Readinfg For Agincourt

I've read up a bit more about traditional archery, and it gets more and more appealing.

In the last few years, there has been a huge revival of old style, non-compound bows, often asian style recurves, and true traditionals like English and North American longbows. My first foray, long ago, involved a compound bow, a 1960's-70s innovation which by all the numbers should be superior; you can hold a 70 lb shot with about 40 lbs of pull, for example, and new sights and balances make them tremendously accurate and fairly fast.

But somehow, they kind of suck. The book I'm reading suggests that people tend to abandon compounds as a hobby unless they're hunting.

Arrows would be also more powerful if you put rockets in shafts. You can even get scopes. Effective, but this is all sort of loud, heavy, unaesthetic and lame, a sort of Republican archery. If you're going to attach a bunch of techno-stuff, why not use a rifle? A visit yesterday to a right-wing archery shop confirmed that problem - I have no tolerance for hunting foppery.

A lot of it has to do with the aiming of a traditional bow, which is fundamentally intuitive rather than mechanical process (raise your hand if you never read Zen and the Art of Archery. )

Basic stuff - the real longbow is a little tougher to use than a recurve, but is often described as the most satisfying. The set of choices is a true "primitive", often called a selfbow, made in the ancient way with horn, and a single piece of wood taking advantage of a section with the heartwood on one side and sapwood on the other. Modern methods include laminating with fiberglass and wood, and require little "tuning".

Primary criteria - the bow should match one's "draw" usually somewhere between 28-30 inches . Bows are left handed or right-handed, and so is your eye. Test this by looking with both eyes at a distant object, pointing at it, and closing one eye. If your finger is still "touching" the object, the open eye is your preferred side. Finally, don't overdue draw strength - 50-55lb bows of good quality can actually shoot as fast as heavier bows- the extreme 100 or over pound monsters are great if you have been training all your life to defeat french armor.

The final thought is jus the nature of it - one of the simple yet finely made and sophisticated wood objects made by humans, which is part of my recent attraction to the violin. Plastic tends to depress me.