Six shooting archery in Robin Hood – Men in Tights

Since today is the leap day, and it's only in every four years (except in years that are divisible by 100, but not by 400, in Gregorian calendar that is) you get a special extra post: Cary Elwes! Of course from the hilarious comedy film Robin Hood – Men in Tights (1993). Real Robin Hood, if he would've existed (which he most probably didn't) would not have worn tights, or known about the leap day for that matter, since they used a Julian calendar at that time. All of this is irrelevant to archery though.

So this time I want to talk about how Cary Elwes, I mean Robin Hood, shoots six arrows at once. It is most probably a reference to western movies with their six-shooting revolvers. Of course you cannot do this with a bow. The second picture shows Hood placing the arrows carefully on top of each other to the bowstring. But there's nothing to keep them there, all aligned beautifully. They used some kind of movie trickery to make that happen (secret arrow holder or glue perhaps?), but in reality this would not work. If shot like this, some of the arrows would surely fly out of the bow. Possibly poorly, hindered by the collapsing arrow pile. Many arrows would just land a few meters ahead or just straight frop off the bowstring and fall to the ground immediately. It would be completely impossible to aim all these arrows.

And what would be the point of it? If an arrow can kill a man, does it need six arrows to kill him six-times more dead? This is precisely the point why the Greeks didn't employ in great numbers the repeating catapult they invented (yes catapult is an arrow thrower, and not a stone thrower, like the ballista), it was too accurate! The same happened with the invent of the modern machine guns. All the arrows and bullets flew to the same spot, which is counter-intuitive after the target is already dead. With machine guns they made the bullets sparse out in flight so they would cover a larger area. With the repeating catapult they couldn't fix that problem, so it wasn't much used in warfare. There is no point of shooting several arrows at once, since they will hit the same target, which is not needed. It is a waste of arrows. Much more useful would be to shoot the arrows one after another to different targets. Now he would have potentially killed six enemies instead of hitting one target six times.

The film is great though, you should watch it if you haven't seen it already. And watch again if you haven't seen it in recent years.