Beside the longbow was the crossbow. It is said to have been used at Hastings but there is no picture of one in the Bayeux Tapestry. The crossbow involved no new principle. It was a very small, very stiff bow, set crosswise at the end of a staff or stock. Practically a small ballista. Its great advantage was that it could be drawn ahead of time and could hold its draw while the bow was aimed, and it could be raised to eye level and sighted. Actually, the early ones were pretty poor weapons, but the Pope considered them too murderous for "Christian warfare" and pronounced an rule against them in 1139. The use of them against infidels was permitted, however. Richard the Lion-Hearted disobeyed this rule, and people generally felt that it served him right when he was killed by a crossbow bolt.

There was a metal stirrup on the front of the crossbow stock. When he wished to set the bow, the archer put one foot into the stirrup, then grasped the bowstring with his hands and strained it back far enough to hook it over a little catch called the "nut." The nut was something like a spool with a notch in it. The notch held the string until pulling the trigger allowed the spool to rotate enough to let the string slip off. This device was never improved upon for its purpose.

Mostly the crossbow used short arrows called bolts. Later, because they had square heads, these were called quarrels. The heads were iron. The short, thick shafts were wood and the "feathers" were leather or paper. War quarrels were quite roughly made and had two vanes, which were made as one and inserted into a saw-cut which was lashed tight behind them.

It isn't known just when the first gadget appeared for helping to set a crossbow. It was called a belt claw and that's what it was: a double hook hung from a belt. By hooking it on the string and sticking a foot in the stirrup, a man could take advantage of his strong leg muscles and so set a bow too stiff for his arms.

After the bow was set the bolt was placed in the groove with its square end (a bolt seldom had a nock) lying between the two lugs of the nut and against the string. To shoot, the bowman raised the stock to eye level, sighted directly at his target over the knuckle of his right thumb and squeezed the trigger.

There were disadvantages. The crossbow was heavy. It was slow. It could shoot only one quarrel while the longbow was delivering six arrows. Though it did not require a specialist and was more accurate at short range in the hands of the average soldier than the longbow was, yet its range was so short that it often couldn't be brought close enough to the enemy to bother him. The bowstring was ordinarily twisted of sinew or gut, and in damp weather it became entirely limp and useless; armies which depended heavily on the crossbow found this to be something worse than a mere nuisance.

The constant efforts which were made to increase the power of the crossbow presently resulted in adding whalebone and animal tendons to the basic yew frame. This composite was an improvement, and it was now too stiff for a man to set even with a belt claw. A simple little purchase was invented to help with the job. This was a short piece of rope running through a pulley which had a hook on it to engage the bowstring. One end of the rope was attached to the archer's belt; the other end could be hitched to the stock of the crossbow.

To set his bow the bowman with his foot in the stirrup, bent forward, hooked on to the string and the stock simply straightened up. In addition to taking advantage of the strong muscles of the lower back and hips, this gave a mechanical advantage of nearly two to one; so a weak soldier could set a strong man's bow and crossbowmen didn't have to be really strong.