  Ever since a hairy primitive first picked up a stone and threw it, man has tried to find better and better ways to strike from a safe distance. The devices which he has produced for this purpose have been many and varied, yet, strangely enough, remarkable similarities often occur between inventions of widely separated areas. In ancient Peruvian graves have been found cord slings for hurling stones almost identical with those used by herd boys in Palestine today, as in the time of David and Goliath. Bronze arrowheads from prehistoric Japan are much the same as those excavated from Roman Britain. The bow has several different characteristic forms distributed throughout the world, but its fundamental principle is everywhere the same. Fig. 37 (Left). A light crossbow like this would be used by a young man or an athletic girl. Flemish, XV century. Fig. 38 (Below). Made a little lighter. A prodd or bullet-shooting crossbow, probably for a lady. The first projectile-throwing arm appropriate to an art museum is the crossbow, which is simply a bow mounted on a wooden stock provided with a catch and trigger, so that the bow could be carried ready to shoot. This was a great convenience in hunting or war, because otherwise the time lost in drawing the bow might give the victim opportunity to escape. Moreover, it was soon found that the application of mechanical devices permitted the use of a bow much stronger than any man could draw unaided. Fig. 39. It took a powerful man to wind and shoot this heavy Swiss hunting crossbow, even with the cranequin to help wind! Fig. 40. If you take off the outer case, these three parts make up the entire mechanism of the cranequin. Fig. 41. Mechanism of a crossbow lock, complicated but effective. Fig. 37 shows a light Flemish crossbow of the fifteenth century. Its wooden stock is inlaid with white and with green stained bone in openwork patterns. This type of crossbow required mechanical assistance to pull the string back to the catch which would hold it until the moment should arrive to shoot; the instrument employed was called a goat’s foot lever. The crossbow of Fig. 38 is Italian work of the sixteenth century. The bow is light enough to be pulled by the hands alone, without mechanical assistance. It had a double string, with a little pouch attached between the two strands, and shot small bullets, instead of arrows. The wooden stock is beautifully carved and the metal parts are damascened with arabesques in gold. This type of light crossbow was especially popular with aristocratic ladies who are frequently represented shooting it in hunting tapestries of the period. In Fig. 39 is shown a very powerful hunting crossbow of the seventeenth century. The bow is of steel, two inches wide and a third of an inch thick. The bowstring resembles a piece of heavy rope. To pull this string, bending a steel spring as massive as this, requires a tremendous power and an immense strength in the mechanism which will hold the fully-drawn bow until the moment for its release. The pulling power is supplied by a device, also shown in the illustration (Fig. 39) called a cranequin or cric. It is in mechanical respects essentially identical with a modern geared automobile jack, although, of course, it pulls instead of lifts (Fig. 40). A force of fifty pounds applied to the handle generates on the claw which grasps the bowstring a pull of more than two tons! Fig. 41 shows the mechanism for holding and releasing the string. (These parts are, of course, normally invisible, being hidden inside the wooden stock). Returning to the artistic aspects of the crossbow of Fig. 39, we observe that the whole of the wooden stock is inlaid with plates of white stag horn engraved with scenes illustrating the legend of William Tell—certainly an appropriate decoration! The bow is quite plain except for the addition of decorative pompoms of colored wool, but the cranequin gear housing is elaborately etched with representations of Biblical and mythological personages, strapwork, and interlace, much of this unfortunately now worn away. |
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