CHAPTER XIV.
CLUB SHOOTING AND PRIVATE PRACTICE
In the following scores an attempt is made to give authentic specimens of the best shooting of as many as possible of the best archers of the past and present time. Mr. Ford himself mentioned how sadly disheartened and crestfallen he felt on his return from his first Grand National Meeting at Derby, where he had scored 341 with 101 hits in the double York Round, which was far below the score he had anticipated, and warned his readers that shooting at a public meeting was very different from private practice or small match shooting. There are but very few archers who have not met with the same disappointment, as will be easily seen when the public and private records here given are compared. Young archers should be strongly recommended to make their public débuts as early as possible—as well to work off the novelty and excitement of the scene as to compare the methods and results of other archers—before they have established great local reputations, which may run the greater risk of being fatally exploded from the very over-anxiety which is employed to keep or increase those reputations in public.
The erroneous practice of shooting trial arrows before the commencement of the regular round has been mostly given up of late years, being altogether discountenanced by the rules of the private practice club, and disallowed at all the public meetings.
In fact, it was a most dangerous practice at the public meetings, where, in former years, before the match shooting commenced, or when it was finished, those who had to cross the ground ran no little risk of being shot by some of the industrious archers, who, not satisfied with the round allotted to the day, were threshing out themselves and their bows, not with shooting at the targets, but mostly at a piece of white paper placed about so far from themselves as an arrow would fall when supposed to have passed through the gold at the particular distance at which these zealots were ever engaged in the apparently hopeless search of the 'range' or a 'point of aim.'
The earliest grand score on the testified York Round in the books of the Royal Toxophilite Society belonged to Mr. H. C. Mules, and was shot on August 24, 1856.
| Hits | Score | Hits | Score | Hits | Score | Hits | Score | |
| 50 | 240 | 42 | 232 | 23 | 131 | = | 115 | 603 |
He also has scores of 116 hts. 500 sc. and 106 hts. 508 sc. in the books made in 1858. This was surpassed by Mr. H. A. Ford on November 3, 1858, in the Toxophilite grounds:
| Hits | Score | Hits | Score | Hits | Score | Hits | Score | |
| 47 | 227 | 46 | 258 | 24 | 138 | = | 117 | 623 |
and the score of Mr. G. E. S. Fryer, made in the same grounds on August 2, 1872, of