You can't have a nut that far behind a trigger. Where the trigger connects to the wood is where the nut is located (or very close to it). when the trigger is moved, the contact with the nut is loosened and the nut rotates to loose the cord.
To have a nut several inches behind the trigger, you would have to hollow out several inches of the handle (which greatly weakens it) and put a very complicated mechanism inside the tunnel to indirectly connect the nut and the trigger. It would not be natural or easy or strong or even reliable and those kinds of mechanisms didn't exist until a century or more later.
I looked at hundreds and hundreds of photos of real crossbows and many drawings of crossbows to make sure I wasn't overlooking something.
Now... someone might draw it wrongly if they lack a sense of physics, they do take liberties with the drawings and frequently rotate the handle in relation to the cord in order to show the trigger, but when I wrote about this I was specifically looking for signs in the VMS as to whether it was physically accurate and could be identified as a specific kind of bow.
It is not physically accurate with regard to the nut, therefore other parts might not be drawn correctly either and thus we cannot be sure it is a specific kind of bow. As to whether there are other bows drawn like that, that's quite possible. Whether there were anatomically incorrect bows in medieval illustration wasn't the main focus of my research at the time (many of them are inaccurate). I simply wanted to find out how much we could rely on the VMS details to tell us where the crossbow originated.
To have a nut several inches behind the trigger, you would have to hollow out several inches of the handle (which greatly weakens it) and put a very complicated mechanism inside the tunnel to indirectly connect the nut and the trigger. It would not be natural or easy or strong or even reliable and those kinds of mechanisms didn't exist until a century or more later.
I looked at hundreds and hundreds of photos of real crossbows and many drawings of crossbows to make sure I wasn't overlooking something.
Now... someone might draw it wrongly if they lack a sense of physics, they do take liberties with the drawings and frequently rotate the handle in relation to the cord in order to show the trigger, but when I wrote about this I was specifically looking for signs in the VMS as to whether it was physically accurate and could be identified as a specific kind of bow.
It is not physically accurate with regard to the nut, therefore other parts might not be drawn correctly either and thus we cannot be sure it is a specific kind of bow. As to whether there are other bows drawn like that, that's quite possible. Whether there were anatomically incorrect bows in medieval illustration wasn't the main focus of my research at the time (many of them are inaccurate). I simply wanted to find out how much we could rely on the VMS details to tell us where the crossbow originated.