Toxophilus

Toxophilus is a book about longbow archery by Roger Ascham, first published in London in 1545.

Ascham was a keen archer and a lecturer at St John's College, Cambridge, and wrote Toxophilus or the Schole or Partitions of Shooting to defend archery against claims that it was a sport unbefitting a scholar.

So, unlike other scholars writing in English at the time, such as Thomas Elyot and John Cheke, he avoided neologisms and flowery classical terms, and "succeeded in making his English work as a vehicle of wide communication ...

Some of the passages describing the environment (for example, the way in which the wind could interfere with the aim of an expert archer) were vivid and at the time unparalleled in English writing.

Toxophilus has served as a source book for many subsequent works on the history of archery, for example The Archer's Craft by A. E.