Giving directions to family, the mention of 'Butt Lane Car Park' often causes amusement. This long, narrow car park, technically leading off Butt Lane and running parallel to the High Street, actually has an important Medieval connection. Unlike a certain famous car park in Leicester, there are no buried kings (to our knowledge) underneath it, but it was the site where training and practice was carried out in the use of England's war-winning weapon – the longbow.

'Butts' in Medieval times were areas used for archery training. The 'butts' themselves were probably the targets and/or the mounds of earth behind them, but the name is associated generally with the practice area as a whole, and crops up in many historic towns which were required to provide archers for military service.

In 1252, all Englishmen aged between 15 and 60 were ordered by law to equip themselves with a bow and arrows, and a law of 1363 made it compulsory to practise every Sunday. In fact, the skills required to use a longbow were probably developed from childhood, and it was this length and intensity of training that made the longbow redundant in the 17th Century. Firearms were far inferior to longbows for a long time, but anyone could pick up a musket and become competent in its use in a few weeks.

The requirements for Butts were simple – a flat area, approximately 200 yards long, with mounds of earth at one end. Importantly, the area should be outside main thoroughfares and not angled towards populated areas!

Butt Lane itself doesn't meet these requirements – it's far too short and falls off towards the estuary steeply. Anyone firing the other way would impale people walking down the High Street! Clearly, it led to The Butts, and the car park is just the right configuration – about 200 yards long, and rising slightly towards the present United Reformed Church.

A trained archer was expected to hit a target at 200 yards – better than a soldier using a musket at Waterloo, who could only hope to place a musket ball vaguely in the middle of a mass of hundreds of advancing infantry or cavalry, and usually reserved fire for the last hundred yards.

Maldon's archers could also hope to shoot twelve to fifteen arrows per minute, while musketeers were doing well if they could get off two shots in that time. The battles of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt were to amply demonstrate the power of the longbow over the heavily armoured knights of France.

Such was the power of the longbow that archers fired level – the arrow flew straight over 200 yards, and the firing into the sky that we see in films was only necessary if ranges of 400 yards were required, which was discouraged because it wasn't accurate, and in Maldon would have seen an arrow fired from near the Baptist church landing in Market Hill!

Accidents did happen however, and Henry I passed an act absolving an archer from murder charges if he killed someone during practice.