It is a thing of beauty, this English longbow. Curved like the ocean horizon... and so powerful it can shoot an arrow fearsomely enough to bring down a stag.

As I draw the string back and feel the tension I am transported, for a nano-second, back to the days of Robin Hood.

Am I being daft? “No,” chuckles Martin Young. A bowyer of 20 years experience, he’s quite used to this reaction, both in little children and those old enough to know better, because it’s what he felt when he first began.

“I started shooting about 20 years ago,” he says. “I was a computer programmer at the time and saw an evening class for modern archery so I went along.”

A self-confessed history obsessive, he asked how he could get to shoot a longbow but was told he’d have to teach himself. “So I bought myself a longbow and that’s what I did.” After a few more years he decided to have a crack at making his own bow. “Once you’ve made your first bow you can’t stop,” he says.

You can use elm or laburnum but he works in yew, the ancient, mysterious tree of the pagans and, because of its strength and versatility, the number one choice for the bowyers of yore.

“Yew is an amazing tree, it regenerates itself,” he says, explaining how it forms a natural hedge around the trunk so that when the parent tree dies, new yews are born.

“There’s an old bowyer’s saying that a bow is a stick, nine-tenths broken,” he says. “Look at the way it bends,” he says, demonstrating. “If you did that to a paperclip it would break.”

It takes three solid days to make a bow and the hardest thing, says Martin, is coming by the wood. “Yew is scarce; I’ve tried giving my card to tree-surgeons but when I arrive at a fallen yew I usually find they have cut it up into logs,” he says.

Once you’ve acquired the stuff you have to season it for around three years before marking out your bow and then starting the laborious process of shaping it. And even then, your trouble isn’t over.

“If it doesn’t go right you can end up with a pile of sawdust, there doesn’t seem to be anything in between,” he says. But if it survives all this and the stretching process and doesn’t snap, you will have yourself a true piece of workmanship and craft. Although, as Martin points out, there’s even more technology in the arrow than the bow, which has to be made precisely for you to fire, just as the bow must be made to your own height.

Because of his interest in the subject, Martin has been allowed to handle ancient bows, both in museums in Somerset and at the new Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth.

He demonstrates his art at Highcliffe Castle and the Druitt Hall and is looking for a barn or woodland where he can set up more sessions. He also takes a talk into schools.

“I dress up in medieval costume and it’s wonderful when little children ask if I am Robin Hood’s brother,” he says.

But if Robin Hood or, indeed, the great Henry V returned to Martin’s humble workshop, would they recognise what he was doing there?

“They would,” he says. And they would probably recognise a lot more. “It still is statute that every man between the age of 16 and 60 should practise at the butts (archery targets) every holiday and Sunday because the law never been repealed,” says Martin.

He shoots as often as he can although, as he is keen to point out, it is unlawful to shoot animals with a bow and arrow in this land.

Another thing that would please Robin and Henry is the way the plethora of longbow and archery phrases from their time have woven themselves so firmly into the national lexicon.

“Rule of thumb refers to the distance between the string and the middle of the bow,” he says. “It should be the length measured by your fist and thumb.”

The word ‘underhand’ is a longbowman’s. “It means a sneaky shot, under your hand not over, as normal.”

To be the ‘butt’ of a joke is an archery term. “It means you are literally the target.” The word ‘quarrel’ is from archery and so is the phrase ‘brace yourself’; you place a brace on your arm to stop the string hitting it.

And if you have ever wondered where the phrase highly strung comes from, then look no further.

“A bow that is highly strung is a bow in danger of snapping,” says Martin.

His garden is too short for me to shoot an arrow safely so I content myself with giving the longbow another satisfying twang. How amazing that one simple action can make you feel so much of your country’s history.

  • longbowlegacy.co.uk