What does a 108-centimetre yew bow lifted from Lake Banyoles mud¹ ask us to learn about archery before kings, heraldry, tournaments, or written war? A yew stave, darkened by lake-mud, carries a question heavier than any painted coat of arms.…
What lesson passed from the narrow mouth of Dupplin Moor into the longbow, once a bodkin head rested in my palm like a cold tooth pulled from an iron beast? Hammered into a small point, the bodkin head grants blunt…
What survives of Taybugha al-Ashrafi al-Baklamishi al-Yunani once common biography narrows into grip, stance, breath, thumb draw, schooling, horse, treatise? Horn at the base of my right hand gives the first reply: a small crescent of polished material, warmed after…
What did William Neade truly try to save in 1624: the longbow itself, or the commonwealth of trained bodies that had gathered around bowstave and shaft, across parish field and statute, through drill, prayer, and pay? Within the small quarto…
Roger Ascham arrived on my kitchen table bound within a worn volume, carrying the smell of chalky dust alongside old paste. A block of beeswax sat beside my longbow, waiting near a coiled linen string. Holding those threads evoked an…
On the Rock of Dunamase the limestone rises with a clenched grammar, as though the earth had learned law from iron, and as though the plain of Laois, which looks gentle when the sun lies low, had carried a memory…
In sanguine martyrum regna Christianorum radicantur¹—in the blood of martyrs the realms of Christians take root. For a medieval mind that line had the weight of a weather proverb. It described how power settled into the soil. A grave that…
Dust deepened within the breach while heat raised a chalky veil from crushed ashlar, and a litter advanced in a long, breathing sway as four shoulders moved with choir-like discipline and the poles sang against their leather slings. Fever pressed…
Memento mori opens the late-October syllabus, and dies irae, dies illa gathers vigil air into study. Samhain with All Souls sets a horizon where remembrance carries ethical weight under eschatological pressure. An archer approaches the line and receives a rite…
Some men arrive larger than their birthplaces. They carry a heat that pushes maps outward, seeks new borders, stamps a name into the grain of years. When such a figure drops, ordinary endings jar the ear. An unassuming death jars…
Wind comes off the Irish Sea with a brisk salt that pricks the lip and lifts the gull-cry over the lough, and the ground in Down remembers. The turf keeps a grain of hoof and boot, a thin echo of…
You can feel it in the land still, if you’re quiet enough. The way the past breathes up through the soil. We talk of the great warriors, the high kings, the men who stood shield to shield with sword and…
There are stories that feel true because we want them to be. Stories of a clean end, a single, meaningful moment that cuts a life’s thread. A hero stands against the odds, and a fatal, well-aimed arrow finds him. It’s…...
strange heat it was, the summer of 1399. The kind of heat that presses down on the land and makes the air thick with waiting. You could feel it in the quiet of the fields and the low murmur of…...
In the hush between the tolling of bells and the hiss of the string, something else stirred in the guildhalls of medieval Flanders and England—something older than the arrows they notched and swifter than the oaths they swore. While the…...
I came across him not in a book, but in a footnote misquoted in the margin of another. It was a binding so cracked it seemed to wheeze when opened, part of a bundle I’d been lent by a Flemish…...
The story I’m about to tell you is not one that fits neatly into the grand histories of kings and battles, nor does it appear in the sweeping narratives of medieval glory or tragedy. It is a whisper at the…...
You never forget the first book that cuts you. The one that leaves a wound, not in flesh, but in the quiet, unguarded place where thoughts sleep before they wake to meaning. Mine was a battered volume on the The…...
The leaden days of socialist monotony in the 1970s and 80s had an odd way of pressing on the spirit, like a cold fog that never actually lifted. But even in the dreary grind of lining up for bread, sugar…...
The dimly lit, rain-soaked cinemas of 1980s Soviet life provided brief but significant havens. Among the films, Sergei Tarasov's 1985 Чернaя стрела (The Black Arrow) stood out not only as entertainment but also as an event—an artefact of a society struggling with its paradoxes. Under the heavy shadow of a collapsing Soviet ideology, this rendition of Robert Louis Stevenson's story connected as both metaphor and adventure, a revolt against the ordinary disguised as historical epic.