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Updated: June 8, 2025
"I will venture a rover with you, or try long-butts or hoyles," said old Johnston. "To my mind the long-bow is a better weapon than the arbalest, but it may be ill for me to prove it." "So I think," quoth the other with a sneer. He drew his moulinet from his girdle, and fixing it to the windlass, he drew back the powerful double cord until it had clicked into the catch.
It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder.
She dropped it in an instant, and leaning from the window sent forth once more that cry of love and alarm, which rang through the stillness of night with all the power of her young throat: "Arthur!" She turned, and sped down the stairs, and across the lawn like an arrow shot for life or death from a long-bow.
The old English long-bow perhaps is a good one; but it is not so powerful as the Turkish. That has immense power. They say it will carry an arrow from four hundred and fifty to five hundred yards. Mine perhaps is not a first-rate one, nor am I what I call a skilful archer; but I can reach beyond three hundred yards though that is an immense distance.
We have had many revelations from the interior, but nothing quite like this. Most histories are valuable in proportion to the truthfulness of the narrator, but Mrs. Melek's story owes a large show of its interest to her obvious tension of the long-bow.
Presently a number of men come from the village, each with a long-bow and some arrows. It is a holiday, and the local Society of Archers is going to spend the afternoon shooting for prizes. One of them takes his stand close to the foot of the pole, fits an arrow on his bowstring, aims steadily, and shoots straight up. It needs a good deal of strength, as the bow is stiff to bend.
The lists were then closed, and the royal party retired to partake of refreshments; after which they proceeded to the butts erected in the broad mead at the north of the castle, where the Duke of Shoreditch and his companions shot a well-contested match with the long-bow.
At all events they are capable of such astonishing feats that if you merely relate the truth about them you will be sure to get credit in England for telling fibs like poor Mungo Park, who was laughed at all his life for a notorious drawer of the long-bow, although there never was a more truthful man."
Bayle, explaining the difference between testimony and argument, uses this laconic simile, "Testimony is like the shot of a long-bow, which owes its efficacy to the force of the shooter; argument is like the shot of the cross-bow, equally forcible, whether discharged by a dwarf or a giant." The arbalest is said by some writers to be of Italian origin.
The greater use of infantry after the reign of Edward I. caused a greater demand for the peasant; and the use of the cheap long-bow gave him a value in war. There were five thousand Welsh archers and spearmen on the field of Cressy. In these and other ways the serf was becoming free. You would expect a gradual, almost unconscious struggle, between the serf and his lord for political power.
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