You know how to shoot that thing?

Archery.
Can't write about the history of Medieval England without archery. The nation's been at it's most warlike when archery has been a fashionable pastime. You can argue the point (and please do, that's what the comment box is for) that England's success in medieval overseas conflict went into decline as the bow itself declined in popularity.
Young people stopped shooting, and so didn't grow up to keep shooting all over Christendom. 

With archery popular at the same time that the early Robin Hood ballads were popular it's no surprise that the outlaws were depicted as archers. These were songs and plays for pubs. If the sport of the day had been football, they would have been footballers.
In the ballads, archery is used more as a sporting contest than deadly combat. Hood rarely shoots it out with an enemy, and rarely kills with the bow. Most of the time Hood and his opponent set a wand in the ground and shoot at this, with the winner being he that shoots closest.
Violence, when it happens in the poems is usually settled with swords.

Now personally, I've ignored this 'sportsmanlike' behaviour in my own novel. Looking at it with an ex-copper's set of eyes, the average bloke in 12C England had a social (and later, legal) obligation to practice with a bow, and often, a need to steal to feed himself.
It's the equivalent of every single person being trained to shoot, and having a gun in their home, but not enough money to eat.
Of course those bows are going to get used for violence.

side note - The practice of shooting at wands is pretty common in the ballads. It bears a striking similarity to 'clout archery'; shooting at pennants still practiced today.

I'm interested in the idea that archery is on the rise again. 
It's getting popular.
It's attracting attention.
Lets just keep it sportsmanlike though, eh?


As a parting shot, take a look at http://markstretton.blogspot.co.uk/ (see the note in the sidebar) on differences between modern shooting technique and medieval stance and draw, and the incredible 200lb draw bow!

-Tom

World Poetry Day - One from the Vault.

You would be forgiven for thinking that Additional MS. 27879 doesn't sound like an inspiring title for anything to do with World Poetry Day.

It refers to a near forgotten manuscript in the British Library's vast collection, just 520 or so pages (many of them worn so thin as to be illegible).
Known as the Percy folio, it contains about two hundred stories and ballads, written in the mid 1600's, describing tales and events stretching back to the mid 12th century.

They tell of Robin Hood.

Despite many of the original pages having been damaged through faulty binding, the ravages of time, or their original owner using them to light fires with, not all the stories were lost. fragments of 8 ballads remained, and it was these that formed the basis for the later, lighter, and altogether more pleasant stories of the 1883 collection by American scholar Francis James Child.
One of the original surviving ballads deals with the death of Robin Hood at what was probably Kirklees Priory, but notably, the death scene is one of the damaged pages, ending halfway through Robin's Plea to Little John:

And sett my bright sword at my head,
Mine arrowes at my feete,
And lay my yew-bow by my side,
My <and there is no more>

Though we're faced with the absence of a confirmed kill in the ballad ( though one is added later by Child) the prose does at least lead us to Kirklees priory.
It's there in the grounds, on a grave where we can find our verse for #WorldPoetryDay.


"Ne'er an archer was as him so good
And people called him Robin Hood.
Such Outlaws as he and his men
Will England never see again."