content_output-037_2 (Q6015): Difference between revisions

seventeen knights and three hundred archers, once sustained the charge of the whole of the combined Turkish and Saracen army, some thousands strong. It is also recorded that four English archers landed near a besieged town on the French coast, changed the fortunes of battle, and brought about the rout of the French army. But if the bow was bad, the hand-gun was much worse. Henry VIII., who was erratic in legislation, granted a charter to the Guild of St. George in 1537 authorising its members to practise with every kind of artillery—bows, cross-bows, and hand-guns alike—almost the same year that he forbade guns entirely, and made the possession of a cross-bow a finable offence. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth Sir John Smith, a general of much experience, stated that the bow was the superior of the hand-gun, and although he was taken up sharply by Mr. W. Barwick, Gent., he stuck to his contention. “I will never doubt to adventure my life,” he writes, “or many lives (if I had them), amongst 8,000 archers, complete, well chosen and appointed, and therewithal provided and furnished with great store of sheaves of arrows, as also a good overplus of bows and bow-strings, against 20,000 of the best harquebusiers and musketeers there are in Christendom.”