of the Barnstaple Records, ed. Chanter andWainwright, ii, 106, 126; Hampshire RO, W/E1/69, m. 3; W/E1/72, m. 3; Philip E.Jones, The Butchers of London: A History of the Worshipful Company of Butchers of the Cityof London (London, 1976), 178; Boxford Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1530–1561, ed.Peter Northeast (Suffolk Records Soc., xxiii, Woodbridge, 1982), 55; Calendar ofthe Plymouth Municipal Records, ed. Worth, 113; Records of the Worshipful Company ofCarpenters, iv, Wardens’ Account Book, 1546–1571, ed. Bower Marsh (Oxford, 1916),23, 68, 95; The Household Book (1510–1551) of Sir Edward Don: An Anglo-Welsh Knightand his Circle, ed. Ralph A. Griffiths (Bucks. Record Soc., xxxiii, Aylesbury, 2004),397; J. J. Muskett, ‘Church Goods in Suffolk, no. xxiv’, East Anglian, new ser., ii


(cont. on p. 71)

wholesale prices charged by Wolborn and Muhlheim, from £6.10s. per hundred staves in the 1530s to £9 or £10 in the 1550s.91

Mostly, then, it was possible to get bows, though it is crediblethat at a time of more general inflation many of those who boughtthem opted for cheap and inferior items and the quality of archerysuffered. It is interesting to compare the prices paid by church-wardens, borough treasurers and so on to equip soldiers withthose given in proclamations and statutes that attempted tostop profiteering by those selling arms. In the 1540s, when theaverage price stood at just over 2s. 1d., 2s. was supposed to bethe price of a third-rate bow, the best commanding 3s. 6d. By the1560s, when those equipping soldiers were paying some 3s. 1d.on average, the best bows of foreign yew were set at 6s. 8d.92

Problems of supply may also have increased from the 1550s. Inthat decade Habsburg forestry officials began to complain thatreckless exploitation was exhausting the stands of slow-growingyew, something even the monopolists admittedby the 1570s,whilethe Germans’ attempts to use their influence with the Habsburgsto defend their dominance of the market against English com-petition and the difficulties of trading through the disturbedNetherlands of the 1560s and 1570s made things worse.93

Another contemporary explanation was that the alternative dis-tractions so feared by the legislators had out-competed archery.Ascham thought that teaching the young to shoot would uproot in

(n. 90 cont.)

(1887–8), 4; Third Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London,1872), 262 (appendix); The Accounts of the Wardens of the Parish of Morebath, Devon,1520–1573, ed. J. Erskine Binney (Exeter, 1904), 197; Churchwardens’ Accounts ofAshburton, 1479–1580, ed. Alison Hanham (Devon and Cornwall Record Soc., newser., xv, Exeter, 1970), 138; The Churchwardens’ Accounts of St. Michael’s inBedwardine, Worcester, from 1539 to 1603, ed. J. Amphlett (Worcs. Hist. Soc.,Oxford, 1896), 39; Records of the Borough of Leicester, ed. Bateson et al., iii, 93;Memorials of the Goldsmiths’ Company, ed. W. S. Prideaux, 2 vols. (London,1896–7), i, 57; J. F. Wadmore, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Skinners ofLondon, Being the Guild or Fraternity of Corpus Christi (London, 1902), 86; Suffolk RO,Bury St Edmunds, C 12/3; BL, Add. MS 32243, fo. 80r; The Churchwardens’ Accountsof St Michael’s Church, Chagford, 1480–1600, ed. Francis Mardon Osborne (Chagford,1979), 197; Records of the Skinners of London, Edward I to James I, ed. John JamesLambert (London, 1933), 367.

91 Schnurmann, Kommerz und Klungel, 130.92 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes and Larkin, i, no. 213; 8 Eliz. I, c. 10.93 Walter, ‘Die osterreichischen Eibenholzmonopole’, 333–4; Holger Riesch, ‘Yew

Exploitation and Long-Bow Trade in the 16th Century’, Jl Soc. Archer-Antiquaries,xxxix (1996), 8–11; Schnurmann, Kommerz und Klungel, 131–47.


them ‘all other desyre to noughtye pastymes, as disynge, cardyng,and boouling’, and this was the logic of the intertwined cam-paigns against unlawful games and in favour of archery that wehave seen at Fordwich and elsewhere.94 But all we can measure isthe rate of prosecution for such offences, which rose and fell indifferent communities at different times under different socialand moral stimuli, so it seems impossible to say if gaming, oreven football, directly displaced archery in the hearts and leisurehours of Englishmen.95 Others blamed drama: a proclamation of1544 condemned plays and interludes for distracting idle youngmen from archery.96 One wonders whether those heartfelt op-ponents of both drama and dicing, the puritans, helped tofinish off archery with their insistence that Sunday afternoons— when more than a third of our accidents had happened —were for nothing but godly exercises; or perhaps new notions ofProtestant Englishness lessened the appeal of an identity rootedin victories over the French won by the longbow.97

As population pressure began to drive down real wages, it mayhave been that working longer hours stopped labouring peoplepractising archery. Ascham fed this too into his explanation:‘these two thinges, straytenesse of tyme, and euery man histrade of liuing, are the causes that so fewe men shotes’.98 Morerecent analysts have raised the parallel possibility that a workingpopulation less well nourished than in the golden age followingthe Black Death was simply incapable of the levels of activity andmuscle building needed to excel with the heaviest bows. The viewmay find some support from contemporary arguments that‘shepeherdes be but yll artchers’ or that the inflation-pinchedEnglish, without ‘Beeif, Mutton, Veale, to cheare their courage’would no longer be ‘valiaunt, stronge, sturdy and stowte, / toshoote, to wrastle, to doe anye mannys feate’ and thus to ‘defendethis owre noble Englande’.99 If Henry VIII tried but failed

94 Ascham, Toxophilus, sigs. Divr–Fiiiv.95 McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 209–13.96 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes and Larkin, i, no. 240.97 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700

(Oxford, 1994), 128–34, 143–6; Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of ProtestantEngland: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries(Basingstoke, 1988), ch. 1.

98 Ascham, Toxophilus, sig. Diiiv.99 Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 27–31, 405; Tudor Economic Documents, ed.

R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, 3 vols. (London, 1924), iii, 41, 55.


to inscribe his power on the bodies of his subjects throughcompulsory archery practice, rather than through the dismem-bering executions for treason which performed this function inthe vision of Michel Foucault, the fault may have lain as muchwith diet as with disobedience.100 Some contemporaries likewiseblamed enclosure for taking away the open spaces necessary forarchery practice, though it must be said that orders to open uppractice grounds around towns did not do much to stem thedecline.101

For those higher up the social scale perhaps we can blamethe Renaissance. Toxophilus’ opponent in Ascham’s debate,Philologus, argued with a superior air that ‘I thynke that a manw[ith] a bowe on his backe, and shaftes vnder hys girdell, is morefit to wayte vpon Robin Hoode, than vpon Apollo or the Muses’.Ascham was forced to counter that Euripides has Apollo himselfclaim ‘It is my wont alwaies my bowe with me to beare’ and that itwas thus entirely proper that the scholar should add archery to hisstudies.102 Some younger scholars at least seem to have followedhis advice, Richard Mulcaster joining leading Londoners in anarchery club known as ‘Prince Arthures Knights’ in the 1570s and1580s, so classical learning did not necessarily doom the bow.103

All these factors probably contributed in their different ways tothe decline of archery practice. Most convincing, however, is theargument that bows were simply displaced by handguns, as theywere in the rest of Europe, though more slowly and with moreheart-searching because of England’s distance from the greatbattlefields and the great arms industries of the Continent, andthe historic English attachment to archery. Here government andpeople found themselves caught between two waves of change inmilitary technology and tactics. The longbow had been central toEnglish success in what has been characterized as the ‘infantry

100 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1977edn), 47–57.

101 Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 68; Phillips, ‘Longbow and Hackbutt’, 585; FrankFreeman Foster, The Politics of Stability: A Portrait of the Rulers in Elizabethan London(London, 1977), 139; Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, i, 104; Middlesex CountyRecords, ed. Jeaffreson, i, 38.

102 Ascham, Toxophilus, sig. Civv. The relationship between English archery trad-itions and the tales of Robin Hood is, of course, a significant and controversial topic ofdebate in its own right.

103 H. D. Soar, ‘Prince Arthur’s Knights: Some Notes on a Sixteenth-CenturySociety of Archers’, Jl Soc. Archer-Antiquaries, xxxi (1988), 31–9.


revolution’ of the fourteenth century and thereby became asymbol of national pride, that ‘gift of God that He hath given tous to excel all other nations withal’, as Latimer called it.104 Now itwas becoming outdated by the changes attendant on the spread ofeffective gunpowder artillery and handguns, variously describedas the ‘gunpowder revolution’ or ‘military revolution’.105 Alreadyin 1528 a proclamation blamed the decline of archery on ‘thenewfanglenes and wanton pleasure that men now have in usingof crossbows and handguns’ and in the same year, perhaps echo-ing this official complaint, the holder of the Austrian yew-fellingmonopoly argued he should pay the Habsburgs lower fees be-cause the English were turning away from longbows to crossbowsand guns.106

Guns’ superiority lay in their penetration. Recent work hasargued that while longbows were very effective against unar-moured men or even those wearing thin mild-steel plate armour,they stood little chance against the quenched high-carbon steelarmour developed from the later fifteenth century. Here guns,with their vastly greater penetrative power, had a clear advan-tage: an arrow left the strongest archer’s bow with perhaps 150joules of kinetic energy; but a ball left a pistol with over 1,000joules, and left an arquebus with no less than 2,700.107 Macabreconfirmation for this can be found in the depth of woundscaused by arrows and gunshots in accidental death reports. Themean depth of recorded fatal arrow wounds was less than oneand a half inches; Nicholas Wyborne, hit by a descending arrowwhile lying flat on the ground next to a target, suffered the deep-est wound, at six inches.108 The mean for handgun wounds was

104 Clifford J. Rogers, ‘The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War’, inClifford J. Rogers (ed.), The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the MilitaryTransformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, 1995), 55–64; Works of HughLatimer, ed. Corrie, i, 197.

105 The literature on these changes is extensive, but see, for a classic statement,Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West,1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988); and for England, David Eltis, The Military Revolutionin Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 1995); James Raymond, Henry VIII’s MilitaryRevolution: The Armies of Sixteenth-Century Britain and Europe (London, 2007).

106 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes and Larkin, i, no. 121; Walter, ‘Dieosterreichischen Eibenholzmonopole’, 328 n.

107 Clifford J. Rogers, ‘Tactics and the Face of Battle’, in Frank Tallett and D. J. B.Trim (eds.), European Warfare, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 2010), 210; Phillips, ‘Long-bow and Hackbutt’, 579–81.

108 PRO, KB 9/629/244.


over six inches, the deepest ten, while other shots passed rightthrough the body or right through the head.109

It was disingenuous of the government to complain about therise of the gun, for, conscious of the need to keep up with contin-ental military change, it drove on its introduction even whileencouraging archery. Handguns were stockpiled first at Calaisfrom the 1470s and then at the Tower, to a total of nearly seventhousand by 1547.110 In 1537 the leaders of the royal gunneryestablishment from Sir Christopher Morris, master of the ord-nance, downwards, presided over the creation of a Dutch-styleshooting confraternity to encourage handgun practice, the Guildof St George, based at London but empowered to licenseEnglishmen anywhere to shoot handguns and crossbows as wellas longbows.111 By 1548 the king was asking York to find fifty menfor service in Scotland ‘suche as be unmaried and willing to lerento shute in a hagbutte’.112 No wonder the Privy Council wasadmitting by 1577 that the decline of archery might be attribut-able to people’s ‘imagining it to be of no use for service as they seethe caliver so much embraced at present’.113 The natural culmin-ation of this process came with the Council’s resolution of 1595 toexclude bowmen from the trained bands.114

Handguns did not displace bows all at once. Across the realmforeigners — not unreasonably, since they were forbidden by stat-ute from using longbows — and ports such as Dover, Hull andSouthampton, with their greater contacts with the Continent andstatutory licence to use guns for civic defence, seem to have led theway in their dissemination.115 The first fatal accident involving agun reported by a coroner to the King’s Bench took place atWelton, west of Hull, on 8 June 1519. A handgunner was shooting

109 PRO, KB 9/579/205, 627/604, 636/309.110 David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison: War and Military Service in England,

1436–1558 (Woodbridge, 2008), 122–3; Gervase Phillips, The Anglo-Scots Wars,1513–1550: A Military History (Woodbridge, 1999), 76.

111 G. Gould Walker, The Honourable Artillery Company, 1537–1947, 2nd edn(Aldershot, 1954), 1–5; ‘Ancient Archery and the Guild of St George’, Notes andQueries for Somerset and Dorset, xxiii (1940), 103–4; on Morris, see Raymond, HenryVIII’s Military Revolution, 164–79.

112 York Civic Records, ed. Raine, iv, 182.113 Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 66.114 Ibid., 171; Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 390–1.115 BL, Egerton MS 2093, fo. 29r; PRO, KB 9/479/89; Southampton RO, SC 5/3/1,

fos. 1r, 50r (I am grateful to Susan Hill of Southampton RO for her assistance with thisdocument, which is severely faded); SC 5/1/26, fo. 43r; SC 13/2/2; 6 Hen. VIII, c. 13.


at a mark on the side of a house and hit a woman who ran in frontof him. He was a French bookbinder known to the locals as PeterFranchman.116 At first some Englishmen, in contrast, were ap-parently unfamiliar with the new technology. At Hougham inLincolnshire in June 1539 John Wyntersall filled a handgunwith gunpowder and paper pellets, presumably to clean it, andthen put a spark from his match to the touch hole while one end ofthe gun was still pointing at his chest, with predictable results.117

The general musters of 1539 confirm the rarity of handguns inEngland — though admittedly those who owned them in contra-vention of the archery statutes may have been wise enough not toproduce them at musters — and their urban and alien associ-ations. Those few guns reported were held by townsfolk — inDorset, for example, one at Wareham, one at Melcombe Regis,one at Wimborne Minster, two at the port of Poole — and often byforeigners, as six of the eight at Chichester were.118

In the 1540s and 1550s, however, handguns spread dramatic-ally. After 1542 operations involving sieges and field fortifica-tions, well suited to firearms, dominated English warfare inFrance and Scotland. Meanwhile the longbow’s one great advan-tage over guns, its rapid rate of fire, was largely negated by themeagre size of the arrow stocks held by most English armies,fortifications and ships, enough by one calculation for aboutfive minutes’ shooting by each man.119 Two thousand out oftwenty-eight thousand English infantry on the 1544 invasion ofFrance were equipped with handguns, and the statutes againsttheir possession were relaxed to facilitate wartime shooting prac-tice.120 By the late 1550s, inland towns such as Bury St Edmunds,London, Norwich and Worcester were starting to equip thetroops they raised with handguns.121 In 1558 York’s newly

116 PRO, KB 9/479/89.117 PRO, KB 9/548/147.118 Dorset Tudor Muster Rolls, 1539, 1542, 1569, ed. T. L. Stoate (Bristol, 1978), 75,

102, 104–5, 125; Letters and Papers (Foreign and Domestic) of the Reign of Henry VIII,xiv, pt 1, no. 652 (M23).

119 Phillips, ‘Longbow and Hackbutt’, 578–83, 587; Jonathan Davies, ‘MilitaryArchery and the Inventory of King Henry VIII’, Jl Soc. Archer-Antiquaries, xliv(2001), 31–3.

120 Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 402; Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughesand Larkin, i, no. 271; iii, no. 225.5.

121 Suffolk RO, Bury St Edmunds, C 12/3; John Nichols, Illustrations of the Mannersand Expences of Antient Times in England, in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and SeventeenthCenturies (London, 1797), 223–4, 227; Welch, History of the Worshipful Company of


(cont. on p. 77)

established civic armoury included no guns, but by the early1560s the city was regularly supplying arquebusiers for thequeen’s service.122 By the musters of 1569 there were forty-ninearquebusiers living in Henley-on-Thames alone.123

Nor could guns be contained within armies or safe practiceareas. Concern about reckless shooting in public places surfacedrepeatedly in the 1540s, in a proclamation, a statute, an order ofLincoln’s Inn to its members and in Nicholas Udall’s play RalphRoister Doister.124 In coroners’ reports from that decade on weregularly find native-born people having mishaps with handguns.By 1575 such accidents were occurring in many parts of therealm, at first in the more prosperous Home Counties, Midlandsand South-West, and later even at Carlisle and in the NorthRiding of Yorkshire. Some were caused by target-shooting, butmore by the general use of handguns, for potting at crows, heronsand pigeons, for street theatre, and even for defence against burg-lars, when a misplaced flame might set them off as they lay,loaded, on the table.125

This pattern of dissemination — towns and more prosperousareas first, the countryside and more remote areas second — isjust what we would expect from European parallels. Dutch urbanshooting guilds switched fast from crossbows and longbows tohandguns from the 1480s onwards.126 In Francis I’s provinciallegions of the 1530s, half the Languedociens were expected to

(n. 121 cont.)

Pewterers of the City of London, i, 169, 176, 179, 193–4, 198, 201, 205; Wardens’Accounts of the Worshipful Company of Founders of the City of London, 1497–1681, ed.Guy Parsloe (London, 1964), 142; Grummitt, Calais Garrison, 173; WorcestershireRO, Worcester City Records A 14/1, fos. 69r–70r.

122 York Civic Records, ed. Raine, v, 188; vi, 15, 28–9, 60, 79–81.123 The Oxfordshire Muster Rolls, 1539, 1542, 1569, ed. Peter C. Beauchamp

(Oxfordshire Record Soc., lx, Oxford, 1996), 65.124 Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot, 1999), 176–7;

Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes and Larkin, i, no. 194; 2 & 3 Edw. VI, c. 14; TheRecords of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn: The Black Books, ed. W. P. Baildonet al., 6 vols. (London, 1897–2002), i, 272.

125 PRO, KB 9/562/71, 576/151, 579/205, 580/87, 588/167, 595(ii)/67, 597/82,599/158, 602/63, 602/75, 602/172, 625/324, 626/37, 627/202, 627/204, 629/240,636/309, 637/374, 985/84, 1012/15, 1013/186, 1014/199, 1014/213, 1110/unnum-bered; KB 8/18/127; Calendar of Nottinghamshire Coroners’ Inquests, ed. Hunnisett, no.255; Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1558–1603, ed. Hunnisett, nos. 95, 115, 146.

126 Paul Knevel, Burgers in het geweer: de schutterijen in Holland, 1550–1700(Hilversum, 1994), 28–30.


come armed with guns, but only one in ten of the Bretons.127

South German town militias tended to be well provided withfirearms, whereas musters in Hither Pomerania on the Balticcoast in the 1540s produced nearly five thousand men with onlyseventy arquebuses and forty other guns between them, a propor-tion nearly double that of the city and Ainsty of York in the samedecade but one-third that of Southampton in the 1550s and wellbehind most English counties by 1569.128

There were meant to be social limits to handgun ownership,presumably to inhibit poaching or revolt. The statutes that aimedto protect archery forbade ownership of firearms to those withincomes of less than £100.129 Whether the upper orders were infact any more to be trusted with the new technology than the oldremained an open question, as the young duke of Norfolk inad-vertently shot one of his servants through the head with a pistol in1557 as his horse stumbled on the way from Newington toTottenham.130 In any case, handguns moved rapidly down thesocial scale in spite of the statutes. The trend was aided by a priceincrease shallower than that of bows: guns in the 1550s and1560s, at about 8s. 3d. on average, were only 33 per cent moreexpensive than between 1510 and 1539.131 The weapons’ spreadwas also encouraged by their potential for hunting. Hunting with

127 Philippe Contamine, ‘La Premiere Modernite. Des guerres d’Italie aux guerresde religion: un nouvel art militaire’, in Andre Corvisier (ed.), Histoire militaire de laFrance, i, Des origines a 1715 (Paris, 1992), 251.

128 Helmut Schnitter, Volk und Landesdefension: Volksaufgebote, Defensionswerke,Landmilizen in den deutschen Territorien vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin,1977), 44, 49–54; York Civic Records, ed. Raine, iv, 172; Southampton RO, SC 5/3/1, fo. 1r; SC 13/2/2; Oxfordshire Muster Rolls, ed. Beauchamp, 65; Certificate of Mustersin the County of Somerset: Temp. Eliz. AD 1569, ed. Emanuel Green (Somerset RecordSoc., xx, London, 1904), 325; Dorset Tudor Muster Rolls, ed. Stoate, 165.

129 25 Hen. VIII, c. 17; 33 Hen. VIII, c. 6.130 Neville Williams, Thomas Howard: Fourth Duke of Norfolk (London, 1964), 33.131 Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars, 77; Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 402;

Durham Univ. Lib., CCB, B/31c/220204/4, fo. 115v; BL, Egerton MS 2093, fo.29r; Third Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, 262 (appendix);B. Howard Cunnington, Some Annals of the Borough of Devizes, 2 vols. (Devizes, 1925–6), i, 5–6; Wardens’ Accounts of the Worshipful Company of Founders of the City of London,ed. Parsloe, 142; HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of the Corporation of Beverley, liv, 178;The Boston Assembly Minutes, 1545–1575, ed. Peter Clark and Jennifer Clark (LincolnRecord Soc., lxxvii, Woodbridge, 1987), 32; Suffolk RO, Bury St Edmunds, C 12/3;Welch, History of the Worshipful Company of Pewterers of the City of London, i, 230;Pamela Maryfield, ‘Love as Brethren’: AQuincentennial History of the Coopers’ Company(London, 2000), 32; Jones, Butchers of London, 178; Records of the Worshipful Companyof Carpenters, ed. Marsh, iv, 115; Records of the Skinners of London, ed. Lambert, 367.


handguns was becoming a major problem by the years around1550, if Sir Edmund Bedingfield’s plaintive letter to the earl ofBath is to be believed. Bedingfield thought action was necessaryagainst

suche p[er]sons as daylie do shoote in handegonnes and beat at the fowlein ryvers and pyttes so as ther is no fowle that dare remayne in the cuntrye.A man disposed to have a flight w[ith] hawk[es] maye seeke tenn myles orhe fynde one coople of fowle to flye at wheare in all yeres past there shuldehave bene founde in the same places vc coople of fowle.

Sir Edmund had checked with the clerk of the peace, who toldhim he had no more than three people entered in his book aslicensed to shoot handguns in Norfolk despite being of inferiorsocial rank, but by the old knight’s estimation there must havebeen threescore men hunting fowl with guns daily and none ofthem worth more than £4 a year in land.132

Across the country in Ludlow a labourer, William ap Thomas,was fined 20s. in 1554 for shooting a handgun contrary to statute;he evidently did not learn his lesson, because in January 1557 hewas fined again for the same offence together with two othermen.133 The owners of the handguns recorded in accidents bythe 1550s and early 1560s, as handguns overtook longbows as acause of accidental death, included a yeoman, two tailors, aweaver and a cutler.134 Handguns had come to stay. A secondedition of Ascham’s Toxophilus appeared in 1571 and a third in1589, but by the 1570s in Sussex, handgun accidents outnum-bered archery accidents by four to one, and the locals were stat-istically more likely to die watching a sledge-hammer throwingcompetition than at the archery butts. The last recorded archeryaccident in the county came in 1575, but eleven more fatalitieswere caused by guns before the end of Elizabeth’s reign.135 InMiddlesex, similarly, the quarter sessions registered four acciden-tal deaths at archery practice between 1562 and 1567 and onemore in 1580, thereafter only accidents with guns.136 In 1570 theLondon Carpenters’ Company gave a sign of the times when it

132 Cambridge University Library, Hengrave MS 88, i, no. 126.133 Shropshire RO, LB 8/1/43/41, LB 8/1/45/13.134 PRO, KB 9/580/87, 595(ii)/67, 599/158, 602/63, 985/84.135 Sussex Coroners’ Inquests, 1558–1603, ed. Hunnisett, nos. 95, 115, 146, 152, 154,

162, 168, 318, 332, 333, 363, 370, 372, 374, 393, 444, 523, 555.136 Middlesex County Records, ed. Jeaffreson, i, 40–1, 47, 57–8, 58, 118, 168, 169,

182, 220.


paid 2d. ‘to the bowyer for mending a Caliver’.137 In 1572 Bristol,always so diligent with its butt-making, built itself a ‘house in themarsh . . . for practice of shooting with guns with bullets’, as thecrown and its local collaborators set out on their new struggle, notto train enough competent archers to defend the country withouta professional army, but to train enough gunners to do thesame.138

There are aspects of our story which the evidence does notallow us to investigate. The absence of coroners’ inquests fromthe King’s Bench records before the 1490s makes it impossible tomeasure the frequency of archery practice much earlier than thepoint at which contemporaries thought decline was already set-ting in. Indeed, we know little about the general level of archerybefore that point, as opposed to the competence of those servingin the armies of Edward III or Henry V. Kings had been com-plaining that archery was in decline ever since 1363, the bowyersof York were apparently decreasing in numbers and prosperityfrom about 1450, and the proportion of able archers in a raresurviving muster list of about 1480 roughly matches that for1522.139 So the decline of archery may have been even longerand steadier than the available sources allow us to see.

Nonetheless, it seems that we have underestimated the vi-brancy of archery practice as a pastime in early Tudor England.The vigour with which communities prepared for it and individ-uals carried it out, in particular as its decline was perhaps arrestedfor a time in the 1540s and 1550s, testifies to the power of the statethat commanded it. Central authorities showed their capacity tostimulate activity from local authorities and local authoritiesshowed their determination to spend money and administrativeeffort on the promotion of archery, albeit sometimes because itsuited the ambitions of local elites to promote social and gener-ational order. Equally, archery’s persistence suggests the inherentattractions of a sociable and competitive activity in fair weatherin the open air on days of rest from work. Its eventual decline

137 Records of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, ed. Marsh, iv, 233.138 Adams’s Chronicle of Bristol, ed. F. F. Fox (Bristol, 1910), 113; Boynton,

Elizabethan Militia, 113–17.139 Strickland and Hardy, Great Warbow, 381–2; Heather Swanson, Medieval Arti-

sans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), 101–2; Kingsford’sStonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483, ed. Christine Carpenter (Cambridge, 1996),352–3.


suggests the inability of legislative action to stem the tide of asocial change driven by interacting economic, dietary, intellec-tual, religious and technological factors, many of them recog-nized by Ascham; all the more so as military realities madegovernmental attitudes towards bow and gun increasingly schizo-phrenic, the first favoured for its moral and historic connotationsbut denigrated for its irrelevance to the modern battlefield, thesecond discouraged for its social disruptiveness, but prized for itsdeadly utility.

Merton College, Oxford Steven Gunn
