Quote Originally Posted by Simetrical
They were made from a single multilayered piece of wood, and therefore were functionally composite. They may, however, have more closely resembled self bows than Eastern composite bows in terms of construction. Either way is reasonable, neither is particularly better than the other, but if you use a definition of self bow that includes the longbow, the statement that "the composite bow was far superior to any self bow" is entirely unjustifiable.

-Simetrical
They were actually cut from the lowermost bough of the Yew tree and were not multi layered [ unless you refer to natural layering of the branch fibre? ] The rough bow stave was fashioned by the bowyer into the finished bow, which had the dark heartwood as the belly and the light sapwood as the back. Nonetheless it was constructed from a single piece of wood which is a world away from the Asiatic compsite constructions of wood, horn and sinew.

We could enter into a lengthy discussion about the performance of the Longbow v Asiatic but it really would be off topic due to the time scale. I am an archer myself and I can tell you that the Longbow performance has been blown out of all proportion

.......Orda