"There were no club makers of course in the early days of the game but golfers found that the skills of the weapons makers could be pressed into service, particularly those of the bow makers who made the bows which King James II was so keen for his populace to use in preference to golf clubs. The bow makers became the first club makers, manufacturing crude but effective implements first for the wooden balls used until the early seventeenth century, and then more sophisticated clubs to deal with the feather ball, the first major development in golf equipment. The bow makers who first began the development of the slender, fragile, long-nosed wooden clubs that held sway until the arrival of the gutta percha ball in the middle of the nineteenth century, were club makers in their own right, and examples of the fine work of the best of them, such as McEwan and Philip and Tom Morris himself, command considerable sums in the present day."