IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 249

The longbow was not a new invention in the fourteenth century. Bows of yew and elm had been used in Wales and England for centuries, and English armies had fought with archers against the Welsh and the Scots long before the wars in France began. What changed was the scale. Between the 1330s and the 1420s the kings of England repeatedly shipped thousands of archers across the Channel, sometimes outnumbering the men-at-arms, and paid them from the royal treasury. A formidable weapon and an unusually well-organised system of recruitment together gave the English an advantage for almost a century.

The weapon itself was simple in construction. A longbow was usually cut from a single piece of yew, roughly 1.8 metres long, and drawn not to the chest but to the ear, so that the archer could sight along the arrow. Bows recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose suggest that the heaviest required a pulling force of well over a hundred pounds. An experienced archer could loose ten or twelve arrows in a minute, several times the rate of a crossbowman, whose weapon had to be wound up with a crank.

Skill of this kind could not be learned overnight. Archery was an ordinary recreation among English and Welsh commoners, and the crown deliberately encouraged it. A statute of 1363 ordered men to practise shooting on Sundays and feast days, and forbade them to waste their leisure on other games. Villages laid out butts, or earth mounds, as targets, and boys began with small bows and moved to heavier ones as they gained strength. The result was a large reserve of men who could shoot quickly and accurately before they were ever recruited.

The lessons of the new tactics were learned first against the Scots. At Dupplin Moor in 1332 a small English force, fighting on ground of its own choosing, destroyed a much larger Scottish army, and at Halidon Hill the following year English archers, supported by dismounted knights, won another decisive victory.

The most famous early demonstration came in 1346. Edward III landed in Normandy with a large army and, after a long march, turned to fight near Crécy in Ponthieu on 26 August. Philip VI of France brought a far larger force, including thousands of Genoese crossbowmen, and attacked late in the day without waiting for the rest of his army. A thunderstorm had saturated the ground and, according to chroniclers, slackened the crossbow strings, while the longbows, kept dry, were less affected. The English archers stood on the wings, and the French cavalry, charging uphill through mud, were cut down in waves.

Ten years later, at Poitiers, an English army under Edward the Black Prince was trapped by a much larger French force and fought its way out with archers posted in a gap between woods and hedges. King John II of France was captured, and his ransom was enormous.

Agincourt in October 1415 is the most celebrated of all the archers' victories, partly because Shakespeare wrote a play about it. Henry V, whose army was weakened by disease and short of supplies, was marching towards Calais when a far larger French army blocked his route. The battlefield narrowed to a muddy field between two woods. After a night of rain the French men-at-arms had to advance through deep mud, while the English archers, who had hammered sharpened stakes into the ground in front of them and were now ordered forward, shot from very close range. Losses among the French nobility were catastrophic, and although the figures in the chronicles are vastly exaggerated, the defeat was real.

Behind these battles lay an administrative achievement. The English archer was usually a free man — a yeoman farmer, craftsman or tenant — recruited by contract or conscription and paid wages, not a peasant pressed unwillingly into service. Captains were contracted to raise fixed numbers of archers for fixed sums, and the crown's ability to fund this system was the real foundation of English success. When money ran short, companies mutinied, deserted or turned to plunder.

In recent decades military historians have asked whether the longbow has been overrated. Tests with reconstruction bows have shown that an arrow could rarely pierce good plate armour at long range, and many French knights may have been killed by arrows that struck unarmoured horses, or in hand-to-hand fighting once they had been thrown to the ground. Archers were vulnerable too: they needed a position they could defend, a supply of arrows and, ultimately, dismounted men-at-arms to protect them. Few scholars would now claim that the weapon explained everything.

The longbow's day passed for reasons that had little to do with its effectiveness. Firearms and field artillery became cheaper, more reliable and easier to teach, and an armoury of arrows could not compete with a supply of powder and shot. English bowmen fought on for much of the sixteenth century, and the Mary Rose was carrying archers when it sank in 1545, but after that the weapon played no part in European warfare.

The longbow has nevertheless retained a hold on the English imagination, and images of arrows darkening the sky have shaped the way the Hundred Years' War is remembered. The evidence does not support the more romantic version of that story. It does show, however, that a country able to organise, pay and train its ordinary inhabitants could defeat richer and more heavily armed opponents for generations.

Among the hazards of long-distance voyaging in the age of sail, none was more feared than scurvy. Its symptoms were unmistakable: gums that swelled and bled, teeth that loosened, skin blotched with bruises, joints that ached, and wounds healed years earlier that broke open again. Victims became listless and short of breath, and in the final stages they died, sometimes within weeks of the first signs. The disease could cripple a fleet far from any enemy. On the voyage of Commodore George Anson in 1740–44, more than 1,300 of the roughly 1,900 men who set out died, the great majority from scurvy and disease.

The cause lay in the diet. A ship's provisions were designed to keep for months or years: salt beef and pork, hard biscuit, dried peas, oatmeal and beer. What they lacked was fresh vegetables and fruit, and with them the substance that the body cannot make for itself and must obtain from food. It was not until the 1930s, with the identification of vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, that this was understood. The vitamin is needed for the production of collagen, the protein that holds skin, blood vessels and gums together; without it, connective tissue weakens, which explains why old scars reopen and why gums bleed. The body stores only a limited amount, so a diet with no source of the vitamin produces scurvy within a few months.

Hints of a remedy were available long before the cause was understood. In 1601 the English East India Company's first fleet sailed under James Lancaster, who gave lemon juice to the men of his own ship; they remained healthy while the crews of the other three ships were devastated. Some years later John Woodall, surgeon-general of the company, recommended lemon juice in a manual for ships' surgeons. Such advice was repeated sporadically, yet it was never adopted as policy, and the reasons are revealing: the observations were isolated, the reports contradictory, and the remedy was expensive and difficult to keep. Some of those who wrote about the disease were convinced they had found the answer; others were equally sure they had not.

The man usually credited with putting the question on a firmer footing is James Lind, a Scottish surgeon who served in the Royal Navy and later published a treatise on the disease in 1753. In May 1747, aboard HMS Salisbury, he selected twelve sailors with similar symptoms, divided them into six pairs and gave each pair a different treatment: cider, a sulphuric acid mixture known as elixir of vitriol, vinegar, sea water, a paste of garlic and other ingredients, or two oranges and a lemon. The last pair recovered quickly, and one was fit for duty within a week. Lind stopped that part of the experiment when the fruit ran out.

Yet Lind did not conclude that citrus fruit was the answer. He regarded it as one remedy among several, possibly useful in the early stages, and continued to believe that scurvy arose from damp air, putrid food and the general conditions of shipboard life. His preferred preventive was a concentrated preparation made by boiling down citrus juice, a process that destroys most of the vitamin it contains. Nor did his book cause any immediate change in naval practice. He was, in short, a careful observer trapped inside a theory that could not explain what he had seen.

The decisive change came decades later and owed as much to administration as to science. Reports from the 1780s and 1790s, including trials on individual ships, persuaded influential naval physicians such as Gilbert Blane that lemon juice protected crews. In 1795 the Admiralty ordered that a ration of lemon juice be issued throughout the fleet, and the effect was striking: the disease largely disappeared from naval vessels on long service. The juice came mainly from Sicily and was supplied mixed with sugar and spirits as a preservative. The navy's success was an argument in itself, though the explanation remained missing for another 130 years.

Unintended consequences followed. When supplies of Mediterranean lemons became unreliable, the navy turned to limes from the British West Indies, which contained considerably less of the vitamin; voyages to the tropics, where fresh food could be obtained, were less demanding than polar ones, and so the substitution went unnoticed for a time. British sailors acquired the nickname 'limeys' as a result. The weaker limes may help to explain why scurvy returned on nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions, and why the disease continued to appear in armies, prisons and besieged cities long after the navy had solved its own problem.

Modern accounts of scurvy rest on several kinds of evidence. Naval musters, hospital records and ships' logbooks allow historians to count deaths and to compare one voyage with another, though the categories used by eighteenth-century clerks were not consistent. Medical texts and correspondence reveal what surgeons believed and recommended. Since the 1930s, laboratory work has supplied the mechanism. And bioarchaeologists now identify the disease in excavated skeletons, where scurvy leaves distinctive traces: porous patches and new bone growth on the skull, and changes at the ends of long bones. Each source has its limits — a skeleton can show that someone suffered, not what they ate — and the full picture emerges only when the different lines of evidence are read together. Historians also differ over how much weight to give Lind's small experiment, whose results were not the only evidence available.

Ask almost anyone over fifty about the town they grew up in and you will hear a version of the same story: the shops were friendlier, the streets were safer, the children played outside until dark. Very little of this is likely to survive contact with the evidence. Towns change, and some things improve while others deteriorate, but the remembered place is rarely a careful average. What interests me is not whether the memory is accurate — it usually is not — but whether the impulse behind it is healthy. My conclusion, which I will try to earn, is that nostalgia is a good emotion and a bad programme: we should trust it as a feeling and refuse it as an argument.

The word itself was invented to describe an illness. In 1688 a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, coined it from two Greek words meaning 'return' and 'pain' to describe the homesickness of Swiss soldiers serving far from home. He treated it as a medical condition with physical symptoms, and for more than two centuries it was understood that way: military doctors recorded it as a diagnosis during the American Civil War, and armies worried about it as a threat to discipline. Homesickness was the disease; the longing for a lost time came much later.

By the twentieth century the diagnosis had vanished from medicine, and the word had drifted towards its modern sense: a fond, slightly painful longing for a period or a place that no longer exists. The drift happened alongside a boom in the business of remembering. Museums of industry, open-air heritage sites, anniversary programmes and costume dramas now present the past to large audiences, and they are often accused of selling a cleaned-up version of it. Some of that criticism is fair. Much of it, though, mistakes a symptom for a cause.

Psychologists, meanwhile, have been unkind to the assumption that nostalgia is a disorder. A group of researchers at the University of Southampton, led by Constantine Sedikides, has published a long series of studies in which participants are asked to bring a nostalgic memory to mind. The results are consistent: people who do so tend to report feeling more socially connected, more optimistic and more confident that their lives have meaning, and the effect is strongest among those who feel lonely or unsettled. This is not what one would expect if nostalgia were mere sentimentality.

There is also a plausible explanation in the way memory works. Psychologists have found that adults recall a disproportionate number of events from roughly the ages of ten to thirty, a period known as the reminiscence bump. Those are the years in which people form their sense of who they are, and it may be that the memories are retained precisely because they are useful. On this account nostalgia is a resource: a store of experience that can be drawn on when the present is difficult, and a reminder of the kind of person one has been.

None of this makes the memories accurate. Memory is reconstructive: each act of recall involves rebuilding the past, and it is shaped by what we now believe and feel. The term 'rosy retrospection' was coined by psychologists to describe the tendency to rate past events more favourably than the same events were rated at the time. Scurvy, cholera, dangerous factories and the deaths of children were ordinary features of the world that the heritage industry presents as charming, and it does no service to anyone to pretend otherwise.

The more serious objection is political. Shared nostalgia can be generous, as when a country mourns work it has lost or landscapes it has damaged. But it can also be exclusive, since the golden age is always remembered from the standpoint of those who did well out of it. A longing for a period of full employment, stable communities and national confidence may look innocent to the people who remember it and threatening to the people who were excluded from it. Several studies have found that reminding people of a supposedly better past can increase hostility towards outsiders; the memory becomes a standard against which newcomers are measured and found wanting.

That is why the political use of nostalgia deserves scrutiny while the personal version deserves sympathy. A politician who promises to restore a lost world is not describing a policy; the offer is a feeling, and the price is power. It is worth noticing how often the golden age is placed a generation before the speaker's own childhood. History, by contrast, is an inquiry rather than a consolation. It does not present a golden age; it shows how the present was assembled out of conflict and accident, which is a less comforting but more usable story.

So where does that leave the question? I think we should stop asking whether nostalgia is healthy, as though it were a vitamin we might take in the right dose. The feeling is not optional; it comes unbidden and it does real work, maintaining friendships, sustaining loyalties and making loss bearable. What is optional is whether we treat it as evidence. The past as we remember it is a place we can visit but not a place we can live, and the sensible use of nostalgia is to ask what it is telling us that we miss, and then to build that thing — if we can — in the present.