ANCIENT AND MIDDLE AGE 

 SHOOTING 



IT is difficult to know where to start an account of the early 

 history of shooting. The long-bow was used in deer 

 shooting, as also was the cross-bow, and if we may believe the 

 early artists and I do not see why we should deer running 

 before hounds and horses were shot from the saddle with 

 the cross-bow, and the arrow went in behind the neck and out 

 at the throat. The artists of old were obviously as imaginative 

 as Royal Academicians when it came to sport. For instance, 

 nearly every picture of a woodcock or snipe on the wing, in- 

 cluding one of J. W. M. Turner's, puts the beak of the bird 

 sticking out in front, on the principle of " follow your nose " ; 

 but every woodcock and snipe treats even Turner with contempt, 

 and hangs its beak in spite of the greatest master of English 

 landscape. Mr. Thorburn makes no such mistake, but even he 

 has made a couple of cock partridges court one another ; and it 

 is really very difficult to believe in the accuracy of artists such 

 as the delineators of the Bayeux Tapestry, where five men may 

 be seen applauding Harold's coronation and with only eight 

 legs between them, most of them clearly disconnected with 

 the men. 



When, therefore, we see drawings of the fourteenth and fifteenth 

 century people engaged in smiting down flying birds with an 

 arrow from a cross-bow, we may be permitted to believe that 

 an ideal has been drawn, and that most of those who tried to 

 kill birds in flight in time learnt to prefer the falcon or the 

 net. Even stricken deer that the Middle Ages artists show 

 us shot through the neck from behind must have had totally 



