Longbow Archery Club

affiliated to the British Longbow Society

Ettrick Forest Archers © All Rights Reserved.

The Royal Company of Archers

History of the Arrow

 

 

The Selkirk Silver Arrow was a prize inaugurated by the Royal Burgh of Selkirk in the year 1660. It was to be competed for annually by local archers using longbows and the winner was given the honour of attaching his personal medallion to the chain attached to the Arrow, whereupon it was kept in the Burgh, there for all to see.

 

The competition, about which no details are known, apparently ceased in 1674 the date of the last of nine original medallions. The Arrow was thereafter safely stored in the Selkirk charter chest where it was known to be in 1747.

 

In 1818, Sir Walter Scott, the noted writer and Sheriff of Selkirk, unearthed the largely forgotten Arrow and arranged for an invitation to be issued to the Royal Company of Archers to come to Selkirk and compete for it against local archers. A member of the Company of Archers won it in 1819 and it was then taken by them to Edinburgh where it has since been safely kept.

 

The Burgh did request it back in 1835 and the Royal Company of Archers, by now appointed the Sovereign’s personal bodyguard in Scotland, agreed to this. However, Bailie Clarkson of Selkirk, ordered by the Burgh Council to fetch the Arrow from Edinburgh, inexplicably came back without it and the Arrow is not referred to again in the surviving records.

 

In the intervening decades, the RCA have periodically returned to Selkirk with the Arrow, and, with much colourful ceremony, currently compete for it amongst themselves every six years.

 

In 1985 the original letter commissioning the making of the Arrow of July 1660 was discovered among the Walter Mason Papers. It was written by John Angus, Town Clerk of Selkirk, to his brother in Edinburgh. This discovery planted the seed of an idea to see if the Arrow could be returned for display in Selkirk. The letter recounts how ‘Ane Egyptian’ (a Gypsy) was caught trying to sell a ‘quarter pound of silver plate’ to a Selkirk Merchant but then escaped leaving the silver behind which was thereupon used to make the Arrow. It was fashioned by Captain James Fairbairn, the Deacon of  the Edinburgh ‘Incorporation of Goldsmiths’ in August of that year.

 

Happily the Royal Company of Archers have agreed to share the display of the Arrow, with its original medallions and their own, in the silver frame especially designed by them. The question of ownership was deliberately side-stepped to enable this early and important example of Scottish silver craftsmanship to achieve much wider appreciation.

 

Thus, nearly 350 years after it was made, the Arrow has returned to its original home, and another page has been added to Selkirk’s unique and fascinating history.

Lindsay D Neil, August 2006.