I’d always learned that it was the mighty English longbow that was instrumental in slaughtering the French at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Not to long ago I saw an episode of Battlefield Detectives on the History Channel and they disagreed.
Again, I’d always heard that the longbow could supposedly pierce plate armor at ranges out to 300 yards. According to the folks who ran the test of the program the longbow couldn’t penetrate the armor worn by the French at that time. So just how effective was the longbow against a heavily armored group?
I’m familiar with the battle of Agincourt, but not with any contemporary tests with longbows and armor from that period.
On the other hand, I’d assume that an object capable of propelling a steel pointy thing up to 300 yards with any accuracy would punch through thin steel plate rather nicely at a reasonably close range…
The field of battle at Agincourt was covered in mud in some places ankle deep, in others up to the waist!
The armored french floundered in the terrible mud, add to that some stupid mistakes on the part of the french and you have your reason for the lopsided victory.
The longbow was certainly a fearsome weapon on the battlefield, but only when used en masse and against lightly armored opponents.
It COULD pierce articulated plate at the arms and legs at close range, but at long range, or against the body it was little effective. You’re only hope would be to fire thousands of missiles at a group of enemies and pray you’d hit atleast a few in some vulnerable spots, or perhaps down some horses.
So no, I would not lay the praise exclusively at the feet of the longbowmen. They certainly helped as the english exploited the battlefield conditions though
Considering that the longbow archers constituted 4/5 of the English army at Agincourt, it´s quite obvious that they were of great importance.
Besides, Longbow archers planted long stakes in front of them, that decimated the chavalry charge; when the French pressed against the center English line, the terrain and battle cirunstances led them to charge on a small front, about 150 meters wide, with arrows raining from the sides, the front French line was stopped on it´s tracks by the English men-at-arms, and at the same time, pressed from behinf by the second French line, all the while the arrows kept pouring down on them. It wasn´t pretty.
At the end of the day the incompetence of the French leadership was the most important factor in the outcome, inciting a disorganized attack, the terrain and tactical use of longbow archers come second. IMO
Considering those dates, we probably can’t rule out the Angles and Saxons bringing it with them in their invasion of Britannia, although the author of that page never suggests it.
It was my understanding that plate armor was developed as a defense against arrows and that at Agincourt the standard armor was chain mail which an arrow would pierce with relative ease even though it would resist a cutting weapon like a sword or ax.
At Agincourt, tt was the combination of longbowmen on the flanks of the line along with the stakes which the bowmen planted into the ground in order to frustrate the charge of the French cavalry (See, John Keegan, The Face of Battle, '78 paperback ed., p. 90-91). When the French cavalry was committed to the charge, the bowmen probably moved back a few paces and directed the stakes at the charging horses. The stakes acted exactly as pikemen would in later battles–it prevented the cavalry from pursuing a charge against otherwise exposed and vulnerable light infantry, and when they were halted, they were peppered at short range by the exceedingly powerful bow weapons of other bowmen who were highly likely to hit (ibid, 94-96).
It would appear as if they aimed for the horses and used hammers to pummel the dismounted and highly encumbered French cavalrymen into submission. The dismounted nobles were temporarily kept as highly valuable hostages, until a French cavalry unit managed to work through the forest and threaten to assail the English baggage train (Ibid, 108-109). At that point, Henry V ordered the hostages killed, much to the dismay of the bowmen and everyone else. They literally lost a king’s ransom by essentially murdering their captives, but there was a collective knowledge that if the battle was lost, they too would be captured, and bowmen were highly disliked and generally not worth the trouble of keeping. It is telling that the subsequent massacre was enforced, under considerable duress, by the archers themselves (One trick pony act, page 110).
The battle at Agincourt took place in 1415, a time when full articulated plate was still worn. I believe the french knights were so armored for this battle, which didn’t help them much. Normally such armor is not very restrictive at all and does not encumber the knight much, but in conditions of mud up to your waist it can be a liability.
The archers would have packed the stakes into little thickets, the idea being not that the horses would charge directly into a pike but that the rider would have no room to maneuver through them giving the archers an essentially stationary target. The bowmen were not bound by chivalry and were tough “regulars” and probably had no problem killing the french prisoners.
An interesting side-note is that once dismounted it took two or three archers to take down a single knight.
I suspect that anybody practising regularily hunt/instinctive archery (which doesn’t necessarily implies actual hunt) hence is trained in the use of a regular, old-fashionned wood bow could do the trick.
I went a-Googling on this topic a while back. It turns out that one reason there’s disagreement about what the longbow could or could not do is that there are virtually no surviving longbows from that period. (Some of the very few surviving specimens come from the sunken ship the Mary Rose, and that’s the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages.)
Hmmm … Googling “longbow Mary Rose” I get this informative page:
The author concludes: “Probably the effect of a massive hail of fast-moving heavy arrows, such as the French encountered at Agincourt, would have been to cause very many disabling injuries [to armored troops], but perhaps only one arrow in a hundred would have killed the man it struck.”
Of course, in warfare longbows were not mainly used to pick off individual targets, a la Robin Hood or Legolas. Instead they were used as massed weapons to be employed at a considerable distance (up to 240 meters, reckons the author.) In those circumstances, killing 1 in 100 outright and disabling a bunch more is nothing to be sneezed at.
“It COULD pierce articulated plate at the arms and legs at close range, but at long range, or against the body it was little effective. You’re only hope would be to fire thousands of missiles at a group of enemies and pray you’d hit atleast a few in some vulnerable spots, or perhaps down some horses.”
Kinthalsis: Well, that’s exactly what the author of this physics article said they did, and why he believes the longbowmen were so effective:
“Henry had approximately 5,000 archers at Agincourt, and a stock of about 400,000 arrows. Each archer could shoot about ten arrows a minute, so the army only had enough ammunition for about eight minutes of shooting at maximum fire power. However, this fire power would have been devastating. Fifty thousand arrows a minute - over 800 a second - would have hissed down on the French cavalry, killing hundreds of men a minute and wounding many more. The function of a company of medieval archers seems to have been equivalent to that of a machine-gunner…”
Combine that with the mud, and there you go… WWI in 1415.
