A classic book on the history of the longbow! ( )

An excellent history about an important weapon by an expert. The longbow has been mythologized, and sometime just lied about, but non-the-less it was a game-changer on the battlefield. Mr. Hardy's bow has even inspired revisionist rivals in the field of weapon research, but remains a seminal work.
I read the 1976 edition, and the review stands. ( )

This book, while more of a textbook and manual than anything, was absolutely helpful in my research of the Hundred Years War in which longbow men were highly sought after and greatly and effectively utilized to soundly defeat the French on many occasions. It beings with the basic history of archery all the way to the most recent uses of longbows and their wooden descendants. There are even some sections that describe how to make long bows with modern tools. Great and informative read. ( )

Archery and the longbow are the author's passion who is an actor by profession (appearing as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies). His own image, both painted and photographed, appears a few times too many in this otherwise splendid book that collects a lot of information about the English longbow. The author's love for the longbow and England results in a marked neglect of longbows when not in the hands of Englishmen and also underplays the relatively quick disappearance of the longbow as an effective weapon from the battlefield of the late 15th century.

The nostalgia for Crécy and Agincourt led the English Kings to amass huge collections of bows (some of whose wood was even imported from Switzerland) and arrows during the gunpowder age. Curiously, most of this armory bows have not survived to modern times. Recycling the wood must have been too attractive. Thus, knowledge about actual English longbows comes from the chance find of 172 bows from the Mary Rose, a sunken Tudor warship. ( )

Cornwell Introduction