Re: Archery

[Gene Bonar <gbonar@auspex.com>]

Poster: Gene Bonar <gbonar@auspex.com>

At 01:57 PM 6/9/98 -0400, Janine H Sutter wrote:
>Greetings!  We are teaching a short history of Archery class on Friday to a
>group of kids aged 8-17.  Could anyone with any good, gross stories please
>e-mail them to me?  Also any interesting tid-bits.  Thanks, Kari Kyst

How about anatomical grossness.  A English noble man when commenting on how
the archers would fire their arrows off the hand mentioned that the archers
got thick hard calouses.  Where as most American bows have a shelf on which
to rest the arrow, English bows do not.  Off the hand means that they would
grab the bow and then rest the arrow on their hand.  After thousands of
arrows being shot this way the fletching would cause heavy calouses.  Often
the archers would take a knife and cut gooves in the calouses in which to
rest the arrow.  

Archilogical remains have shown that archers of the period were
hunch-backed.  Decades of pulling the heavy bows built the muscles and the
corisponding bones in the shoulder to the point that the archer would have
had one shoulder decidedly bigger than the other.

I leave it to you tell this two point in more gross terms.

Go in peace, 

Gene Bonar                               Auspex Systems 
919.461.2221 (voice)                  TSE, Cary, NC
919.319.9910 (fax)           gbonar@auspex.com
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