Shooting at the Standard in Finsbury Fields

Stow wrote that before his time the lord mayor, sheriffs and aldermen of London used to go out at Bartholomew-tide into the fields at Finsbury, where the citizens had gathered, and shoot at the standard with broad and flight arrows for games. The shooting once went on for several days. By Stow’s own day, and he died in 1605, it had shrunk to a single afternoon three or four days after St Bartholomew’s Day. Brand quotes the account from Strutt as a sign of the decline of the longbow near London.