About AD 490 Clovis, king of the Franks, put the Salic Laws in writing. In them there is a mention of a fine of 2,500 dinars for anyone shooting a poisoned arrow at a man, whether he hit or miss, and a fine of 54 solidi for cutting off the fingers of the hand a man would use to draw the bowstring.
In the midst of these dark, and so little recorded times, there is suddenly evidence of the utmost importance. In the eighth century in Germany longbows of yew wood were in use — eight were found at Lupfen in Wurtemburg — shaped so that the tensile sapwood was used on the back. It had been discovered again, or perhaps it was a knowledge never quite lost, that within a yew-log, rightly cut from the tree, are the natural components of a 'self-composite' weapon, the perfect natural material to resist tension, the sapwood, lying next to the perfect natural material to resist compression, the heartwood.
Not long after the Romans had gone from Britain, but before the Danes had really begun their main incursions into the country, in 633, Offrid, the son of Edwin king of Northumbria, was killed by an arrow in battle with the Welsh and the Mercians. We cannot be certain that the arrow flew from a Welsh bow, but since the inland races in Britain do not seem to have been addicts of military archery this may be the first reference in recorded history to the bow in the hands of the people who for centuries have been credited with introducing the longbow to the British islands and with being the first exponents of its general military use, which, taken up by the English and their Norman rulers some hundreds of years after Offrid's death, led to the great archer armies of the 14th and 15th centuries.
If the Welsh did not have bows yet, it cannot have been long before they adopted the weapon from the raiding Danes, but it is more than likely that, however they first came by it, the Welsh, among all the tribes in the British Isles, either retained the use of the bow from much earlier times, or invented it for themselves long before there could have been any chance for them to have learned of its use from the Scandinavians.
By 870 the Danes were in many parts of Britain. In battle against the Anglian King Edmund, they defeated him, captured him, tied him to a tree and shot him to death. In the early 1900s the stump of the tree, which tradition said was the one to which Edmund had been tied, was torn and twisted in a violent storm. Deep in the wrenched trunk were found ancient arrowheads. Sadly, there is no report of any of them surviving today, or of their being examined for type or date.
