Got him. Hi it's Tod at Tod's Workshop and Todd Cutler here and I'm back with my
Colettiere A Chavarines dark ages crossbow. I'm also back here at Kentwell hall,
just around the back of the house at the fishpond. Amazing place; go visit it. A quick background
to the bow; it was found in an archaeological dig in the 20th century, but it actually dates
from the 11th century from a stilt village in Southern France around the shores of a lake.
Now it's an interesting bow because it's quite clearly very basic, it's just made from from wood,
literally anybody with a little bit of skill, as people would have had then, could whittle this
out with a knife and a couple of other tools. It's not difficult. The materials are cheap as well, so
it's a really good sort of lightweight, anybody's hunting crossbow. There were certainly more
sophisticated bows around in the 11th century, we see them in manuscripts of Crusaders for instance,
but this is not one of them. This really is a peasant or a cheap weapon. It's as good as it
needs to be. But it was at the shores of a lake, on the edge of a village by a lakeshore and I've
wondered if it's also for crossbow fishing. Now I don't know that from any European context,
it's not something I'm familiar with, I mean out in East Asia for instance, particularly they they
do that a lot, but Europeans I don't know, but if you owned this bow and near the side of a lake
a thousand years ago you would go fishing with it I would swear on that. Now the last time I
made this, I actually did a making video of it and you'll find that again a couple of years ago
back in my feed, but the bow I made there was very quick (to make) and it was 30 pounds in
draw weight something like that, this one now is about 60-65 pounds in draw weight so much better
suited to the hunting of rabbits and pigeons and such things and of course fish. So I've got three
bolt types here and two of them I think reflect very well what this bow is about which is cheap
low cost, so the first one is my proposed fishing bolt and it is frankly just a bone harpoon tip
so the material and the form is very typical of lakeshore and seashore peoples, so I've
just twinned that up with this bow here. The next one is a wooden blunt, so again really good for
shooting birds out of trees it will also float, so against the side of a lake shore it's a really
good bolt to have because you just won't lose it and incredibly cheap to make anybody can do it
and the third one of course if you are shooting rabbits or something where you really do need
to penetrate the beast then this one has got iron heads on it and is used for that,
but of course, of all of this that the iron head is by far the most expensive part that mattered,
the rest of this is just materials that they will find very easily. These bows don't have a stirrup
of course, they way pre-date the stirrup, so if it's very powerful you would sit down the ground
put your feet within the bow and pull it back this one at 65 pounds you don't need to do that,
but you hitch it into your hip here hands on the string, pull back, set the trigger down
and then you're in and you're locked and loaded. Like all crossbows you can shoot from cover,
now the other thing you can do with all crossbows is you can hold the bolt downwards,
so just because the bolt would fall off doesn't mean I can't shoot from the edge
of a pontoon or a boat or anything like that and I can just shoot straight down.
Before we go on, if you want to help support the channel buy the merch, visit the sites,
it really does help. Now to talk you through the various parts of the bow but you've got a wooden
stock here and then the trigger itself is from the crook of a branch and it's actually boxwood this,
so it's very dense, very hard and the grain runs as the trigger shape is and that means you have
a very strong trigger even if it catches in the groove a bit and that just simply
pushes the string out of the notch here and over the top.
Then here you've got a hemp cord and just a pair of wedges here which push directly down onto
the bow pushing it into the socket so it's a very straightforward system. The crossbow string itself
is just a linen string, standard kind of crossbow string construction and that's it,
so it really is, well you could do it with a knife or a draw knife or an axe something like that or
even just a bushcraft knife, the only interesting bit, the only difficult bit is going to be carving
out the slot for the trigger there, but that would just take a bit of time if you haven't got
a chisel. When it comes to loading the bow; hands on the string and you pull back and you flick
the trigger down so that, that way the trigger is just in the position to accept the string.
Obviously if it's over the string here as it's released, it's just going to flick the
bolt out of the way, so you have to make sure that the bolt is just in front of the string,
if you think it might move if you're going through cover, if you're moving around,
pop your thumb on the bottom of it. If you're shooting downwards pop your thumb on the bottom;
it really is a very easy thing to do it's a little alarming if you've never done it before.
Take my word for it, it's fine. This bow here is 60 pounds in weight so it's not enormously
powerful, it's got a 10 inch/25 cm draw length, so the energy it delivers is not very much so
I've gone for relatively lightweight bolts for small game, you could probably go for a heavier
bow it would work up to a point, I would think the trigger will cause a problem sooner or later,
but maybe 100 pounds/110 but what is a really useful aspect of the crossbow is you can load
it and leave it loaded and wait wait for your fish to come past, wait for your bunny to sit
up and have a look around, wait for your pigeon to land. You can't do that with a long bow, so
you can be ready to shoot. So that although it's not as powerful as a hand bow it is probably more
accurate and it is, in the hunting context very versatile you can shoot it from cover as well.
Got him. So all in all, it's light, it's cheap, it's easy to make, it's pretty versatile,
easy to use, it's a great little hunting weapon, it really is. You're not gonna take down stag with
this thing, no you're not, but I don't think that's what it was ever for. So coming back
full circle again, blunts we all know, they use those iron heads, well they definitely had them;
harpoon tips? I think they probably would have done, if you're seeing that resource down there
and you've got a bow in your hand, you're going to have a go at it. But anyway, thank you very much,
catch the earlier build video. We'll see you again sometime thanks.
So this is the original fish pond that was built when Kentwell hall was built.
I can't shoot into here because actually I might hit fish and
in this country we're not allowed to bow hunt, but just watch them......
there's hundreds, thousands and thousands of them.