"A cloth-yard was used to measure cloth. It is an inch longer than an ordinary yard. A natural way to measure cloth is to hold one end in one hand, and measure along the edge to the nose, then repeat, and these would be cloth-yards. I measure thread for making
lace in the same way. A cloth-yard shaft was an arrow a cloth-yard long." from the following
Imperial Measures of Length
http://everything2.com/title/Clothyard
The
clothyard, or
clothier's yard, was a unit of length measure from the times of
Medieval England. It was an important unit in that many sources available tell us that it was the commonly accepted length of the
arrow used in the
British Longbow, a critically important technological and sociological weapon from around the era of the
Hundred Years' War. It is fixed in popular culture, as the introductory quote demonstrates, by its use in the tale of
Robin Hood, whose arrows were described to be of such length.
Robert E. Kaiser (
MA) writes in the
Journal of Archer-Antiquaries that the origin of the term
clothyard dates to the reign of (King Edward III), who introduced the
Flemish weaver into England. These weavers, makers of fine cloths which were prized by the nobility, had their own unit of measure; their 'yard' was 27.25 inches, as opposed to the standard 36 inches. This was the '
clothier's yard.'
One of the sole surviving examples of a Medieval British war arrow, in the libraries of
Westminster Abbey, is of a length of one clothyard. The term itself survives in many writings of the day. Further evidence for its use (as distinct from a standard yard) as the unit of measure of a war arrow lies in a proof, by
John E. Morris (modern scholar of Edward III's military) that a 36 inch (standard yard) pull from a period
yew longbow of 65-70 lbs. is
biomechanically improbable, if not impossible - tending to support the theory of a shorter standard arrow.
On the other hand, an
SCA guide to period archery claims that the arrow length was, in fact,
not a clothyard but rather around 36 inches - despite the latter investigation above. To continue the confusion, some modern sources put the length of a clothyard at 37 inches or longer - Russ Rowlett's dictionary of units at
UNC states that the clothyard, in the form of the English
ell (a unit for the measuring of cloth at the time] was in fact "45 inches (1.143 meters)...but the 'clothyard arrows' used with
longbows in late medieval times were closer in length to the 37-inch
Scottish ell."
One point of agreement, however, appears to be that the clothyard was indeed a unit of measure specific to the
textile industry of the day. The second is that it was (and is) popularly applied to the length of at least one type of
longbow war arrow; this is the usage modern folk will be most familiar with.
Sources: