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Why did Welsh mercenary bowmen in the medieval period wear one shoe at a time?
Wiki User
∙ 12y ago
That's actually a bit of a misconception, the Welsh on the whole were depicted in manuscripts and drawings of the time as wearing one shoe, but this is not necessarily what they actually wore.
Some speculated that the one shoe was to enable the Welsh to walk on hill sides, but that seems a little odd, especiallly as Wales is not one big range of hills - We do have at least some flat ground.
It seems more likely that they were drawn this way to indicate wealth - The Welsh were generally not that well off, but not completely destitute, so there became a sort of key showing wealth with the poorest having no shoes, while the rich could afford them. As the Welsh were sort of on the middle ground, they were often shown with one shoe to indicate their 'mediocrity'.
Bear in mind as well, that the manuscripts were written at the time, generally for people of the time, and the illustrations were usually not intended to be historical commentaries, rather they were to put forward a general idea so attention to detail was not as important as people assume.
Wiki User
∙ 12y ago
Rob Ap Hugh
Bare foot on the longbow to bend it while stringing would seem an obvious answer. None of your nylon paracord in those days, just some organic stuff likely to give up the ghost in the heat of battle.
Dulce Hickle
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The idea of any Welsh (or English) longbow before the 14th century has no basis in fact; despite many clumsy attempts to fabricate historical evidence where none exists.The Old Welsh word bwa means simply "a bow", as does the Latin arcus, the Anglo-Norman arc and the Early Middle English word boue. These are the only words used to describe bows in Wales and England up to the late 13th century and not one of them means "longbow"; no actual examples of bows from the early period exist; no descriptions of the size of bows from that era exist and the theory that all bows must be longbows is total nonsense.The Welsh were certainly using longbows later in the medieval period, when English archers were also using them.All that we can say with certainty is that the bow (in some form) was being used in both Wales and England in the period 1066 to 1250 and that after that date (at some unknown time) longbows were being used by both Welsh and English archers.Without some new, unfabricated evidence from the period we can not know any more than that.
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