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.
