What Is a ‘Robin Hood’ in Archery?


The story goes that Robin Hood competes in an archery tournament where the prize is a golden arrow. As with “The Fit of Robin Hood”, “The Challenge”, an episode of the 1950s television series The Adventures of Robin Hood with Richard Greene, features an archery tournament in which outlaw heroes take refuge in Sir Richards’ castle. The archery tournament for the silver and golden arrow forms the gripping centerpiece of an earlier ballad: Robin Hood’s Gest.

In archery, a Robin Hood is a feat in which an arrow, having been fired, splits another arrow. The name for the feat is taken from the legendary tale of Robin Hood, who is purported to have split an arrow this way in order to win an archery competition in which he was to fire second.

An altered version of “History” appears in the first episode of the television series Robin of Sherwood, in which the prize offered is a silver arrow owned by Herne the Hunter as a means to lure Robin into the castle. The Sheriff of Nottingham decides to lure Robin Hood into a trap by staging an archery competition in which the prizes will be arrows tipped with gold and silver.

Robin Hood in Competitive Archery

Modern competitive archery pays homage to one of these mythical archery stories called “Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow”. The most famous criminal in history owes his success not only to his equipment, but also to his skills. Among Robin Hood’s many virtues and exploits, we all agree that his legendary trick is to smash an arrow with another arrow, beautifully immortalized by Kevin Costner (some call me soft, but I love this movie).

Many archery enthusiasts have criticized the claims of archery consultant Robin Hood, saying he used makeup and clever camera setups to hide his technical flaws. In the video, he claims to be using a different long-lost ancient archery technique than what we use now. Director Otto Bathurst claims in the video that archery is historically accurate, though he openly admits that the new Robin Hood movie itself isn’t (though we can only tell by watching the damn thing).

Honestly, I don’t need my bow tricks to be historically accurate in the new Robin Hood movie, Ben Mendelsohn’s Sheriff of Nottingham. If you succeeded, then you managed to accomplish a great feat and consider it a successful shooting gallery. As we know in archery, if you can make a very hard shot like Robin Hood or hit 70m 10 times, it’s not skill, it’s just luck.

Why a Robin Hood Can Occur

If you keep filling the target with arrows, you will end up hitting another arrow. Of course, this type of shot can happen by accident if an existing arrow is already on the target. This occurs when an archer pushes the tip of an arrow shaft deep into the end of another arrow already in the bullseye. This event is achieved when the archer fires an arrow at the target, and then accurately throws the next rod at the first, as the hero of folklore did in his famous skirmish with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

The lateral movement of the arrow as it flies forward is called “Fishtail”. Unfortunately, if we hit the notch on the edge, we will touch it and the arrow will hit the target, not the arrow. I dare say (not to introduce more math into this) that 1 out of 10 arrows that hit the first arrow hole will hit about the center. If someone manages to hit another arrow, they will most likely break the plastic notch, but the arrow will get stuck behind the first one.

Firstly, if you managed to give Robin Hood an arrow, then the arrow that the second one hit will break, you will lose the second one, and possibly the second one. And “Robin Hood” is when you shoot an arrow at an arrowhead that is already stuck in a target, the target, breaking it. Robin Hood is a special type of shot; where the archer manages to break an arrow that has already hit the target with another arrow from a secondary shot from the same position.

My arrow did not split in the middle, as in the traditional tale of the legendary archer from whom “Robin Hood” takes its name; however, it split my shot in half and split the top of the arrow.

Eric Greene

Eric Greene is the avatar of Wildseer. Eric is a nature lover and technologist who strives to integrate modern human life into the natural world for the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants.

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