So I just watched Ladyhawke, where Rutger Hauer’s character uses a crossbow that has two bows, one on top of the other, ensuring that he can fire two shots without reloading.
Did these weapons actually exist? If so, did they have two triggers? If not, how did you fire one bow at a time?
They must have existed 'cause these people are busily making and selling replicas.
I’m sure they were made - the 14th century must have had “crossbow-nuts” who would buy anything, and I could see some aristocrat commisioning one as a hunting weapon. I doubt they were used by any military force, though. Loading a crossbow takes long enough as it is, so a double rig would basically only have an advantage in the first volley of combat, which is hardly worth the extra weight, complexity and cost.
I think I’d prefer to have a Chinese repeating crossbow.
Why does this mean that they “must have existed”?
??? Um…because the very first line on the website says, “Our crossbows are fully-functioning, 13th to 16th century all-wood replicas”, and not, “Our crossbows are replicas of the double crossbow they used in Ladyhawke”, thus I infer that the answer must be, “Yes, there really were double crossbows and it wasn’t just something Richard Donner and the props department came up with.”
Good point. Some company in Arkansas with a 1998 style web site said so. No doubt they have a few PhD historians on staff.
Do you have a PhD historian on staff who says otherwise?
Oh for fuck sake, I have no idea. I think it should be plainly obvious that a company that sells novelty items isn’t a worthy site that proves that such things existed in history.
I realize that Diceman wants me to prove a negative which of course I can’t do but it’s a slow day at work so I did some checking.
Here is the Wikipedia entry on crossbows and there is no mention of a double cross bow. You’d think that those guys would have mentioned it. I know that many people don’t like Wiki as a source but it might be better than a toy company.
Wiki does have one interesting bit:
It would appear that historically this was how they solved the problem of slow rate of fire on crossbows and that, if the claimed statistics are correct, this is more efficient method than a double crossbow would be with out the extra complication of a second mechanism.
A search for “double cross bow” on Google does give a lot of hits but the first few pages are all for companies that make them now, discussing scenes from fantasy movies and RPGs.
To be clear, I am not even close to a historian, so I will believe that double cross bows were prevalent if I can be shown a proper cite.
I’ve emailed the website selling the double crossbows. We’ll see if they can provide a source or some kind of expertise on the whole thing.
There’s got to be a historian on here somewhere whose cleaned a crossbow or two. Hopefully one will be by to give us some answers.
I came in to second the repeating crossbow.
Double Crossbow : Double barrel shot gun :: Repeating crossbow : Machine gun.
I think we have a clear winner.
I don’t know if they existed, but it seems a distinct possibility.
Aside from that, the idea of them has been around in pop culture longer ago than Ladyhawke. One shows up in Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “The God in the Bowl”, written before 1936 and published in 1952:
(I suppose it’s possible that L. Sprague de Camp added that detail, but I doubt it. It would probably make it more likely – de Camp was a stickler for authenticity.) It appeared in the Conan comic book in the early 1970s, double crossbow and all.
None of the milestones in historical crossbow literature (Payne-Gallwey, R. : The Crossbow, Alm, J. : European Crossbows; Harmuth, E. Die Armbrust & Paterson, W.F. : A Guide to the Crossbow) mention or depict double crossbows, nor have I ever seen a non-modern one in my 20 years of bowyery (period crossbows and handbows).
There are extant examples of crossbows that shot two arrows at once, by means of two bolt grooves side by side but only one bow for propulsion.