Archery lessons

The second to last day Kris and I were in Scotland, we visited Stirling Castle. Magnificent!

One of the events of the day was two men dressed as medieval warriors: a foot soldier and an archer. The archer's name was Hugh. He was quite entertaining. More than just talking briefly about archery, he gave lots of history and entertaining sidenotes. Here are the ones Kris and I wrote down to remember.

• Pick a quarrel

  Crossbow archers would carry their arrows in a quarrel, which is a four-sided leather pouch that hung off their belt. As the archers headed off to the battlefield, they would pick up their allotment of arrows that were made by arrow makers. The allotment was in delivered in the quarrel, so archers would go off to "pick a quarrel."

• Longbow archer pay

  English longbow archers started training at age 5, and practiced pretty much every day. Good archers were able to keep three in the air. In particular, the timing was such that as one arrow was arriving at its target, another was in the air on its way, while a third was being cocked on the bow. Another quality of a good archer was the ability to watch the air for incoming, return arrows.

  Longbow archers were paid 2 pence a day vs the 1 pence a day regular foot soldiers were paid. The double pay was the source of considerable animosity between archers and foot soldiers, as archers typically stood back 400 yards or so from the hand-to-hand battle - considered a safe distance where one doesn't need to "risk his life" (at least, not as much).

  If an archer was captured in battle, often his pulling fingers were cut off. As most archers could find employment only as a soldier, many would return to the lines as a regular foot soldier. Regular foot soldiers would see the missing fingers and be socially hostile to the new soldier.

• Two finger salute

  As mentioned above in the previous section, longbow archers' fingers were cut off when the archers were captured in battle. They were then often released. Cutting off the pulling fingers was pretty close to a living death sentence.

  In some battles, when the enemy was defeated, the English longbowmen would hold up two fingers in an aggressive gesture (the two finger salute), so show the enemy they still hand their fingers (and would fight again another day).

• Kiss it goodbye

  When pulling back an arrow in the bow, with a bow of proper strength, the farthest back an archer should need to pull the arrow is back to the mouth. As the back of the arrow (the feathers) is next to the archer's mouth, where he could kiss it goodbye.

• Keep it under your hat

  Archers were paid by how efficient they were. One way to see how many arrows were shot, is to count the number of bowstrings that broke. If you broke a large number, obviously you shot a lot of arrows. Often, if an archer noticed the archer next to him had a large number of broken bowstrings, he might cut his bowstring, so that he also gets paid for the extra strings.

  To prevent fellow archers from seeing how many bowstrings an archer had (thus could use), an archer would hide extra strings under his hat, taking them out only when needed. So, each would "keep it under his hat."

• Cock up

  Typical arrows have three feathers. When they are cocked in the bow and released, one or more of the arrows will graze the bowstring if the arrow isn't aligned correctly. In order to help the archer (who is firing very rapidly and doesn't have much time to think) align the arrow correctly, one feather is different than the other two (say, black with two white ones). The colored arrow indicating direction is called the cock. The proper alignment is the cock feather pointing up, or "cock up".

Entertaining lessons. Thanks, Hugh!