@WillS: Itīs a very interesting hint, that there are experiments with 30" arrows now, which show that 30" seems to be the best draw lenght for Mary Rose bows. Do 30" arrows have a higher velocity or a better penetration than 32" arrows? How do the light weight 28" arrows perform?
It always seemed very odd to me that most warbow archers now use longer arrows than in the 15th and 16th century. Recently I read an interesting german study on body hights in earlyer periods. The average body hight of a man in the 16th century in the southern Germany and northern Tyrol would have been about 167 cm, people from northern Germany and England were about 171 cm tall. Having only facts like these, people from today would assume shorter draw lengths for archers in earlyer periods. But interestingly, previous people often had different body proportions. Their legs were often shorter but, the upper body was just as big as today. I even read somewhere that the arms were as long as today or sometimes even longer. The different body proportions come from hard physical work during the age of growth.
