A cloth-yard shaft was an arrow a cloth-yard long.

A cloth-yard shaft with a six-foot yew bow behind it will go through an armored man and the horse beneath him.

For, in sooth, had he not pulled you down, a dozen cloth-yard shafts had crossed each other in your body.

Kynan even joined the hunt, grinning as he transfixed a silver and black gemsbok with a cloth-yard shaft.

Martin uncovered his ever present bow and strung it He drew out a cloth-yard shaft and sighted on the pursuing ship.

Cloth-yard shafts pierced many a Wersgor spacesuit without fire-flash or magnetic force-pulse to give away a man's position.

If you will not think of yourself, then consider your horse, which would have a cloth-yard shaft feathered in its hide ere it could reach the wood.

Quick as a flash old Wat's arrow had sped, and the Butcher sprang back with a howl of pain, his hand skewered by a cloth-yard shaft.

Two more of the cloth-yard shafts hit the man, bare inches apart in his chest, the gray-goose fletching bobbing as he slumped, held up by the deepdriven heads punched through him and into the boards.

These bows are basically wood, yet they can loose arrows half the length of those cloth-yard shafts needed for the longbows farther and more powerfully than any hand weapon other than crossbows or calivers.

From her I walked across to the Abbey, and none too soon, for what with cloth-yard shafts for your body, and bell, book and candle for your soul, it was no very cheerful outlook.

The men in the canoes rushed their boats toward the river-wall, and were met by another shower of cloth-yard shafts and a volley from the small balistas mounted on towers on that side of the stockade.

From the higher sides of the cog the bowmen could shoot straight down, at a range which was so short as to enable a cloth-yard shaft to pierce through mail-coats or to transfix a shield, though it were an inch thick of toughened wood.

The archers, trained by their woodland pastimes to the most effective use of the long-bow, shot, to use the appropriate phrase of the time, so "wholly together," that no point at which a defender could show the least part of his person, escaped their cloth-yard shafts.

And always it gave time to fit the second shaft and loose the second volley, and redouble the boiling turmoil that was held at a distance by nothing more deadly - but there was nothing more deadly!- than cloth-yard shafts of wood and steel flighted with a handful of feathers.