A bow without a string is just a stick! Making bow strings is a skill that you have to quickly learn when you shoot as much as we do, although you can purchase them premade from shops such as ours (nowstrikearchery.com) but it is much more satisfying and cost effective to do it yourself. 

One of the most common questions that we get asked is “what are the strings made from?” Now we know that’s not the actual question the person is asking so when we answer with the correct name of the material “B55” we are often met with blank stares. The question most people mean to ask is “what were the strings made from?” and the truthful answer is we aren’t really sure. Being an organic material historically strings haven’t survived the test of time, in fact barely any bows have either considering the great quantity that they were produced. The Mary Rose Trust is the best source of original longbows however it is only the wooden part that survived, the horn nocks and the strings being lost to time. However they do claim to have a fragment of original string and if it is what they think it is, then it would suggest quite plausibly that the strings were made from hemp. 

In recent years others have successfully made hemp and linen strings for heavier draw longbows so with experimental research it seems that there might be an answer, especially as other cultures e.g. Japan make similar. Without a time machine we will probably never know for sure.

The strings we make for our own bows is a modern bow string material which is much more reliable and easier to source than the historic alternative, though the techniques we use for the loops we believe is similar to the Medieval counterparts. This is a skill that we teach on our two day longbow making course though if you come to shoot with us, having watched the video below, you’ll have an appreciation for the handmade nature of the bows.