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.

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) :
 

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it was required, as the experience and skill of several centuries had brought it to perfection, ere it was at length superseded by the improved arquebus.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

The Crossbow   >  Chapter 2   >   Sporting Crossbow   >   p.12