Approaching Game by Means
of a Stalking Horse
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The time and money lavished on the ornamentation of high-class
sporting crossbows, especially those of late sixteenth-century Continental
manufacture, were very considerable, the best workers in metal, ivory and
mother of pearl, being employed in their decoration.
The stock of the sporting crossbow was often covered with
artistic representations of animals, birds and hunting scenes, surrounded
by scroll-work, all finely chased and inlaid in silver, ivory and pearl.
The polished metal fittings of the stock, and even the
hardened surfaces of the steel bow, were sometimes deeply inlaid with a
delicate tracery in gold of leaves and flowers, or heraldic designs.
Different workmen constructed the distinct parts of a
good sporting crossbow, just as the separate pieces of a gun are treated
in these days by various artisans, before they are fitted together to produce
the weapon in its finished state.
Fig. 8 - Crossbowman approaching game by means of a stalking
horse.
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One set of craftsmen made the stock, another the windlass
or the cranequin, and so it was with the lock and the string ; but the
most important artificers of all were the men who forged and shaped the
steel bows. The bows from Mondragon in Spain, which were of the same quality
of steel as that of the famous Toledo sword blades, and those from Pyrmont
in Germany, were celebrated for their excellence of strength and temper.
In confirmation of this we read in Sir J. Harington's
translation of Ariosto (Italian poet, 1474-1533) :
But as a strong and justly tempered bow
Of Pyrmont steel, the more you do it bend,
Upon recoil doth give the bigger blow,
And doth with greater force the quarrel send.
(Orlando Furioso)
The sporting crossbow of the sixteenth century, or from
about 1500 to 1630, was no doubt a very effective weapon in its day for
the purposes for which it was required, as the experience and skill of
several centuries had brought it to perfection, ere it was at length superseded
by the improved arquebus.
The hunter could not, however, bring down birds on the
wing with his crossbow ; nor, indeed, could the man who used the arquebus
of the same
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