2010/11/01 by Steven Gunn · 1 citation
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Mechanics and Biomechanics Studies #Historical and Literary Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtq029
openalex publication_date 2010/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In 1545 Roger Ascham, humanist scholar and educationalist, published Toxophilus, a dialogue in which an enthusiast for the longbow expounds to a sceptic the many benefits of archery for personal development and national defence. Ascham was worried that archery practice was in catastrophic decline. He claimed that in the great town where he set his dialogue, ‘there be a thousande good mens bodies, yet scarse x [tha]t vseth any great shoting’.1 Ascham’s concern was neither idiosyncratic nor novel, but how justified was it? And if archery was in decline, how accurate was Ascham’s diagnosis of the causes? Concern to maintain archery went right to the top of English society and dated back to at least 1363, when the first of a succession of ordinances and parliamentary statutes had commanded that Englishmen should spend their Sundays and holidays not in pointless amusements such as football, bowls, tennis and dice, but in shooting at the butts.2 By the mid fifteenth century it was accepted by political writers such as Sir John Fortescue and George Ashby that national security depended upon the populace being ‘much exercised in shooting’, something to which ‘By law every man should be compeled’.3 Henry VII and Henry VIII defended the longbow with statutes banning the possession of crossbows and handguns by the lower orders; they promoted it with further statutes ordering every householder to keep bows, not only for himself, but for his servants and children, and commanding every adult and adolescent male to use them.4