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Originally Posted by Hotspur
A wiki article?  |
. Sure. If it has a reference, it gets you into secondary reference works. Since I don't currently have a university library system to draw on, and I didn't want to take more than three minutes finding out if you were probably right (which you were, according to Wikipedia), it doesn't need more.
Not good enough for writing a paper, but that's not the point here.
As for the longbow reference, I've seen pictures and reconstructions of the original meso/neolithic bows in other (primary) literature (most readily accessible in <i>The Traditional Bowyer's Bible</i> series, but the wiki link is a good start. Elm isn't yew, but it's a perfectly good bow wood if the bow is properly designed, and it was widely used in Europe.
English longbows were designed in part to maximize the number of bow staves they could get from a yew log (primary literature), as well as to maximize their weapon potential, and that is where the narrow, D-shaped cross section of the English long bow comes from.
F