Shooting at the butts was a legal obligation, not a pastime. Edward III issued an ordinance in 1363 directing able-bodied men to practise archery on Sundays and holidays rather than waste time on other games, and the requirement was restated repeatedly for two centuries. The Unlawful Games Act of 1541 obliged men under sixty to keep a bow and arrows and to shoot, while banning a long list of competing amusements. The point was military: the longbow needed a lifetime of training to draw properly — the skeletal deformation visible in archers recovered from the Mary Rose shows what that training did to their bodies — and no state could produce such men on demand. It had to produce them continuously, in every parish, by law.

Butt, boss and mark. The words are not interchangeable. The butt was properly the earthen mound or bank the target stood against; the boss is the straw disc; the mark was the aiming point. Many village butts were exactly that — a mound of turf — with a piece of cloth or a white card pinned on it. The coiled straw boss belongs to the same tradition but is a portable, repairable refinement, and it is what survived into modern target archery.

Why coiled straw and not a board. An arrow arriving at sixty metres a second must be stopped over a short distance without breaking the shaft or blunting the point. Coiled straw does this by friction along the whole length of the arrow rather than by impact: the compressed stems grip the shaft and decelerate it progressively. A hard flat surface would shatter or bounce the arrow; loose material would let it through. The same properties that make coiled straw good at holding a beehive's shape — springy, dense, repairable — make it good at catching arrows, and the craft transferred directly.

An honest note on the decline. The longbow was not defeated by the musket's accuracy, which was worse, or its rate of fire, which was far worse. It was defeated by training time. A serviceable musketeer could be made in weeks; an effective longbowman took years, and once the statutory practice lapsed the pool of them vanished within a generation. The butt in the churchyard was the infrastructure that made the weapon possible, and when the butts fell out of use the weapon went with them.

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Archery Butt