[This video] (https://youtu.be/BEG-ly9tQGk) shows a Danish man shooting a bow in extraordinary ways. Now I understand if archers did have a quiver it was to hold the arrows inbetween fights while during a fight they held arrows in their hand, but did they all shoot like that? I could see Huns, Mongols, Turks, Persians, maybe Chinese, and maybe even Kievan Rus/ Novgorod/ Muscovy archers shooting like that.
However, I'm not sold on European archers fighting like that. Although the movie is trash, I find it much more believable that European archers shot like they did in Braveheart where they stuck their arrows in the ground and used one at a time, in a stationary position.
While certain things Andersen suggests are based on reality, his claims that this is deep hidden archery lore that modern archers/historians have ignored is ridiculous nonsense to rack up views for his trick shooting videos. Holding arrows in the bow hand is possible, but would probably be more common for horse archers rather than foot archers. The same goes for quivers. While quivers were not unknown to European archers, arrows for immediate use were generally carried in the belt. There is a vast amount of art depicting this. Some of it shows archers simply shoving arrows into their belts, while others have the arrows tied to the belt by a cord or strap. From the practical perspective, tying them to the belt would be better for carrying a larger amount of arrows than simply shoving them through. It could be considered similar to modern methods of carrying a handgun: you can simply shove a pistol into your waistband, but it's going to be much safer, more comfortable, and more practical to have a holster for it. Sometimes quivers do seem to have been used by English archers. Special leather quivers were purchased for the king's bodyguard of archers in the late 14th century. A sketch of a dead English soldier in an early 16th century Swiss chronicle shows the man carrying some kind of arrow-bag, although the bag is a little large and weird-looking for a quiver. Possibly it was just a bag for hauling around a large number of arrows and not a proper "quiver" as we would think of it. There's some general art depicting arrow-bags as well, like this guy and this guy, whose bag seems to be halfway between a quiver and the usual method of tying arrows onto the belt.
Hi, there was a good thread on this video a while back, with participation from several flaired users
The post is archived now, so if you have more questions for any of those users, ask here and tag their username to notify them
