The English longbow was less a weapon than a way of life. A war-bow of yew pulled between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds — some heavier still — and no one drew that cold: it took years, boys working up from lighter bows, and English kings made the practice law, Edward III ordering every able man to shoot at the butts on holidays and give up idle games. The training left its mark in the bone; archers' skeletons are found with thickened left arms and twisted wrists. What it bought was the arrow storm — several shafts a minute from every man, thousands aloft at once — which, in the right ground like the mud and stakes of Agincourt in 1415 or the slope at Crécy in 1346, broke the finest cavalry in Europe.

This is a set of five such archers (models MK240–MK244) caught across the whole sequence of shooting — nocking, drawing, loosing, reaching for the next shaft — each in the white jupon and red cross of Saint George over green and blue, arrows planted in the turf for quick shooting. Massed together they are a shooting line in miniature. Range them against the French chivalry they cut down at Agincourt — the Constable Charles d'Albret, who died on the field, and Marshal Jean de Boucicaut, who was captured on it — with their own Thomas Strickland and the banner of Saint George behind them. In a diorama they hold a stake-line on rising ground, the storm about to fall.

Model: MK-S07 (MK240–MK244) / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 5 figure set