Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we are going to talk about these
two crossbows. Absolutely identical. Well not quite, but actually there's a heck of a lot of
similarities between these two things there really are; 400 years apart. Let's talk our
way through them. So first up we have a latchet bow around about 1600 maybe a little bit before
possibly French or Northern English, Scottish manufacture. Really difficult to track down
information on these things. I saw the original, a guy brought it to me at a show and he explained
that it was a Reivers bow. So basically there was a lot of troubles between England and Scotland,
give or take around the 1600 mark up at the borders and there's a whole bunch of guys
called Reivers who would protect themselves and cause trouble and this he said was a civil defence
weapon for those. Really interesting piece. I'm going to show you the Adder now. So this
bow came out around 2020 20, 21. Brainchild of Jorge Sprave, you probably all know him.
You got a catch to hold the lever in, trigger mechanism goes forward, lever comes back. Main
difference here is it's got a safety catch well that's not just a modern thing, they had them
back in the day but didn't really use them very much. The other main thing, this thing has got a
magazine. Even faster to shoot. But I'm going to tell you about the similarities now because
they are striking, they really are. So you got a trigger mechanism here and you've got
the long lever here. Now clearly you don't want that lever to spring up so you've got a catch
at the back that really engages positively, you can hear when it comes in you can see it,
you can feel it. So you open that up, the trigger itself you just pop the nut forward so it can
engage the string, that comes up and engages so it's now locked. Okay that's all spring loaded,
locks in ready to go. It doesn't take that much work because it's about 250 lbs draw weight. We
pull it down and you can hear the clip engaging at the back. Clearly you do not want this lever now,
because it's fully loaded, to spring forward, it would absolutely destroy the bow. It's not going
to do you many favours either. So the trigger mechanism goes forward and collects the string
and then is pulled back, that is exactly the same system on this Adder here. So I'm just going to
release the cocking lever, again it's exactly the same principle, you do not want that lever
to disengage when it's loaded up. The trigger system now you can see it, the whole trigger
system here is moving forward. Right you move it forward, nice good noise. Noises, feedback;
really important during this process. You now push that closed, now nice and engaged, we now have
a loaded bow. Process is exactly the same, the trigger system slides forward, the setup is a bit
different but the thinking behind it; identical. Move the trigger system forward,
collect the string, bring it back. The bolts you probably noticed, they're both very small,
much smaller than conventional crossbow bolts. Similarities all the way through,
the same thinking, and this is the point. Historical people were no different to us,
different technology, but not different thinking. So what they wanted then is what we want now.
What did they want then? Hi I've interrupted the film for another Tod Cutler related interesting
fact. So Lansknecht 'S' guard quillon dagger. You can tell it's Landsknecht because it's got this
amazing sort of fish guard pommel on it. They absolutely loved them and they loved grips that
just went out like this, like big cones. It's a Landsknecht thing. I don't know feathers in the
hats, weird shaped dagger handles. Anyway you'll find this and loads of other amazing pieces on Tod
cutler.com So around the year 1600, crossbows had basically fallen out of use in British warfare,
but they still had access to them. So this is an earlier one let's say from around the year 1400,
it's a windlass bow, but it was still popular for target shooting,
sport shooting. So it goes up, but it takes a little while to load,
really powerful for crossbows, quite long power stroke for medieval ones,
so it's about 6 in, so about 15 cm. Nice positive engagement. This one here it's about 800,
850lbs in draw weight. Undoing the windlass getting it ready for the next shot is part of
the process. So I could have sped through it, but it wouldn't be true to what is needed for the next
shot. So it's powerful, shoots a heavy bolt, but it's slow and it's kind of a little bit awkward.
The next type of bow that was available around 1600 is cranequin spanned hunting bows like this.
Not for war, for hunting and there were quite a few of them about. The cranequin is this thing
here, which is a compound gearbox. Really quite a sophisticated bit of kit and actually around
this time militarily these bows had fallen out of use and these crenquin are actually getting
repurposed as cannon elevators. And you then crank it up to around about 600/650lbs draw
weight the bow and it's deliberately quite a powerful system. Little bit slow, self locks
usually these things like that just make sure the trigger's engaged, never hurts. Now of course
that needs to be reset, now so you're not ready for your next shot for a little bit. Bolt goes
in, so again nice bow, powerful. When you're hunting, speed's not an issue. Now these are
definitely old hat by this point but these are goats foot bows but they can span 4,
500lbs without too much of a problem. Lever goes on, comes in, bolt goes
on. So they all shoot well, they all shoot nicely, but that's not what they wanted. So if they wanted
power, this is not the bow that they would have gone to, but it does offer these other things.
It offers speed of loading, none of the medieval bows have that. It offers a compact size, they
don't have that. You can shoot this one-handed if you need to, you can't do it with those,
they're all too big. But the compromises are, it's not that powerful. It's not that powerful because
it's fast to load, it's got an inbuilt lever. I've done these at about 300lbs and they become
ungainly, 250lbs, brilliant. So you're limited by the power because of the bow. It is short,
you've got a really short power stroke, about 85mm, little bit over 3 inches. You haven't got
the time to put the energy into the bolt, the bolt has to be small, that means it's relatively light,
means it's fairly low on momentum. It's not going to pierce that deeply. So that means all these
compromises in a pure military sense don't really make sense, but this is either civil defence,
in which case having it small, compact, faster loading; brilliant. Or it's purely for fun; also
brilliant. Because you don't want that weight, you don't want that slowness, you've gone out
to shoot in the garden, well this lets you shoot in the garden. "There you go, have a go!" You're
not waiting 45 seconds or a minute for somebody to take the next shot. Much more fun. Now in many
respects all of that is exactly true for the Adder as well. It's quick to shoot, it's fun to shoot,
the magazine on it means that you really can shoot very quickly, but the thing is that magazine
there, it was I believe that Jorge was obsessed by the Chinese repeating cross bows, which in
1600 were known about in Europe. So they could have taken this magazine technology and put it on
that latchet bow. They didn't and the thing about the latchet bow is actually there's no technology
in there that wouldn't have been familiar to an ancient Greek. An ancient Greek would look at that
and go "oh nice, clever!", but nothing outlandish. This thing came from out of space, this is a thing
of the Gods. But the same things are true, it's fast to shoot, it's fun to shoot, it's
not super heavy, that means it's actually quite easy to get the bolts out of the target. You can
hand it to a friend, they can use it very easily, there's nothing ungainly about it. There's clever
about it. Exactly the same design parameters 400 years apart. The thinking behind these two
bows is basically exactly the same. So, fun, war, civil defence? Who cares? Let's weigh the bolts,
put them through a chronograph, see what we get. First we have our windlass with a 68gram bolt.
161 ft per second, now we have the cranequin hunting bow. I actually used a windlass bolt
earlier, generally a hunting bolt for this would be a bit lighter than a war
bolt for a cranequin bow, so we're using a feathered one coming in at 50grams. Bow
itself round about 600,650lbs, the windless was around about 8,850lbs.
155 ft per second. Now we have our goats foot bow about 350lbs in draw weight shooting a 50gram
bolt. 147 ft per second. So our latchet bow 250lbs in draw weight shooting a 17gram bolt.
120 ft per second and finally the Adder shooting a
13gram bolt. Got to be careful not to shoot the crony on this
one. 245 ft per second, quite a difference. So I have our table of numbers, but basically we've got
nice powerful windlass bow, we got a cranequin bow which is a little bit under that, goats foot bow,
little bit under that again, you'd expect that because of the power difference between the two,
and then you come to our latchet bow. That has a pretty pathetic, if you look at it that way 12J.
Grossly inefficient steel bow, short draw length which also makes it incredibly inefficient, what
it means is you end up with a bow that is fast shooting, fast loading, really important and the
thing is 12J it's not a lot, .63 of momentum, it's not a lot, but that sharp little dart into the
torso or into the face or into the neck, that is going to make you want to be somewhere else. And
in the case of the Border Reivers it really was about skirmishing, about civil defence; about "oh
they're coming in the back door, they're coming in the front door", these, relatively low power
as they are will do the job of making people want to be somewhere else. Now the Adder has some vast
benefits and that is principally materials. So what you have here is is a glass, fibre glass bow,
it will come back a lot further, what's that?, it's about a 10 inches, about a 25 cm draw length.
Far, far more efficient right at the beginning. When you pull the trigger it has to move the
entire system, the system is the bolt, it's the bow itself, glass fibre not steel like we've
got in the latchet bow, and you have a lovely beautiful skinny Kevlar, Dacron string whatever it
is on that, lightweight. This entire system by its very nature is an inefficient system in comparison
to this and you can bet that in 10, 20, 30 years time there'll be some far more efficient system
that makes this thing look like a dinosaur. But right now the efficiency of this is extraordinary
compared to that and that is why you get the difference. So what you have here is 37J even
though the bolt is lighter, but of course it's much faster, but still you have a pretty small
momentum of .98. So there are differences in the efficiency and the materials that are used, I mean
that's obvious, but other than that the parameters are really quite similar. You want something that
is small, compact, fast to load, fun to use, all of these things, that this very definitely is, as
indeed is the latchet bow. But there is of course the screaming difference, which is you've got the
magazine on here. So this is a fast shooting bow, but the compromises that were made to make it that
way and to make it small and handy means it's not vastly powerful and that means it's really good to
back it up with multiple shots. They didn't know about the magazine system, or at least they didn't
think to add it to this, so it didn't have it. Could they have done it? Because that's a really
good question and the simple answer is yes. Couple of years ago I did a collaboration with
Jorg Sprave where he asked me to make a magazine system for a longbow and this is what I did,
all medieval technology and materials. So we got a horn spring here, you've got a magazine slot here,
you got bone guides, it's the sort of thing they would have used to reduce friction, but it works
by sliding forward, picking up the arrow, pulling the string back and you've got the trigger here.
You feed the bolts in in exactly the same way and you stack them up, so you can get five in
here just like you can on the Adder. So the point of this is that medieval technology could have
been used to adapt the latchet bow and make it, well even faster shooting than it already is. But
have a look at this little bit of footage of Joe Gibbs, I love it and that's reason enough to show
you.
So you can see it is a really fun device whether it would be good for warfare in
that context with a heavy bow? Well there's a whole film about it, go check it out. But
in the case of civil defence if your weapon is not vastly powerful, multiple shots are really
useful. This would have loved to have had a magazine on it, but regardless of that,
let's go and see what it does in the real world. So on our target there, we got a pork joint.
Going to load up and we're going to shoot nice and close so that hopefully I'll hit it every
time. Now in medieval crossbow terms this is one of a heck of a fast shooting bow.
Nice so let's go for the
Adder. Definitely easier to shoot and that's the gun stock if nothing
else. Let's see what we got. We know the modern crossbow bolts have gone through,
so I'm going to pull those first, so here are our three
bolts. Now they're going to be through the
pork and we can see that because it's staying. That's
it and that is what you have on the other side. So you can look
at the numbers and say well it's not really a very powerful bow. I would argue powerful
enough. Back at base for our conclusion. Well I stand by what I said right at the beginning which
is that these two bows are actually remarkably similar, different as they may look. They have
so many ideas behind them which are the same, so you've got lever action, a sliding trigger that
picks up the string, you've got a small compact size, far less powerful than the bigger brothers,
but that's not what their design intention was. They're small, they're flexible, they're handy,
they're rapid shooting, they're fun, they're basically the same design 400 years apart.
The thinking behind this is the same thinking as behind that, the desires for what was being
made with this, the same as it was for that. The massive difference really is the magazine
feeding on this one. Beyond that conceptually they're the same bow. What would I have had back
in a cattle raid in 1600? Well I'm not an idiot. Magazine fed, faster shooting, absolutely. Which
is the one that I love? This one. The materials technology, the look, everything about it this
speaks to me. This is what I like. Anyway, two bows, same thing separated by 400 years. See you.