Imagine a mounted archery competition. What do you see? There’s a lane—probably taped off. Some stationary targets are on stands at known distances. Competitors go one at a time—sometimes at a canter, sometimes a walk—and shoot (usually three) target arrows made of carbon with smooth little heads on them from bows with a draw weight ranging between 20# and 30#. The rules have to be standardized so people across the world, competing at different times and in different places, can compare scores fairly.
Now imagine a battle, its belligerents on horseback, armed with bows. Grim and fatal business. What do you see? Hopefully not the same thing.
Let’s go back a little bit: imagine now, before the battle, training for it. It’s deadly work. Warriors train to kill and prepare themselves for the eventuality of being killed. How do they train? Does this training look like a mounted archery competition?
No, of course it doesn’t. In battle, the targets shoot back. There are no lanes—none that anyone would be foolish enough to follow, anyway. If enemy combatants are armored with something more substantial than a pizza box, they must be struck hard with heavy arrows with deadly heads on them to reliably defeat them. The warriors must work together as a group to be successful, not doom themselves by going one at a time. These are all very basic combat conditions, and mounted archery competition replicates zero of them.
That’s to say nothing of the rigors and harrows of campaigning in war; the stamina needed to fight, especially when tired, sick, and underfed; and the control over oneself, one’s mount, and one’s weapon when entering into the highest level of excitement a human being can possibly experience.
Is the sport of competitive mounted archery a Martial art? I would call any training that prepares someone to help determine the outcome of a violent engagement “Martial art.” The author’s humble opinion is that competitive mounted archery, as we know it, does not do this well.
How about a friendly competition?
There is no inherent problem with competition, per se. Fighting, by any authoritative definition, is competitive, and to train Martial art in earnest, one must train against someone—in other words, compete. (The English language seems to lack a clear distinction between, on the one hand, competing by doing the same thing as other competitors for the highest score, and on the other hand, engaging with and interfering with the other competitors. A swimmer does not, for example, interfere with other swimmers in a swimming competition; but a water polo player does. The latter form of competition is infinitely more emulative of the Martial experience.)
But let us say, for example, two mounted warriors—whose actual occupations are to fight, astride, and whose primary weapon is the bow—want to play for sport, to settle who is better at Martial skill, and who want to keep their heads in a Martial mindset. So they come up with a game: “Let us strike three targets while riding at full speed, and see who does better.”
This seems like a totally sensible way to pass the time in camp. Still Martial.
They compete, and one is faster, but the other strikes truer.
Who won?
They squabble about it and determine that they should have devised clearer rules.
So let’s do this again. Time is worth this much, and accuracy is worth that much. Between the two who wanted to determine who was better, informally, and just for fun, they tie, or at least agree to tie. They have warring to do. The outcome of this game isn’t that important—keeping their Martial skills sharp is.
But next year—and let’s say it’s peacetime—another cavalryman wants to try the same game. This rider shoots better and rides faster. “I am the best,” the rider proclaims. This gets around to the other two, who protest that the circumstances were different and it was unfair. Another round of rules helps to clarify who, in fact, is best, and another competition is held. But this time, they’re not just passing time, they’re not just trying to keep their skills sharp and stay battle-ready with improvised, informal Martial exercises—this time, they are trying to win this game for the sake of winning this game, against each other and against future competitors. They must, for the sake of fairness, remove novel conditions (which is about the only constant in fighting).
Several generations of rules have been determined at this point of our hypothetical competition, to make it fair to all current and future competitors, which naturally includes a scoring rubric.
The objective of this Martial exercise takes a sharp turn about here. Competitors are no longer trying to show that they’re better fighters, or improve their fighting ability, with a Martial exercise; they are now trying to score the highest.
Accuracy is important. So is speed. This has been true since our first hypothetical competition. But now scoring is important—and war is not—so we will see a marked departure from some Martial devices. Lighter draw weights on the bows make them faster to draw, lighter arrows make them easier to handle, and both make them overall easier to loose. These make for a higher score. They do not make for more Martial efficacy. And here, when we have a score-based competition, our competitors—if they wish to do well—will be training for the score, even if that means, as it usually does, that they do so at the expense of the training’s relevance to fighting.
When trying to improve your score, you try to make the task as easy as possible. When trying to improve your skill, you want to make the task as difficult as possible.
We are not done with affronts to good Martial sense. Now that gaming the game (despite Martial irrelevance) has become common practice, new gear to facilitate this sportification crops up, and new craftsmen or manufacturers come forward to fill the demand. Training grows around this new gear, facilitating techniques impossible with weapons-grade equipment, in a co-evolutionary cycle.
No one in her right mind would try to win a modern, typical, mounted archery competition (as governed by the modern four-letter acronymic organizations) with a war weight bow, because a heavier bow would make her perform worse in competition. It would, however, make her perform better in combat. The sport, ostensibly Martial, incentivizes its players to do things less Martial to win. That is blatant bastardization of Martial art. That’s sportification.
Finally, what was once an exercise to make one better at warring, a means to a separate ends, has now become an end in and of itself. People don’t play the sport to get better at fighting. They play the sport to get better at the sport. That’s not Martial art.
This is true not only for mounted archery, by the way. Look at almost any sport or anything that has a score attached to it. Consider what it might once have been when used as a training exercise to some other end. Consider what it was before it was scored and done for the sake of getting better at the training exercise, itself. Consider what it has done to the art of riding horses—scoring riding has almost ruined generations of riders from riding functionally.
And this is why what people conventionally call “mounted archery” is not Martial. It has done for the Martial art of mounted archery what fencing has done for the Martial art of the sword.
At Martial Equestrian, we play games as Martial exercises. They are informal, constantly evolving or changing, and the moment someone figures out an exploit to win the game by leveraging the rules (despite good Martial sense), we move on to another game. The point of the game is not the game, itself, but the skill, competence, and confidence its players gain by playing it.
Martial Equestrian 