Stonebows Using Marbles?

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Pellet Crossbow ca. 1550 – 1600, Probably Italian or French^[1]

Some of you may hunt with crossbows or may use them recreationally. Others may also use stone bows or pellet bows and you may know all about different type pellets, caliber, velocity, and overall firepower. Well, while we do have a passing knowledge of crossbows used as weapons, stonebows using marbles was a totally new world to us.

We recently learned a few things about them and wanted to share some information and wonderful photographs and images. And, as you may suspect, we will leave you with a conundrum.

A Deadly Art

Dirk H. Breiding served as Assistant Curator in the Arms and Armor Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This collection is now one hundred years old and it contains fourteen thousand objects from around the world. While Breiding features bows from the Museum’s collection while writing this comprehensive study, he writes about bows in Museums all across Europe and in the United States. At least some of the artifact photographs and art in his detailed study are now in Open Access at the Metropolitan Museum and we share a number of these gorgeous artifact photographs with you.

The crossbow dates to China in the 5^th century BC. “A crossbow consists of a bow mounted horizontally and at a right angle to the front, or fore-end, of a support, known as a tiller, or stock. The tiller is fitted with a catch or a lock that allows the bowstring to be retained in a “spanned,” that is, drawn, position for any length of time.”^[3]

Breiding considers that calling the “bullet-shooting crossbow”^[4] a stonebow is “somewhat misleading” and he thinks that a more accurate term would be “pellet” or “bullet” crossbow. He agrees with other academics whom we have read that bows were probably introduced to Europe from the Near East. He also notes that self-bows^[5] “discharging small round projectiles are mentioned in European documents as early as the fourteenth century….” Still, he notes, we do not have pictorial evidence of pellet crossbows in Europe before the sixteenth century.

What Kind of Pellets?

While crossbows shoot bolts or quarrels, pellet crossbows shoot “…small stones, balls, bullets, or other pellets made from clay, marble, or metals like lead and iron alloy.”^[6] In the 16^th century most pellet crossbows were simple and and had two two strings.  Our feature image, while ornate, is an example of a two-string bow loaded with a pellet. “The earliest forms of ammunition included clay balls, which were rolled and baked to form round, hard bullets.”^[7]

On page 119 Breiding tells us that “during the sixteenth century [crossbow pellets] were the size of a large cherry, approximately an inch, or 2.5 cm, in diameter; a rare depiction of clay pellets is found in the portrait of an Italian crossbow maker….The pellets in the nineteenthcentury appear to have been somewhat smaller.” The oil on panel which Breiding refers to is by Lorenzo Lotto (Italian, ca. 1480–1556) and it is named Portrait of a Crossbow Maker (Master Battista di Rocca Contrada), and it dates to about ca. 1551.

Pellet Crossbow Use & When They Were Popular

Lotto’s portrait clearly shows a clay pellet about one inch in diameter. We regret that we do not have permission to publish the image; it is on page 66 in Breiding. We will introduce a question here for your consideration. Why is this one inch baked clay ball not a marble?

Pellet crossbows were favored extensively across southern Europe well into the seventeenth century. The small caliber pellets did less damage to small game such as birds and rabbits, and it was almost silent. It also became the poachers favorite bow and it was used by them for decades.^[9]

Breiding concludes that “by the eighteenth century, the popularity of pellet crossbows appears to have all but vanished throughout continental Europe. Only in England … would pellet crossbows remain in use as hunting weapons until well into the nineteenth century.”

Small Pellet Crossbow                                              

This is a gorgeous bow, isn’t it?  It was probably made for a woman or child. Breiding tells us that this bow has a “finely carved” lion’s head at the front of the tiller. The lion has its mouth open. Even more striking to us is the animal on the dorsal. This is “…a dolphin-like sea monster; [it] has a curled, scaly body with a second face on its back, and it is accompanied by a small lizard or salamander in front” (page72).

This description is only a fragment from Breiding. Surely this is a one-of-a-kind, and unless from the high nobility, we cannot imagine a child being entrusted with this bow. After all, gold is among all the other materials that it is made of! These Italian pellet crossbows were fully developed by the mid-sixteenth century and they were popular for about one hundred years.

The German Pellet Snapper

Take just a moment to compare these two pellet crossbows. The one on the left is characteristic of the “German” type, or Kugelschnepper.

While both are stonebows, the difference in style could not be more different. Look at the butt on the German style as compared to the butt of the Italian. The German stock looks remarkably like a more modern gunstock.There is something else on the German pellet bow. It is too strong to allow spanning by hand [14], so it has a “…lever spanner and release mechanism … permanently secured to the top of the tiller by means of a pivot” (Breiding, page 76). This bow is moving much closer to the musket.

Pellet And Bolt Crossbow Combined With A Wheel-Lock Gun

“The combination of a crossbow and a firearm into a single weapon was probably first undertaken in Italy during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Such weapons soon spread to the German-speaking regions north of the Alps, where they continued to be made well into the seventeenth century. However, the small number of surviving examples and the scarce documentary evidence suggest that this type of combination weapon was rare” (Breiding, page 84).

If you wish to read the technical details of the gun mechanism, then you can start reading on page 84 of Breiding’s book.

This is a pellet crossbow was  crafted by Durs Egg. Egg was a gun maker from Switzerland “…who spent some of his apprenticeship in Paris and eventually settled in England in the early 1770s. He set up his own shop in Princes Street, London, in 1778.” Egg’s work

clearly shows the evolution of the crossbow into a firearm.

Changes in Preference over Time

Breiding explains that “in terms of practicality, the crossbow has often been compared to its ancestor, the self-bow, and occasionally to its successor, the firearm. For the greater part of the period under consideration, the three weapons differed comparatively little in their effective range and varied only somewhat in the initial power that their projectiles delivered at various distances” (page 3). Firearms were introduced simultaneously in different countries as early as 1320.

The Conundrum

Over a period of some 200 years men, women, and children hunted with crossbows which shot pellets of hard baked clay about one inch in diameter, rounded stones, marble, iron alloy, and lead. The smallest pellet crossbows were hand-help and in size they compared to a pistol. And the pellet compound bow was often referred to as a “repeating” bow because it was relatively easy to reload and fire again. The woods all across Europe were widely hunted and landed estates were used by Royalty.^[17]

When Does A Crossbow Pellet Become A Marble?

Hundreds and probably thousands of pellet crossbow shot were left in fields, meadows, and woods all across Europe.. After all, bolts were expensive and every attempt would be exhausted to retrieve them, but pellets were both inexpensive and expendable. And now many European woods have been turned into public lands.

Examples of forests which have been converted into parks are El Bosque Metropolitano in Madrid; Bavarian National Park in Germany; Sherwood in England; and Bois de Bologne in Paris. More conversions are on the drawing board.

Historically in England a Royal Forest is where Kings and Royalty hunted. Today these “…former area[s] of unenclosed countryside designated and introduced by the Norman kings for their pursuit of hunting and generation of income. It was a legal term, and Forest Law was a distinct legal system operating within the Forests which protected the deer and wild boar. Contrary to what their name suggests, Royal Forests were not exclusively covered in trees, but could include tracts of agricultural land and even settlements.”^[18]

First, children may well have grown up in a settlement created from a former estate.She or he may have found pellets in their own yard or garden!

Second, children and adults spend a lot of time in the forests of Europe. They hike, camp, and explore. We can just imagine how many pellet shot must have been found over the years. So, when a child finds a baked clay or ceramic pellet ranging in size from about ⅝” to one inch, like the one on this pellet crossbow, and when the child plays with the pellet in a game of marbles, then is it a marble?

Context

Jo explains that it is all about context. When spanned on a crossbow the ball is a pellet. That same pellet, she believes, becomes a marble when collected and used in a game of marbles. Other examples of context determining use include “Codd”-bottle marbles and even deodorant roller balls!

Agnese Vacca on Archaeological Context

“Agnese Vacca is an archaeologist of the Ancient Near East. She obtained her PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology at Sapienza University of Rome in 2014. From 2015 to 2018 she was Research Fellow at the same university (Department of Classics), on behalf of which she was charged with research activities and support for educational tasks.” She also is 2018 Grant Recipient and she served as Vice-Director of the Italian Archaeological Expedition to the Erbil Plain (MAIPE), Iraqi Kurdistan Università degli Studi di Milano. She is the author of several works in peer-reviewed academic journals, series and conference proceedings….^[19]

Vacca concurs with Jo. In her paper “Where do the Children Play?…” Vacca speaks to this conundrum. Section two of her paper is entitled “Child-related Objects and Playthings: Archaeological Contexts and Problems of Defnition”.^[20] She writes: “The identification of toys as specific forms of child-related material culture is a complicated task. Objects generally interpreted as toys encompass clay rattles, miniature vessels, figurines, and small carts with wheels…. However, there is no unequivocal interpretation of these objects as child-related in the published literature. In fact, their function and meaning may  vary considerably depending on the context in which they were used, resulting in different interpretations ranging from toys to utilitarian items and objects with a ritual purpose and significance ….” We added the emphasis to Vacca report.

We can only imagine an archaeological field survey in ancient woodlands in which the academicians find dozens of clay and stone pellets. First, would someone in the survey attribute the artifacts to adult use as munitions? Would anyone surmise their use in hunting? And finally would anyone be so bold as to suggest that they may be marbles?

Finito

We learned something about crossbows while writing this post. And we learned a great deal about pellet crossbows. Initially, we didn’t even know what they were! We also met a number of people who shared information and images with us. We really enjoyed getting to know them and the exciting work they do in research, languages, history, archaeology, and more.

It is our hope that you enjoyed and learned from this story. As always we give you some references you can check out and read more deeply about a number of subjects. And we do hope that you will check out some of the crossbows in museums all across Europe.

Finally, if you have questions, information, or images to share, please do press the Contact button and share what you have with other marble enthusiasts.

References

1. Medium: Steel, wood (walnut), staghorn, hemp. www.metmuseum.org/ 2/27/2024 ↑
2. Title: Crossbow, Date: ca. 1425–75, Culture: Central European, possibly Austria, Medium: Wood (European hornbeam), horn, animal sinew, animal glue, birch bark, staghorn, iron alloy, hemp, leather, Credit Line: Bashford Dean Memorial Collection, Funds from various donors, 1929. This is a simple yet elegant bow distinguished by inlaid panels decorated with flamelike extensions www.metmuseum.org/ 2/28/2024 ↑
3. Breiding, Dirk H. A Deadly Art European Crossbows, 1250 – 1850. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. ↑
4. “Bullet-shooting crossbow” @ https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Bullet-shooting_crossbow/ 2/28/2024 ↑
5. Think Indigenous American bows. Also used in Africa, the Americas, northern Europe, and Southern Asia. Traditionally a single piece of wood and one bowstring. Can you imagine a Native American firing stones with a bow? ↑
6. Breiding, page 66. ↑
7. “Bullet-shooting crossbow” You might also want to check “The Pellet Bow – What is It?” by Mark F. Cheney in Institute of Maya Studies October 2017 Explorer ↑
8. Title: Pellet and Crossbow, Date: 1573, Culture: Northern Italian or French, probably Savoy, Medium: Steel, wood (cherry, mahogany), staghorn, ivory (probably elephant), Credit Line: Gift of William H. Riggs, 1913. www.metmuseum.org/ 2/29/2024 ↑
9. “Bullet-shooting crossbow” ↑
10. Title: Small Pellet Crossbow, probably for a Woman or a Child, Date: ca. 1575–1650, Culture: probably Italian, , Medium: Steel, wood (probably walnut and ebony) gold, Credit Line: Gift of William H. Riggs, www.metmuseum.org/ 2/29/2024 ↑
11. Sketch produced by Debbie S. Sellman, DS Web Design. Thank you! ↑
12. Title: Pellet Crossbow, , Date: ca. 1600–1650, Culture: German, , Medium: Steel, wood, staghorn, hemp, leather, Credit Line: Gift of William H. Riggs, 1913 www.metmuseum.org/ 3/2/2024 ↑
13. Kugel has a number of possible translations to include: ball; bullet & cannonball; marble; (Papierkugel), & pellet ↑
14. Drawing the bowstringto its full draw length. The sketch above with the box of clay pellets is spanned. ↑
15. Title: Pellet & Bolt Crossbow Combined with a Wheel-Lock Gun, Date: ca. 1570–1600, Designer: Decoration based on designs by Jacob Floris (Central European, 1524 – 1581, published in Antwerp in 1564, Culture: Central European; possibly Southern German or Austrian, Medium: Steel, wood (cherry), staghorn, hemp, felt, Credit Line: Gift of William H. Riggs, 1913 www.metmuseum.org/ 3/2/2024 ↑
16. Digital Number: RI_DC_0000061; Place of Production: London; Source: Dean Castle; 18^th Century. Special thank you to Jennifer Herrera, Development Co-ordinator [Museums], East Ayrshire Trust. ↑
17. You might want to check “How hunting helped shape elite society” @ https://news.mit.edu/2020/manner-of-franks-book-hunting-0910 3/4/2024
18. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199654406.001.0001/acref-9780199654406-e-1896 (3/5/2024). If you love woods and trees like we do then you really need to check out the oak trees a @ “Royal Forests” https://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/ancientoaksofengland/Royalforests 3/5/2024 ↑
19. @ https://whitelevy.fas.harvard.edu/people/agnese-vacca 3/5/2024 ↑
20. “2. Child-related Objects and Playthings: Archaeological Contexts and Problems of Defnition,” pps. 42 – 44. In “Where do the Children Play? Some  Thoughts on Toys in the Ancient Near East during the 3rd Millennium BCE” pages 37 – 61. Agnese Vacca in A Turning World. A Multidisciplinary Approach to Spinning Tops and other Toys and Games, Claudia Lambrugo (ed.), Milano: Milano University Press, 2023. PDF available @ https://www.academia.edu/112192737/Claudia_Lambrugo_ed_A_Turning_World_A_Multidisciplinary_Approach_to_Spinning_Tops_and_Other_Toys_and_Games_Milano_2023_Milano_University_Press 4/6/2024↑

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