Page 209 - The Pocket Guide to Outdoor Knots

Tying #3

While the constrictor is generally regarded as a semi-permanent seizing that
must be cut off when no long required, it may be tied so as to incorporate a

quick-release draw-loop (figures 6–7).

Knot lore

Clifford Ashley claimed to have discovered this knot for himself some years

before he completed The Ashley Book of Knots (published in 1944). Unknown to
him, however, it had already appeared in a 1931 publication by Finnish Scout
leader Martta Ropponen, who knew it as a whip knot, and earlier still in Hjalmar

Öhrvall’s book Om Knutar (1916), where he referred to it as a timber knot.

Lester Copestake, a member of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, believes it
is also the gunner’s knot, used to seize the necks of the flannel bags of

gunpowder that acted as cartridges in muzzle loading field guns, described—but
frustratingly not illustrated—in The Book of Knots (1890) by Tom Bowling.

Then again, the scholarly Cyrus Lawrence Day points out, in Quipus & Witches’
Knots (University of Kansas Press, 1967), that this knot may be identical with

one described—but again not illustrated—by the Ancient Greek physician
Herakles in the first century AD for use as a surgical sling. There is evidently not

much that is truly new in knotting.