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FourWinds 10943 posts |
May 11, 2005, 09:00
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Being a one time toxophilist myself I know a fair bit about what a bowman would give his right arm for :-) I've shot a yew bow and they're bloody hard to pull. The average non-compound bow (if you can find one these days) has a pulling strain of around 35-40 lbs. Yew long bows easily exceed 60lbs - some are up to 80 or 90 lbs. There aren't many folks around today that could even think of pulling one of those. One thing you would not have wanted to do was pick a fight with the right arm of a Welsh bowman! Please don't make it personal and attack my every post (you've done it a few times now) - it ain't worth it, is it? Try reading the whole web page and take note of the 'too many knots in British yew trees' bit and that a tax was levied. The tax forcing all merchants to carry yew staves back into Britain is well documented - hey, they even mentioned it on Time Team the once, what more proof could you want? :-) I never said British bowmen were crap, just the British yews weren't that well suited to the job. We all know the bowmen were the best (but then we wrote history didn't we).
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PeterH 1180 posts |
May 11, 2005, 09:28
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Irish yews are a sport of the bog standard yew - Taxus baccata. They are all descended from two trees found on a limestone crag in Fermanagh in the 1760s. They became popular in cultivation because they were straighter and resembled funereal cypresses and could be topiarised. They certainly didn't exist during the longbow era, but possibly modern bowyers may prefer them to the ordinary yew. Whether "English yew was crap for making bows" or not is hardly a valid point - that WAS the yew wood that was used and with deadly affect by the largely Welsh archers. Yews in the wild were cut and cropped for bows, those in churchyards were left alone. Some wild yews were over cropped and died. Other wild yews were removed when livestock was put into fields where they grew. That is why large venerable yews are almost always found in churchyards today. Looking at place and field names with the yew element - only 6% are near churches so it is a false assumptuion to believe that they were always associated with churches and pagan sites etc. Oldest yews that I know of are three in Powys - Defynnog, Discoed and Llanfaredd. All exceed 35 feet in girth giving an estimated age of 4,500 years. Yews do not have a single trunk so it is not possible to establih age by counting tree rings. Source : Flora Britannica
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nigelswift 8112 posts |
May 11, 2005, 10:11
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"Looking at place and field names with the yew element - only 6% are near churches so it is a false assumptuion to believe that they were always associated with churches and pagan sites etc." Since this shatters what I've always assumed was definite fact I'm desperately trying to find a reason to disbelieve it.... The above reasoning, and the idea that only yews in churchyards were spared from being cut down, make good sense, yet I'm left with the feeling they're not conclusive. Churches are associated with pagan sites. Old yews are associated with churches. So maybe....? Especially as - "dead" yews can regenerate with a new individual, so in a way they're almost immortal. A yew "could" imply a yew on that site for even longer than the age of the oldest quoted yews.
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FourWinds 10943 posts |
May 11, 2005, 10:31
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This is why the Greeks and Romans associated the yew with resurection.
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FourWinds 10943 posts |
May 11, 2005, 10:33
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>> that WAS the yew wood that was used and with deadly affect by the largely Welsh archers. Can I ask you to prove that statement, please? There are no surviving examples of ye olde yew bow and the tax of imported yew staves does point to foreign yew being used in very large quantities. British yew may well have been used but it seems it was not necessarily the preferred wood.
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moss 2897 posts |
May 11, 2005, 10:53
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Gleanings from "meeting with remarkable trees" There are 50 gargantuan (over 30 feet in circumference) found in British churchyards. With this sort of diameter they can be presumed to be over 1000 years old, because of our damp climate their heartwood rots away leaving cavernous openings. The Tandridge yew - Surrey. Evidence found by archaeos that a saxon vault under the west wall, a relic of the first church, was deliberately skewed perhaps to avoid the roots. Could be that it went back to "celtic" times. As a xtian symbol, and probably a celtic symbol as well, the tree faces two ways. Firstly it encompasses life as something that goes on for ever symbolising immortality. but it also represents death with its poisonous berries. Its warlike symbolism in that its good for spears and bows I leave to others.. Also of course its evergreen, as is the holly and the ivy. A visit by G.Cambrensis in 1172; "Yews are more frequently to be found in this country than in any others I have visited; but you will find them principally in old cemeteries and sacred places, where they are planted in ancient times by the hands of holy men" or, of course the yews had pagan origins Theres one in irish celtic lit. the Yew of Ross, probably a tribal tree.
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follow that cow 277 posts |
May 11, 2005, 11:11
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>There are no surviving examples of ye olde yew bow< I seem to recall that there were a number of longbows found within the wreck of the Mary Rose. As to the type or origin of the wood that they were made from, 'don't have the foggiest. http://www.rickard.karoo.net/articles/weapons_longbow.htm p.s. earlier in the thread someone said something about the flesh of the Yew berries not being poisonous...... I would get a second opion on that first before having some for supper ;-) FTC
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PeterH 1180 posts |
May 11, 2005, 11:32
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Yes - I agree. Yews can be regarded almost as immortal as, in a sense, single yew trees are not really single yew trees - they are cloned trunks spreading out in an ever widening circle. Same thing is true of much younger coppiced ash trees in managed woodland. Trees were cut to near ground level for poles . Then the tree regenerated from the base. Every few years, the new poles were harvested. Un-coppiced or un-pollarded trees died through sheer weight of branches, but the coppiced trees just kept sending up new trunks in a widening hollow circle. Impossible to date through tree ring growth because the original tree trunk has long rotted away. Don't be too dismayed at the statememt that only 6% of yew place names are near churches - that was a figure from a survey made in Cheshire. - there is still a very strong link with places of worship. Important thing to consider is that the impressive old yew we see today was not like that 2000 years ago. It was just a thin sapling and no one would venerate that. Unless of course, as you say, another elderly yew grew nearby. The argument is very old - Gilbert White considered it in 1789 with regard to the yew at Selborne (fell in the gale of 1990) and in 1658, Sir Thomas Browne wrote " Whether the planting of yewe in Churchyards, hold not its originall from the ancient Funerall rites, or as an Embleme of Resurrection from its perpetual verdure, may almost admit conjecture." Any tree or shrub with red berries seems to attract Christian mythos because of the drops of blood on the Crown of Thorns
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PeterH 1180 posts |
May 11, 2005, 11:43
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I can't get your link to link, but I'm sure you are correct. Yew was not just used for longbows though. The oldest wooden artefact found in Britain is the 250,OOO year old yew spear point found at Clacton - that's Palaeolithic from the Hoxnian inter-glacial. I believe that even older ones have been found in Germany
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StoneLifter 1594 posts |
May 11, 2005, 11:52
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Thanks, FW, for that link to the Longbow. Anyone remember Zen and the Art of Archery ? (No, I don't either). All parts of the yew are poisonous - they seem to stop the heart 'just like that'.
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