When a bird is hit fair and square it comes down, and the shot is
cheered. Sometimes shot after shot is fired, and nothing falls,
especially if there is a wind. But the interest never flags, and the
shooting goes on for hours. There is a great deal of talking and
laughing, much beer is drunk in the pavilion, and the fun only ends
when the light fails.
This is the great national sport of Belgium. There is scarcely a town
or village which has not a Society of Archers, called generally after
St. Sebastian, the patron saint of archers. Many of them were founded
600 years ago, at the time when the famous archers of England were
showing how well they could hold their own with the bow against
knights clad in heavy armour. In 1303 a society called the
Confraternity of the Archers of St. Sebastian was founded at Ypres, a
town in Flanders, to celebrate a great battle, the Battle of the
Golden Spurs, in which the Flemings had been victorious over the
French the year before, and this society still exists. The chief
Society of Archers in Brabant in the old days was at Louvain, and it
was founded just three years before that Battle of Cressy of which you
have so often heard, when, as the old chronicler Froissart says, the
English arrows flew so thick that it seemed to snow.
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