Showing posts tagged as: Battle of Hastings 1066
Give it Your Best William Tell: The Crossbow through History
Obscure origins: Like so many things pertaining to the dark realms of antiquity it can’t be said definitively when the crossbow came into existence…at some point between the 7th to 5th centuries BC, the consensus of opinion says. What is pretty much settled is that it first appeared as a combat weapon in China. The Chinese employed it to good effect during the Warring States period (c.475 – 221 BC). Crossbowmen of this period comprised between 30 to 50 per cent of standing Chinese armies. The weapon was still popular during the Han Dynasty (late 3rd century BC to AD 220) but it’s popularity diminished after the Hans lost power, possibly due to the introduction of more resilient heavy cavalry under the succeeding Six Dynasties.
The crossbow in Europe, decline and reemergence: From ancient China the crossbow spread to Europe’s early civilisations. Its use was recorded in a battle at Syracuse (Sicily) as early as 397BC. The ancient Greeks were responsible for several early iterations of the crossbow namely the gastraphetes, a hand-held crossbow invented before 400BC, and the ballista, a small assault weapon capable of firing both stones and bolts, which the Romans copied and modified as a composite catapult-crossbow called a scorpio. The scorpio was lethally effective, offering marksman-like precision of its projectiles. The cheiroballistra or maniballista was another Roman variant on the crossbow with specific application as a siege engine. After the fall of Rome the crossbow fell out of use in the West until the 10th to 11th centuries AD when it was revived. The French used crossbows in siege warfare and they were in use during the epochal Battle of Hastings in England in 1066. France’s iconic heroine Joan of Arc was wounded by an English crossbowman in an attempted siege and the famous Plantagenet warrior-king of England, Richard the Lionheart, was killed by a bolt from a crossbow. The crossbow attached considerable prestige especially in England, so much so that only knights were permitted to own and use the weapon in war.
Crossbow or siege engine? As iron-based crossbows were improved and made more powerful and elaborate, the concept of the crossbow starts to merge with that of the torsion-powered siege engine (the former requiring only one man to work it while the latter needed several men). Certainly medieval sources seem to have conflated the two…different authors writing on the Crusader wars for instance have described the ballista alternately as a crossbow or a siege engine [Stuart Ellis-Gorman, The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King (2022)].
Evolution of medieval crossbows: In the Middle Ages the arbalest was popular in Europe. This was a decided technical advance in crossbows, improved by having a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string. Arbalests were larger and heavier weapons with metal-tipped bolts replacing the earlier wood-bolted crossbows, thus achieving devastating impact against the armour of the enemy. By the 13th century further technological improvements in the use of crossbows came with the advent of winches and various spanning mechanisms such as winch pulleys, cord pulleys, gaffles, cranequins, and screws [‘Medieval Crossbow’, Medieval Britain, http://medievalbritain.com]. The crossbow increasingly evolved into a defensive weapon, a composite crossbow–catapult of sorts, used to defend castles during sieges and favoured for its longer range capacity.
Crossbow versus longbow? Which weapon was more effective in medieval warfare situations? There is not a straightforward answer to this question because the two lethal projectiles had different strengths and advantages over each other. The (English) longbow had a flexibility and portability edge over the more clunky crossbow which need time (and sometimes assistance) to load. The crossbow however was more accurate including at distances in honing in on the intended target (with a range of up to 300m). The longbow having simpler parts was cheaper to manufacture and where it had clear advantage over the crossbow was in its frequency of shots. In the time it took the crossbowman to launch two or at most three bolts at the enemy, the longbowman could propel 10 to 12 arrows. The crossbow though perceptibly slower to load and much heavier to carry, required appreciably less strength to operate…it’s locking mechanism allowed the crossbowman to handle stronger draw weight so able to hold the bolt for longer with significantly less physical strain, which translated into better precision (‘Medieval Crossbow’). Another plus for the crossbow was ease of use, it required minimal training cf. the traditional bow which took years of training to master. The downside for the longbow in battle was that it couldn’t penetrate medieval armour as the heavier bolts could do. This didn’t seem to be a problem in the two most famous battles of the 100 Years War—Crecy and Agincourt—where the English bowmen triumphed completely over the numerically superior French and mercenary crossbowmen (and cavalry) [‘A quick history of the English longbow’, Notes from the U.K., 17-Jan-2025, www.notesfromtheuk.com].
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The crossbow reaches its obsolescence point: By the 16th century the crossbow had seen its best days and was being supplanted by gunpowder weaponry – muskets, cannons, guns. Firearms had greater range, faster reload times and an overall firepower that crossbows could not begin to match. The final fling for the crossbow as a weapon of choice in war occurred in 1644 at the Battle of Tippermuir in Scotland (English Civil War).
Endnote: Crossbow sellers’ greatest marketeer: Hovering at the intersection of history, myth and popular culture is the heroic legendary figure most popularly associated with deadeye expertise in the crossbow caper and a talent for shooting apples off his own son’s head, William Tell. Elevated by Swiss folklore as a symbol of the struggle for liberation from the tyrannical Austrians, baby boomers—opera buffs aside—will associate the mythical hero William Tell with the 1958–59 British television series The Adventures of William Tell in which Tell (played by Conrad Phillips) is portrayed as a sort of Robin Hood clone but with a different kind of bow and the Swiss Alps rather than Sherwood Forest for backdrop𖤓.
𖤓 a nexus not coincidental, ‘William Tell’ was created to exploit the success of another highly popular ITV show of the Fifties The Adventures of Robin Hood. ‘Tell’ followed the earlier series’ familiar formula: a brave citizen turned outsider valiantly leading the resistance on behalf of the oppressed masses against a unredeemable evil tyrant
A Doomsayers’ Day Out: The Manic Panic of 1910 over a Passing Celestial Event
We take our leave of the year of Corona, 2020 and enter a new, who-knows-what-will-bring year. With the renewed intensity of the 2nd wave pandemic across the globe, we’ve seen echoes of a return to the panic-buying and manic hoarding of household essentials that characterised the middle months of 2020. But of course there is panic and there is panic! Covid-19 doesn’t hold a candle to the doom-cringing that accompanied the approach of Halley’s Comet to Planet Earth in 1910.
Astronomer Edmond Halley set the whole phenomena of comet prediction in motion back in the early 18th century when, using Newton’s laws of gravity and motion, he determined the periodicity of the recurring comet that came to bear his own name. Halley calculated its return to Earth occurring every 74 to 79 years, marking the first time that science, wresting control from the astrologers and prophets, predicted a future occurrence in nature❆ (prior to Halley astronomers viewed the periodic appearance of the comet as distinct and separate occurrences) [‘Apocalypse postponed: How Earth survived Halley’s comet in 1910’, (Stuart Clark), The Guardian, 20-Dec-2012, www.theguardian.com; ‘Halley’s Comet: Facts about the most famous comet’, (Elizabeth Howell), Space.com, (2017), www.space.com/].
Talking up planetary peril With Halley’s Comet due to return in 1910, in February of that year the Yerkes Observatory undertook spectroscopic analysis and announced that there was cyanide (poison gas) in the tail of the approaching comet. When he became aware of this, French astronomer Camille Flammarion observed that the comet “could impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life all life on the planet”. The “Yellow Press” of the world seized on this, sensationalising the claim (the Comet was depicted as “the evil eye of the sky”). Flammarion’s comment and the alarmist reporting generated widespread public fear and hysteria, triggering all manner of drastic actions in response to the Comet’s imminent arrival. Some people in despair of impending doom went on dangerous alcoholic binges, one person in Hungary even suicided convinced of the probability of global immolation. In America, forebodings of doom accorded with a particular interpretation of the Bible in the Midwest and Rockies states and prompted intemperate reactions to the Comet (farmers selling off all their property, slaughtering their livestock, etc) [‘Halley’s Comet: Topics in Chronicling America’, Library of Congress Research Guides, www.guides.loc.gov/; ‘Memories of Halley’s Comet (1910) – Group Oral History Interview’, SCARC, Oregon State University, www.scarc.library.oregonstate.edu].
⤵ 1910 Comet over Gary, Indiana
Altering nature and the environment Elsewhere the (irrational) fear of a huge ball of toxic gas hurtling towards Earth at 190,000 km per hour led some folk to wildly predict dire consequences for the planet – in France the River Seine would be flooded, it was said, it would cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and so on [‘Halley’s Comet, Covid-19, and the history of “miracle” anti-comet remedies’, (Sylvain Chaty), Astronomy, 09-Oct-2020, www.astronomy.com/; ‘Fantasically Wrong: That Time People Thought a Comet Would Gas Us All to Death’, (Matt Simon), Wired, 01-Jul-2015, www.wired.com/].
In China the comet kerfuffle contributed to the social and political unrest that culminated in the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, which brought to a close the reign of the last Chinese emperor [James Hutson, Chinese Life in the Tibetan Foothills, (1921)].
⤴ Postcard, 1910 Comet (Source: www.sciencesource.com)
Art anticipates life Interestingly, just four years earlier, pioneering science-fiction novelist HG Wells had provided what many, over-stimulated by the Comet’s presence, saw as a different omen. Wells’ novel In the Days of the Comet pictured a “green trailing trail” plummeting inexorably to Earth…the only difference being that the destruction that the socialist Wells’ comet was going to inflict on the world was on the “voracious system of capitalism” [’The Doom of the World’, (Vaughan Yarwood), New Zealand Geographic, www.nzgeo.com/].
The impending cataclysm brings out the fraudsters Right on cue with the diffusion of hysteria was the emergence of charlatans and scammers peddling ”sure-fire” remedies to counteract the devastating effects of Halley’s Comet’s impact with Earth (cf. the Donald Trump-endorsed bleach and other quackery claiming to be an antidote to Covid-19). in 1910 there were ‘miracle’ anti-comet pills (comprising sugar and quinine) and a cure-all “Halley’s Comet elixir” (Chaty). Just as Coronavirus 2020 prompted a run on toilet paper and hand sanitiser in the supermarkets, people started panic-buying gas masks while some flocked to their churches to seek divine intervention to save them from the Comet [‘The Halley’s Comet Fuss of 1910’, (Jacob vanderSluys), Jacob vanderSluys, 18-Aug-2020, wwe.jacobvsndersluys.medium.com].
⤵ 1986 Comet (Image: NASA)
As things transpired the reality turned out to be something of an anti-climax…Halley’s Comet safely passed by Earth, missing it by at least 400,000 kilometres (as it had done previously every 75-76 years for millennia!)✧ and normality returned to everyday life across the globe (Chaty).
⤵ Bayeux Tapestry depicting 1066 Comet 
Footnote: All down to Halley’s Comet Coincidences occurring during the periodic passage of the Comet has provided fertile ground for doomsayers. Edward VII’s death in May 1910 during the period Halley’s Comet was visible, was ‘proof’ to many of the Comet’s ‘paranormal’ power to wreak havoc and destruction on the Earth♉︎. Similarly, it was noted that author Mark Twain’s lifespan encompassed the exact duration between the 1835 and the 1910 comets. People in 1066 saw the passage of Halley’s Comet as a foreboding sign…for English king, Harold II, this premonition preceded his loss and death in the Battle of Hastings later in that year. The Great Comet of 1680 facilitated a scientific breakthrough, in this year German astronomer Gottfried Kirch was the first to sight Halley’s Comet through a telescope.
⤴ 1680 Comet over Rotterdam (Lieve Verschuier)
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the next perihelion of Halley’s Comet is predicted for 2061
……………………………………………………………… ❆ Unfortunately Halley himself didn’t live long enough to witness the next cycle of his eponymous comet (1758)
✧ subsequent scientific testing confirmed that the tail of the Comet contained no toxic gas
♉︎ In Julius Caesar Shakespeare wrote, “when beggars die there are no comets seen, The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”