Replica Warbows

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Replica Warbows

Category Information

What is a warbow? What should it be made of? What weight should it be? Etc.

Basically a war bow is an English Longbow designed to bend "full compass" as described by Roger Ascham and found on the Mary Rose. Traditionally, the bow should be made from European yew, typically around 100lbs at 30"..

Very little English yew is ever likely to make a good bow as most English Yew grows too quickly making it too brittle and with too much thickness of sapwood to make good bows.

Contrary to popular belief not all European Yew is suitable for making bows either. The wood that will make the best bows will fit the following criteria.

It will have come from an area where the growing conditions are poor in nutrients, typically at a high altitude, such that the wood will have grown slowly creating a hard and dense material with a lot of growth rings to the inch.

It will have come from the bole of a tree with a diameter not less than 8 - 10 inches and not more than about 20 inches.

Smaller diameter wood will be riddled with knots and pins and the properties of the wood will be quite rubbery. This means that you will be able to make a bow, up to quite high weights, but the performance of the bow will be poor and it will not shoot many arrows before it becomes quite soggy. This is because young, immature trees need to be flexible to bend with the wind.

As the trees grown bigger the wood becomes harder and more "bend resistant" such that it makes crisper and faster shooting bows, at a price, this wood is now that bit more brittle and less rubbery so you now have a good shooting bow but it is not a tough bow.

The next stage of growth of the tree takes the wood into an even more brittle state such that it is very hard and tough but does not bend too far before it will break.

So there you have it, Yew was without doubt the best wood available for making bows in the middle ages, but it was never a long lived item and certainly had it's problems and limitations. It is these very limitations that suggest that some of the claims for draw weights of War Bows were well above what the materials could have coped with, the evidense tends to support weights up to about 100lbs at 30" - there is no firm evidence to suggest that bows could have been any heavier. Finding materials that will handle weights up to 100lbs reliably is hard enough, add 50% more to the weight and it gets a whole lot harder to find suitable materials to work with.

All Yew bows can be made safer and longer lasting if you back them with Hickory, ideally the Hickory needs to be worked to a single growth ring, like a self bow back. Most Yew bows fail in tension when the sapwood lets go so the thin hickory backing can both prevent this and also provide a much tougher and more consistent bow. This will also enable wood, that is not suitable for making a self bow, to still make a reasonably good laminated bow.

However, yew is a softwood and no matter what you do with it Yew bows at the higher weights have a limited working life. It is entirely possible to have "shot out" a 100lb yew bow in under a year with regular use. It has been said that a medieval war bow in daily use could be "shot out" in about a month and the life expectancy in battle might be no more than 2 - 3 dozen arrows.

The problem is to produce heavy "war bows" that can be expected to perform year after year. The only way that we can do this is to use materials that were not available in medieval times and to make the bow using Hickory and Osage laminates, preferably with the Hickory worked to a single growth ring like a self bow. These bows are both tough and fast, they will become faster as they become more supple with use and will retain their weight and performance for many years.

Some "replica war bows" have been made using Lemonwood as a belly wood in the bow. This too can have it's problems as there is very little Lemonwood that will make a satisfactory bow at weights much over 60lbs, so whilst it is relatively cheap and readily available it is far from ideal in this application.

The above is meant to be a general guide to help people to avoid some of the difficulties associated with acquiring a good replica war bow that will both perform well and last.