whereof she will write herself, and pray you to send her more bows and arrows, which, I pray you, do not, both for that she lacketh none, and because I would not have you accessary to the destruction of your said warren.”
Many similar notices of the choice of archery as a ladies’ pastime occur in illustration of England’s fashions two centuries ago. Sir Francis Leake writes, in 1605, to the same grim old Earl of Shrewsbury, thanking him for sending “a verie greatte and fatte stagge, the wellcomer being stryken by yor. ryghte honorable ladie’s hande, and he shall be merrilie eaten at the assises.” He adds, that his “balde bucke” lives still to wait the Earl and Countess’s visit: only this he begs, that my lady “doe not hitt hym through the nose, to the marring of his white face. Howbeit, I knoe her ladyshipp takes pity of my bucks, since the last time it pleased her to take the travail to shoot at them. I am afraid that my honorable ladies, my Lady Alathia and my Lady Cavendish, will command their arrow heads to be very sharp; yet I charitably trust such good ladies will be pitiful also,” &c.[1]
London in the 16th and 17th centuries had many famous bowmen amongst her citizens, as might be presumed in so large a population and with so many pleasant, suburban green pastures, easily accessible, and expressly set apart for its practice.
When Clerkenwell Church was being rebuilt (1791) contemporary archers manifested their respect for Sir William Wood, an old marshall of the Finsbury Archers, by expending a considerable sum in the re-embellishment and removal of his monument from the outside of the old to the interior of the new building; and the epitaph still survives to tell us—
Sir William Wood lies very near this stone,
In’s time, in archery excelled by none.
Few were his equals, and this noble art
Has suffered now in its most tender part;
Long did he live the honour of the bow,
And his great age to that alone did owe.
Queen Catherine, consort to Charles II., presented him with a large and splendid silver badge, now in possession of the Royal Toxophilites, Regent’s Park. The tradition is, that the king, at a grand parade of bowmen in 1669, seeing an arrow remarkably well aimed, inquired who the archer was, and immediately knighted him.
These same Finsbury Archers, a division of the Artillery Company, at the beginning of the present century, had still, by Royal grant, the privilege of exercising in all the beautiful meadows, which, in the memory of one or two still surviving citizens, extended, without a single intrusion of brick and mortar, from the present site of Finsbury Square up to Islington village. Time was when, on the least show of building there, the London ’prentices, raising their well-understood watchword, “Axes and spades! Axes and spades!” rushed forward, bearing down all opposition, and speedily levelled dykes, hedges, and enclosures, obstructive to the manly votaries of the English longbow.
So late as 1786, the Artillery Company marched their body of pioneers across the disputed fields. Finding a field enclosed with a brick wall by Messrs. Walker and Ward, proprietors of a lead mill, they commenced an unceremonious attack thereon. The lead merchants pleaded ignorance of the company’s right, and promised complete redress; so one of the archers’ division then present was ordered to shoot an arrow over the wall in assertion of the company’s right, and then passed on to deal as summarily with other delinquents. A cowkeeper named Pittfield had put up some sort of fence, and, in doing so, one of the archers’ stationary marks was removed; him they obliged to replace the butt and inscribe it, “Pittfield’s Repentance,”—well remembered by many at the present day.
A singular occurrence, which fell out in these fields in the reign of Queen Mary, led to the foundation of Lady Owen’s Almshouses and Schools in Islington parish. One lovely Midsummer eve the London Archers were assembled in great force in all the open pastures around the village. On the same spot where the charity was erected, there sat a woman milking a cow. The Lady Owen, a maiden gentlewoman living hard by, strolling about with her maid-servant, observed the dairy-woman, and “had a mind to try the cow’s paps, whether she could milk,” which she did; and as she rose from the stool, a random arrow passed through the crown of her steeple-fashioned hat; startled and alarmed, but grateful to the Almighty power that had saved her harmless, she, on reflection, vowed that should she ever live to be a lady, she would erect something on the very spot commemorative of this signal deliverance from a painful death. The result was a school for thirty boys, and ten almshouses, built originally with a cluster of iron arrows surmounting the roof.[2]
We have spoken at large and done ample justice to the foregone and modern race of English bowmen. Let us not overlook our valiant brothers of the Cymri, whose archers