The Book of Archery
Complete History and Practice of the Art
The Book of Archery – the wisdom of our Ancestors has said “Speak well of Archers for your father shot well in a bow. Yet there is a hold upon your sympathies far more powerful than a thousand wise saws or modern instances, such as these – I mean the strong propensity of youth and age for recreations which unbend the mental faculties. while the body enjoys the exhilarating influence of sun and summer breeze, which tempt us to climb up the upward lawn, plunge into the deep rocky Glyn, wander over fern clad heaths, and wend our way through the shadowy, pathless woods.
These advantages are the archer’s; his are the glories of sea, earth and sky, with all its pleasures of the young and opening year; for his past time belongs to that fair season only, when, as the old forest glee has it.
For ages anterior to the Conquest, the Inhabitants of Britain held Archrty in little estimation, except as an appliance of sylvan sport, when her chieftain’s sought relief from the tedium of domestic tranquility, by warring upon the antlered denizens of the waste.
Besides a preference for other weapons the sportsman, necessarily habituated to a bow if feeble range, grew mistrustful of its powers in more serious contests, those mightier hunting’s where the game was man.