Quite apart from what is regarded as definitive about long bows and Longbows, and the obvious contradiction in terms within the assertion, I am of the opinion that there is not a thread of genuine evidence that the average English military archer was ever equipped with long recurve ended bows in English military service or even in home service and lawful practice.
There are very occasional pictures depicting archers shooting long recurve ended bows in various liveries. Some of these may well be English mercenaries in service to other regimes, but equally, they may not be English mercenaries. The livery does not necessarily spell out who was wearing it in the picture. We just cannot be certain about this. There is just not the evidence which is anything more substantial than hints.
Daryl has referred to an extract from Mike Loades’ excellent and very pragmatic book entitled ‘Longbow’ were he refers to English mercenaries in the service of Burgundy. We do not know whether the bows depicted were of Burgundian origin and manufacture as standard Burgundian artillery or whether English archers came ready equipped with long recurve ended bows which were manufactured in England.
In regard to the use of long recurve ended bows, Mike Loades says on page 17 at the end of his first paragraph in the inset –“Without the material evidence of actual bows, it is hard to be certain.” That is the crux of the issue. We cannot be certain. We can only speculate.
I have some difficulty accepting Len’s assertion above that Mick’s bow IS Burgundian. From the very pictures I have seen, such as that on page 37 of Loades’ book, one can only say that Mick’s bow has some very modest similarities and that is all that can be said. If Mick’s bow IS Burgundian, did he deliberately set out with prior knowledge that he intended to build a Burgundian bow from whatever examples or, as is more likely from his post above, that he built a bow from something in his imagination drawn from the style of the English Longbow. By his own admission, the latter is the case. The only similarity I can see between his and the Loades’picture above of a Burgundian bow is that it is both long and also has some reflex in the outer limb greater than and commencing lower on the limb than what is shown in Loades’ picture.
There is nothing wrong with Mick’s bow. It is well made and apparently it shoots very well probably for reasons more closely related to what Daryl has pointed out about the mass of the Yew limbs. I do not consider that recurved outer limbs have anything to do with it and I do not believe that recurving the outer ends of bows made from wood has even a slight performance benefit despite the history of their considerable and widespread use in the first half of the 20th century. I will go into my reasoning shortly.
Mike Loades went on to suggest that even if long recurve ended bows may well have been given a trial, they seem to have been discarded for practical reasons of functional output versus manufacturing inputs, which would have included cost. I find this a more persuasive argument considering some experiments I have conducted on some of my all-wood static recurve ended bows compared to straight bows from the same manufacturer of the same nock to nock length and made from the same limb material. The experiment was to ascertain whether or not the recurved ends actually worked as in working recurves.
The bows tested were made by Ben Pearson in the 1940s. The static recurves were his model 502-R of 66 inches nock to nock measured along the back surface. The comparison was made with his model 502 bows which have the same width profile and length but lack only the recurved ends
- Straight ended 66” Ben Pearson bow with 1 ½” of set. Most of these bows in my collection had this amount of set. Only 3 or 4 out of 14 had tips which were behind the handle belly. The red line shows the amount of set.
- 535536F0EFBE455A9E986CF67797A64C.jpg (127.66 KiB) Viewed 5632 times
- Static recurve ended 66” Ben Pearson bow with 2 ½” of set. All such bows in my collection had similar or worse amounts of set shown by the red line.
- Locksley 50# static recurve_2a.jpg (180.53 KiB) Viewed 5632 times
Now, whilst these test bows are not ELBs and have rectangular sections, the fact of whether recurved ends in wood bows have performance benefits over straight ended bows is still justified for the reason that I have compared like with like within the test group.
All of the recurve ended bows tested had more severe recurves than the so-called ‘Burgundian’ bows.
At this point, I would like to point out a few basic wood bowmaking principles –
That the more of the bow limb which can be made to bend during the draw,
1. the more energy is stored in the limb for transmission to the arrow;
2. the more efficiently the bending load is distributed along the limb, and
3. the less likely the bow is to take a set.
In the test bows above, according to my Ben Pearson catalogues from the period (1941 and 1942), all these bows left the factory straight, that is, the recurves had straight limbs up to the start of the recurves and whose nocks were 2 inches forward of the main limb. The straight ended bows were straight out to the tips with the nocks in line with the back of the handle.
As I purchased all these bows, it was very noticeable that the recurves had far more set than the straight ended bows. Averagely, the recurves had 2 ½ inches of set and the straight ended bows had between 1 ¼ and 1 ¾ inches of set. Even with this small difference, the recurved bows had lost a far greater percentage of their nominal draw weight.
(NB: Pearson marked the nominal draw weight under the handle grip wrapping only prior to finishing the bow. He did not mark anything externally on the bows until later in the 1940s. I have no clear evidence, but I suspect that all details were marked on the box ends in which the bows came. This suspicion is based on examples of other contemporary manufacturer’s box labels that I have seen.)
The nocks of the recurves aligned with or behind the back of the handle toward the belly. The nocks of the straight ended bows aligned from 1 ¼ and 1 ¾ inches behind the back of the handle. At first intuition, it would seem that the straight bows had taken more set than the recurves based on their tip alignment with the back of the handle, but this is not the case.
In fact, the recurved bows had moved their tips up to 3 inches behind their initial position at their nominated draw weight. This observation required investigation as to why. So, the following is the experiment I conducted.
I traced a line along the last part of the back surface of the recurved bows using the length of an A4 sheet – one for each of the 6 bows tested. The outline of the recurves of each of the test bows had a datum position 10 inches in from the line of the bow’s tip (see picture below). The datum position was marked on each bow.
- Limb-recurve-profile.jpg (12.5 KiB) Viewed 5632 times
The recurves did not change shape at all. So, it can fairly be said that the recurves do not work, hence being static.
Compared to the recurves which were exactly the same nock to nock length as the straight ended bows, meant that the recurves had far less working limb than the recurves by as much as 4 inches at each end effectively giving them the functional limb length of a 58 inch bow (66 inches minus 8 inches of recurves).
So, a straight ended 66 inch bow of 50lbs has far less bending load on it than a 66 inch static recurved bow. Furthermore, the static recurves has string nocks which are 2 inches forward of the back of the bow which then increases the bending load on the limb even further.
This phenomenon of having the tips further forward than a straight ended bow effectively produces the bending load of a much shorter bow instead of a nominal 66 inch bow. So, unless you have a bow whose limbs are made from a prodigiously compression and tension resistant material, you MUST expect far greater string follow and consequent loss of draw weight and cast compared to a straight ended bow and this would explain what I was observing in the test bows.
Even moderately recurved tips have the same effect albeit to a lesser degree. And this is why the static recurves I have in my collection have such severe set compared to the straight ended bows.
So, the amount of outer limb dedicated to reflex which does not unwind and hence store energy has no benefit in a normal wood bow which is why I strongly disagree with Mike Loades’ assertion to the contrary in the inset on page 17 of his book where he says –
It isn’t a more efficient spring because of the limitations of the material from which the spring is made, and secondly, at least the same potential benefit could be got from a shorter straight ended bow.“The advantage of such a design is that the recurved shape makes the limbs work faster, the tips springing forward like striking snakes, which in turn moves the string faster. This results in an arrow speed that would otherwise have required a bow of greater draw weight to initiate. Quite simply, it is a more efficient spring.”
The only benefit from static recurves on wood bow are if the bow is short, then the string angle at the drawing fingers is less. By putting recurved ends in an ELB, all the other set-inducing disadvantages of static recurves still apply because of the loading on the wood, including Yew.
Also, the single benefit of static recurves toward shallow string angles is hardly a benefit on a bow which is already prodigiously long with an already very shallow string angle at the drawing fingers. If you want to keep the amount of bending load on the limbs down to the equivalent of a straight ended bow, then you MUST increase its length by the amount of the static recurves over and above the standard straight ended length. By doing this, however, you are only increasing outer limb mass unnecessarily to negative advantage once again – a classic example of the law of diminishing returns.
So, coming back to the question of static recurved ends on ELBs, I find it difficult to believe that the English bowmakers would have wasted very much time or effort in effecting recurves on the ends of English made bows when it would very quickly become apparent that there was no benefit to a bow’s cast and a significant amount of additional work in bending the tips into recurves – difficult as that would have been in a limb of narrow and deep section compared to the much later shallow section flatbows of the modern era.
My concluding argument is from the practical viewpoint that genuine improvements tend to remain with us in whatever field of human endeavour.
If there was any genuine benefit in the use of static recurves on ELBs, most certainly we would have seen them on the Mary Rose bows which were made at the end of the English military archery period. Not one of them can be described as being recurved and none of the writers on these bows has described any of them as such despite a few having bent ends consistent with having a weight upon them whilst submerged.
Clearly, if ever the English toyed with the idea at any time, it was discarded in practice as of no benefit. What continental armies preferred and supplied to English mercenaries is another question altogether. But it has little or nothing to do with the equipping of English military archers or the development and/or use of recurve ended ELBs.
I do not believe they ever existed because there is no reason to support any form of performance benefit in a field where utility is paramount.
