Evidence OTHER than MR Bows of 120+ bows?

[Josh B]

I should imagine that one reason the nth american indigenous peoples used lighter bow than european medievalists is because thier enemies did not have body armour..just clothing/uniforms.  shirts/bare torsos.  even my 40 pound ash bow with a 5/16th arrow and a sharp point would do damage.

You are undoubtedly correct.  I would imagine that a good blacksmith to make armor would have been  hard to find in pre-contact America!  Lol!  I shouldn't have even brought it up as it has absolutely no bearing on the OP.  I'm easily sidetracked I guess.  My bad!  Josh

[Atlatlista]

50-60 pounds though is not wholly unrepresentative of military bows from many cultures other than England though, so I may content myself with that.

Which cultures would those be? Records, estimates, and reconstructions from Turkey to China suggest 120-180lbs for infantry bows and 80-120+lbs for cavalry bows. While 50-60lb bows surely saw action from time to time, I don't know of any source that considers them acceptable for military use. To me, such composite bow draw weights offer strong supporting evidence that English archers commonly used 150+lb bows.

Regarding long-distance shooting, both Fourquevaux and Smythe - two sixteenth-century military writers - indicated the advantages of engaging at closer than maximum range.

That's the problem though - most of the data you're referencing is from estimates based on non-functional examples. Most extant ethnographic bows from Persia, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan fall in the 50-60 pound range. And Native American bows of the eastern woodlands, plains, Pacific Northwest and so on fall into this range as well. Inuit war bows may well have been lighter.

[Atlatlista]

Just went back to the data for these things, as I wanted to look at the ethnographic examples I could find, and I actually managed a little free time this week (which I didn't think would happen).

You're right in that early Chinese exams required a 168 pound draw from an infantry archer and 90 pounds or so from a mounted archer.  However, according to Stephen Selby, that was a test probably using a special bow to test the archer's strength, not as a standard draw weight for a bow in battle.  In battle, as the archer would be expected to shoot many arrows, draw weights varied considerably.  Ming and Qing accounts list draw weights from 36-96 pounds.  So, the low end of Ming war bows would have been as low as 36#.

Mongolian ethnographic bows tend to run up to 80 or so pounds, but not more than that.  Turkish war bows have been measured at draw weights around 70-80 pounds.

So, I think there is a great deal of variability.  50-60 may be a bit on the low side for a warbow, depending on the culture, I'll grant, but it's very representative of bows from cultures that didn't differentiate between war and hunting bows.

[WillS]

Is there any way of finding out whether different types of archery were used within these results? By that I mean - 36# as a drawweight is not going to do a whole heap of damage to somebody, especially if the arrow has any kind of heavy, forged point with enough mass to penetrate flesh/armour/leather etc. Would these very light bows be used as "harrassing" bows, dropping arrows from a very long way away to provoke, annoy and confuse approaching armies/enemies? 

It's why I think it's vital to always consider arrows when discussing war bows - the arrow is what does all the damage, and the bow has only one job - get it to where it's needed with enough grunt to do it's job when it arrives.  An arrow suitable for a 36# bow is going to have to be tiny, thin and light to go anywhere at all, and with no mass it can't do much damage. 

Unless it's for insanely close range...

I think 36# is too light to even be legal for hunting in the states isn't it? Not sure what good it's going to do against a human wearing either armour or just leather/layered linen for example!

[Heffalump]

"Ming and Qing accounts list draw weights from 36-96 pounds"! 

36# for a warbow, seriously?  ......I'll make a point of doing a bit of research on this when I'm back in Shanghai next Spring. I can only assume these would have been for indoor Winter practise with suction-cup tipped arrows to encourage the servants to move a bit faster! 

[Del the cat]

with suction-cup tipped arrows 

These points are rubbery!
Jorry good! I tell blacksmith!
Del
(Oppologies to the Chinese community )

[Atlatlista]

"Ming and Qing accounts list draw weights from 36-96 pounds"! 

36# for a warbow, seriously?  ......I'll make a point of doing a bit of research on this when I'm back in Shanghai next Spring. I can only assume these would have been for indoor Winter practise with suction-cup tipped arrows to encourage the servants to move a bit faster! 

I thought it was strange too, but it was quoted on ATARN from Selby's book on Chinese archery.  He posted in the thread and didn't dispute the numbers, so I can only assume it wasn't a misquote, not having Selby's book myself.  If anybody has better data, I'm always happy to hear it.  I don't have an agenda for these things, I just want the facts.

[llkinak]

I think 36# is too light to even be legal for hunting in the states isn't it?

Quite so, Will, at least for some states.  For example, Alaska requires a minimum of 40 pounds for some animals like wolf, black tail deer, wolverine, caribou, etc, and minimum of 50 for others like moose, brown bear and other bigger critters.  I'm not sure what other state regulations are.  36#s seems needlessly light to me as well, especially for warfare, but I have no doubt it could injure / kill unarmored humans.

[Atlatlista]

I think 36# is too light to even be legal for hunting in the states isn't it?

Quite so, Will, at least for some states.  For example, Alaska requires a minimum of 40 pounds for some animals like wolf, black tail deer, wolverine, caribou, etc, and minimum of 50 for others like moose, brown bear and other bigger critters.  I'm not sure what other state regulations are.  36#s seems needlessly light to me as well, especially for warfare, but I have no doubt it could injure / kill unarmored humans.

Yeah, it is a bizarrely light number, and it comes from a translation of Chinese measurement systems from the 16th and 17th centuries.  So, there's always that to consider as well.  Nonetheless, I think that we often view the past as monolithic, in terms of bow draw weights and other things as well.  The Mary Rose bows varied by 40 pounds in draw weight, and all indications are that they were more or less general-issue weapons.  So, I think we should expect quite a lot of variation in bow weights, be they for war or hunting in the pre-modern period.  Especially when we consider how hard it would have been to get really accurate draw weight measurements in the absence of modern spring-based scale systems.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

The evidence for the numbers I listed is pretty overwhelming. What Ming source lists a 36lb bow? A very late (1637) Ming text says that strong archers draw 155-160lbs, average archers 125-140lbs, and weak archers around 80lbs. Selby's book lists many accounts of infantry bows at 147-167lbs and cavalry bows at 92-119lbs. Not all of these come from military exams, but such exams shouldn't be discounted. Adam Karpowicz's careful measurements and replicas of extant Turkish bows indicate an average draw weight of 111lbs. Similarly, a replica of a Scythian bow drew 120lbs. Karpowicz and Sebly identify 80-140lbs as common weights for composite bows in general. In the Qing era, about 80lbs was consider the minimum for effective cavalry use. Earlier accounts of Manchu bows give 106lbs as the average. Etc. Some soldiers in the eighteenth century couldn't pass examination with 80lb bows, but this wasn't considered acceptable. Some sources did encourage using a soft bow for mounted military usage, but this usually meant something 80-100lbs rather than extreme weights (up to nearly 240lbs) some folks would draw.

[toomanyknots]

but this usually meant something 80-100lbs rather than extreme weights (up to nearly 240lbs) some folks would draw.

I thought the 240 ish bows were only used as military strength tests, etc. 240 lb is dam near ridiculous for an actual usable bow.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

One archer supposedly used such a bow to win a contest in the eighteenth century. I don't know of any recorded use in war.

[toomanyknots]

One archer supposedly used such a bow to win a contest in the eighteenth century. I don't know of any recorded use in war.

Wow!

[Atlatlista]

The evidence for the numbers I listed is pretty overwhelming. What Ming source lists a 36lb bow? A very late (1637) Ming text says that strong archers draw 155-160lbs, average archers 125-140lbs, and weak archers around 80lbs. Selby's book lists many accounts of infantry bows at 147-167lbs and cavalry bows at 92-119lbs. Not all of these come from military exams, but such exams shouldn't be discounted. Adam Karpowicz's careful measurements and replicas of extant Turkish bows indicate an average draw weight of 111lbs. Similarly, a replica of a Scythian bow drew 120lbs. Karpowicz and Sebly identify 80-140lbs as common weights for composite bows in general. In the Qing era, about 80lbs was consider the minimum for effective cavalry use. Earlier accounts of Manchu bows give 106lbs as the average. Etc. Some soldiers in the eighteenth century couldn't pass examination with 80lb bows, but this wasn't considered acceptable. Some sources did encourage using a soft bow for mounted military usage, but this usually meant something 80-100lbs rather than extreme weights (up to nearly 240lbs) some folks would draw.

To be fair, I like Adam Karpowicz's work, but on several threads he has shown a consistent bias towards higher bow weights in his calculations from the actual result on bows where dimensions and known draw weight are available.  I think there is a certain bias in the warbow community towards trumpeting the heaviest possible draw weights and the heaviest possible interpretations of bows.  This may be a justifiable reaction to previous theories (and some extant theories) that heavy bows didn't exist, but it has its own problems.  In addition, the sample size of known warbows from periods for which they were actually used is ludicrously small. 

The textual evidence is valuable, but I just quoted a source that says 36 pounds as a minimum and you refuse to believe it, but I'm expected to take at face value your quotations of much heavier draw weights as "overwhelming evidence."  The source I'm quoting by the way is the following:

"However, in the Ming dynasty (1368--1644 AD), Li Chengfen's manual mentions draw weights in the range 3--8 li (36--96#), with exceptional archers shooting 9--10 li (108--120#) [paragraphs 11C9, 11C11]. Also, in the Qing Dynasty (1644--1911 AD), we see draw weights ranging from 30 kg (66#) to 8 li (104#) [p. 346, paragraph 12D1, footnote 27 on p. 352] --- and I'm not including the strength testing bows. "  http://atarn.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1946

Personally, I'm not sure why our competing ideas can't both be right.  People, and bows, would have had great variability, and quite light bows are still capable of killing.  Not everyone was focused on penetrating plate armor.  I mean, Chinese sources also list zhugenu as being military weapons, and we all know what light draw weights they have.

If you throw in the extant ethnographic evidence for societies that didn't have a differentiation between hunting and war bows, you find a huge number of bows with draw weights in the 50-70 pound range.  This is quite a lot of societies covering quite a lot of the world, and these bows were certainly also used for warfare.

So, on the sum of things, I don't think there's anything inherently ridiculous about 50-60 pound bows being used in the context of military archery from pre-modern periods (certainly nothing meriting scoffing lord of the rings references).  Clearly, it's not a good baseline for medieval English archery, and it's on the light side for Asiatic archery as well, but it certainly fits with the evidence we have for ethnographic contexts of unsegmented hunter-gatherer societies, Native American contexts (both North and South America), African contexts, and Island Southeast Asian contexts, and it fits within the range of textual accounts of Chinese archery, ethnographic examples of extant Mongolian bows, and extant Japanese bows.

[WillS]

I'm sure everybody's already seen this, but hopefully it adds something to the discussion.

If you consider that archers would have been trained from a fairly young age if they lived in a location/era where warfare could be won with a bow, I don't think it's at all unreasonable that 200lbs was an achievable, and possibly average draw weight.  Here's "that" now famous video of Joe Gibbs (age 28) shooting six heavy arrows pretty damn easily from a 170lb warbow.  Bear in mind Joe hasn't been shooting a particularly long time (11 years I think he said) and certainly hasn't been pushed into training for warfare which would probably give you a kick up the arse to use heavier bows, so if he can achieve this then I think 240lbs for a trained, hardened warrior isn't at all crazy. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-2KLuAH4GY&feature=c4-overview&list=UUgkVHUxltoZ_uoNUFlJ_B7A

Mark Stretton of course has successfully shot 3 arrows in succession from a 202lb warbow, so adding 38lbs with years and years of training plus the pressure of warfare and it all seems pretty logical.  I know nobody's really disputing that it's true, but it does put the idea of a 36lb "warbow" into perspective - that just doesn't make any sense!