He’s a straight shooter about longbows and arrows
When Stephen Ralphs was 5 years old, he was given a copy of “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” Fifty years later, he found himself on Russell Crowe’s farm in Australia giving private archery lessons in preparation for director Ridley Scott’s movie “Robin Hood.”
“From the age of 5, I wanted to be Robin Hood,” said Ralphs, who lives on the medieval archery ground of the village of Kenninghall in Norfolk, England. “It was something that never left me, the idea of this outlaw who had the longbow, and he didn’t like to be told what to do. It’s an attitude. And some people have a little bit, and some have a lot more. I probably had a little bit more than I should have had.”
Holding with a tradition that the male of the family should receive his first longbow at 7, the age of reason, Ralphs’ father crafted a weapon for his young son. “We went off and found a yew tree, and he showed me how to do it,” Ralphs said. “And I was always known locally as ‘that boy with the bow and arrow,’ so it was something that was with me from a very early age.”
Still, Ralphs’ path to a career in archery wasn’t straight as an arrow. At age 19, he left school to become a printer, and he also tried his luck as a rock musician. But he always made longbows as a hobby and gave them to friends.
“I had a friend that had left the army, and he said, ‘You can sell these.’ And I said, ‘Nah, no one wants to buy these. These are just sticks.’ And he said, ‘Well, give me three.’ So I gave him three, and he came back the next day and threw 200 bucks on the table and said, ‘There. See, people will buy them.’ ”
By his late 20s, Ralphs started an archery company, which began doing projects for theater, television and film — including 2000’s “Gladiator,” 2004’s “King Arthur,” 2005’s “Kingdom of Heaven” and now “Robin Hood.”
Bow and arrowsmith: Ralphs made more than 200 longbows for “Robin Hood,” relying on knowledge that has been passed down in his family for generations. “There are only certain timbers you can actually make bows from,” he said. “The best wood is from a yew tree. It forms a natural spring because the wood has a very soft sapwood that remains elastic and a very hard heartwood. And what a bowyer is looking for is almost perfect timber, which is funny because nowadays we import the best timber from the Cascade Mountains in America, in the States. But in medieval England, it was imported from Italy, from the Baltic states as a form of taxation. If I was bringing in so much wine, by law, I had to bring in so many bow staves, because the defense of the realm depended upon it. The string was either made from hemp, flax or linen, but they also had top quality strings made of silk. And we think possibly they might have put a bit of gut in them. And then at the end of each part of the bow, the tips, there was a part called a horn nock, and that was made from ox or cow horn, because the wood is so delicate that the bow string would split the timber.”
Callous behavior: Archers sometimes wear leather shooting gloves to protect their fingers, but Crowe insisted that Robin Hood could tough it out. “Russell said, ‘Why don’t you shoot with a glove?’ And I said, ‘Because you get far more accuracy and more feel for the arrow if you don’t wear a glove. Plus, I’ve been shooting since I was 7, and I’m so old and crusty now, it’s like playing the guitar. I don’t have to.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t want to wear a glove.’ So I made these little rawhide extra fingertips that went on his fingers that he was quite happy with. So we used those in the film.”
Zing went the strings: In addition to Crowe, Ralphs trained approximately 500 background actors to look like they’d been holding longbows since they were in short pants. “First thing is you explain the equipment, and then you try to explain a bit of the history,” he said. “When I go onto a film, and I say to everyone, ‘This 6 foot of timber is designed to keep you alive. It’ll look after your family, it’ll put food on the table, and if you’re really lucky, it’ll bring you home rich.’ That’s what these guys did: They went from England to France, and hopefully they would hold someone to ransom or come back with something worth money, which they would then sell. They used to say that an English archer carried the lives of 24 Frenchmen under his belt, that they were his 24 arrows.”
Pointing in the right direction: Ralphs was able to get something off everybody’s backs. “Hollywood has a love of putting the arrows on everyone’s backs,” he said. “Well, a medieval arrow is 32 inches long, and you cannot physically pull the arrow out from behind you, put it on the bowstring and then shoot. All the actions in archery are small motions, and they’re done very precisely, because they come from hunting, and you don’t want to scare the animal that you’re trying to hunt. So you always start with an arrow on the string, on the bow, ready to shoot.”