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During the closing months of 1999 and the first quarter of 2000 Southampton’s archaeology department excavated a series of tree planting holes and a trench for a services duct in the Above Bar precinct of Southampton. The holes, situated just outside the town’s medieval walls but along a main thoroughfare in use since early medieval times, were dug down through a post-medieval and medieval street sequence of waterlogged wheel ruts and ditches, producing organic finds of wood and leather that were retrieved, processed and conserved.

Perhaps the most unusual and important finds to come from the excavation were found in a layer of black, stony and smelly soil, probably an accumulation of domestic refuse, lying at a depth of 850mm to 1200mm. These finds, described at first as “sharpened sticks” on the original museum record sheets, were later cited on Southampton city's website as being two parts of a late medieval yew “Long Bow”.  It was this reference which first came to my attention during one particularly late-night session of internet surfing, but the passage sadly provided nothing more substantial than a single line comment and no clues to the bow’s present whereabouts.  I therefore took it upon myself to locate the bow and to see if a viewing could be arranged.  In the event my search was to prove a lot easier than expected and rumours that the bow was in storage at God’s House Tower museum were soon to be confirmed in an e-mail from Karen Wardley, the museum’s curator.

A month later on a cold but sunny Wednesday morning in December Martin and I arrived outside the offices of the museum of archaeology to meet up with Karen for our first glimpse of the object we had been searching for.  Signing in under “The Company of HolyRood” we were led up a narrow staircase to a small open plan office where every inch of floor space was taken up with old yellowing filing cabinets, precarious stacks of scientific reports and cardboard boxes stuffed with rolls of technical drawings.  Following Karen through the eclectic debris of academia we passed a heavily laden notice board upon which was pinned an old Echo article by our friend Dave Newble, sensationalising some obscure Viking connection with the Bargate (your guess is as good as mine!), while on our left an impressive reproduction Neolithic stone axe lay exposed from it’s tissue paper protective wrapping atop a filing cabinet.

Arriving at Karen’s desk we watched as she lifted the lid off a small rectangular cardboard box to reveal a collection of plastic bags covered in handwritten labels displaying various catalogue numbers, along with the researcher’s best-guess interpretation of the often indistinguishable object within.  Clearing the jumble of smaller bags from the surface she produced two larger bags each containing a section of the bow.  Removing them carefully from their bags and placing them upon her desk she handed us each a pair of latex gloves before standing back and urging us to take a closer look and handle the objects as we pleased.

Item number 201 was observed to be one end of a bow limb, though it was sadly impossible to say which one. The fragment’s dimensions (mm) were as follows: -

On closer inspection the fragment was seen to be smooth shaved, and made of hard, close-grained yew which tapered to the tip of the limb in a rather flat ‘D’ shaped cross section, possibly the result of compression in the earth after its rejection rather than by design. The limb had suffered a catastrophic failure at some time during its manufacture/use, resulting in a partial fracture about three-quarters of the way along its length, and a complete break at its end, the wood seeming to have split at a large knot.

The most exciting detail for me however could be seen at the very tip of the limb, where one half of a string groove remained on the side. The museum reports hypothesised that the bow had likely broken on the tiller before being discarded into the street in disgust, there to be trodden into the muck and buried until its discovery around 600 years later, but two details I observed made me doubt this possibility.

Firstly, only a small part of the string groove remains. If the bow had broken on the tiller then surely the full groove would remain as this was not the area of failure and the limb tip looks to all intents and purposes to be intact. Furthermore the tip looked as if it had already been shaped into the final ‘cone’ profile to receive its horn nock, a process which would likely shave away most of the redundant tillering groove beneath. In Robert Hardy’s book "The Great Warbow" (p10-11) he observed a similar detail on the bows recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose in 1979: -

"The bow-tips also bore slots for the tillering strings...When the bow is finally tillered the tips are ‘coned’ to fit into the drilled-out horn nocks…and in this process the tillering nocks are more or less worked out..."

Surely this is what we are seeing here. The second detail relates to the paler colour of the wood of the ‘cone’ section as compared to the rest of the limb. Once again Robert Hardy describes a similar observation with the Mary Rose bows in "The Great Warbow" (p10): -

"...at the tips of all the complete bows...there showed an average 2 in (5 cm) length of paler-coloured wood on that part which was cone-shaped...The paler section was the result of lesser exposure of the timber, protected by the horn nocks as long as they remained.”

If this bow did break while on the tiller, and in my mind there is no reason to suppose it did, then it is my belief that the bow had already been finished up to the point where horn nocks were applied. Perhaps the bow was being tested after the final string fitting when it broke or maybe it broke while out hunting and had been brought to the bowyer to see if it could be repaired. Another possibility is that the bow had been broken on purpose, either in rage or as a punishment for its owner or simply because it was no longer needed or had outlived its useful life. I wonder what happened to the rest of the bow?

Item number 263 consisted of a thicker fragment of the same limb which clearly fits with item 201 at the broken knot, giving a total length of 545mm. The fragment’s dimensions (mm) were as follows: -

Apart from the break at the knot, item 263 also suffered a further break running for at least half of its length in the form of a split which had followed the grain from belly to back, in the process possibly separating heart wood from sap wood, although the bow’s advanced state of discolouration made it impossible for us to clearly make out the layer of sap wood if it indeed existed. With three breaks in the space of only half of one limb this must have been a remarkable explosion of wood as evidenced by two further finds, item 361 and item 240 which were also identified as yew (Taxus Baccata) and believed to be fragments from the same bow.

Taking the two limbs together and making allowances for their degradation in the soil and subsequent shrinkage during the conservation process it was clear to us both that this was not a bow for military use, certainly not a "Great Warbow", but perhaps more suited to hunting. Judging by the small, sleek taper of the one limb that remains this would have been a very fast bow and no doubt a joy to shoot had it not ended its life in such spectacular fashion. Oh how I wish I could have heard the bowyer’s response!

With our visit drawing to a close we thanked Karen for her time before leaving with photocopies of the site reports and archaeologist’s sketches for our records. As the museum next door was still open we decided to pop in for a quick look around the medieval section before Martin’s lunch break was over, and in so doing we struck up a conversation with Eddie Stevens, Southampton’s town gunner, who seemed to enjoy the opportunity to get away from his desk and chat about his passion for medieval Southampton. In the course of our stay Eddie showed us his prized possession of a splendid reproduction 15^th century hand gun which he one day hopes to fire, before letting us into the stores to handle a 15^th century gun stone found locally, and a mysterious round ball complete with lead plug and covered in perfectly round metal spheres. Eddie believed the object to be an early hand-grenade or shrapnel missile, but Martin’s guess of an original bowling ball from the nearby Oldest Bowling Green in the World (1299) seemed to impress Eddie so much that he immediately discarded his own hypothesis and sided with Martin instead!

All too soon it was time to leave, but we promised to return in the new year to take Karen up on her invitation to provide our group with a tour of the archaeology department’s find’s warehouse, which will no doubt be worthy of another article like this one. Watch this space...