Palmerston Forts - Part 4 - The Royal Armouries Museum

A J Summersgill | December 15, 2005  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

ARCHERY CONTEST

And so, on to the Archery exhibition! I really struck lucky with this, since I had arrived at Fort Nelson on a whim, imagine my delight to find that there were large guns being fired, as well as these chaps giving a most impressive Archery demonstration. To the left, you can see that crowd of people arranged behind the Archers as they demonstrate their skills. There were a number of targets, some regular, others made of plate armour or chainmail.

Here’s a Crossbowman reloading his weapon, although I’m not sure if the microphone is a genuine medieval one or not.

What you can see here is a "race" between a Longbowman and a Crossbowman to see who could fire the most number of shots in a minute.

The result was that the Longbowman fired 19 times, the Crossbowman only 5, and that was a good rate of fire for a Crossbow, so I won’t be buying any of those. Mind you, it takes 4 times as long to train a Longbowman and the Crossbow has marginally more penetrative power, but there’s not a lot between them for accuracy.

Here’s one of the targets having been plastered with arrows from the chap on the right.

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