Pluck Yew

     Imagine it’s Sunday morning, you’re getting on your Sunday Church clothes, grabbing your bible, grabbing your rifle, and loading up a few magazines for your rifle, pile everything into the car and off to church.  After church you get your rifle, and in the church yard, all the men have a practice shoot in friendly semi-formal competition.

Every man in the community is of course there (for both church and shooting) as required by law.

Well, that was England a few hundred years ago and it was bows and archery equipment instead of M16’s but that was the order of the day for a Sunday afternoon.  England became a powerhouse of Europe on the strength of its Archers and the concept of an armed populace influenced the political landscape in the years to follow.

It’s amazing what you sometimes learn.  To start off, the archery program in the schools (existing in N-K and planned for Central Springs in the future) is a really neat program.  The coaches really added something nice (I didn’t have a thing to do with it).  I did, however, get to drive a bus load of N-K students to an archery competition where one of the girls took top overall score.  It was almost shades of merry old England to watch.

In researching the bow for a couple different education programs, especially how to build a bow and its early use, I came across the reference to a familiar old symbol.  The “peace sign” (palm out) which used to be the “V” sign (with your palm facing in for victory during WW2) might have had its earliest use in the middle ages.  Bows were commonly made from a wood called the Yew tree.  English archers would taunt their enemy (the French) by holding up two fingers (used to draw the bow) as an imminent sign that you could expect a shower of arrows headed your way.  The sign was also known as “Pluck Yew” as you were about to pluck the string of a yew bow.