As wumpus said, most arrows would not have killed anyone. The maximum distance would have been 250. I suppose 300 would be possible but unlikely. If I recall the distance to penetrate a knight’s armor would have been less than 100 feet. This would have been done at a right angle but I doubt if it would immediately kill. Archers are support troops and to a certain extent shock troops (with their rate of fire it would simply be sharp, pointy, rain). Once they cause the line to break down due to injuries and the unhorsing of knights things are going to be much, much easier for the main force to defeat.
So, to sum up what was said here:
It was the archers, not the weapon that turned the day. The real heroes of the battle were the English men-at-arms that held the French attack and made it bog down (literally in the mud). Once stopped and massing together in columns, the French could no longer fight effectively.
The French then made the tactical mistake of reinforcing a failure with a second line further hindering weapon use…and then the archers fell on the open flanks as the slaughter started.
The longbow didn’t stop the French, but it along with the defensive position of the English funneled the French like cattle into a chute… with much the same affect as a meat processing plant.
WooHoo, who wants to fight like that?
The power of a bow isn’t just about draw weight, but also draw length (which translates into the duration for whcih the arrow will be under power when loosed) and the way in which the bow recoils during release. the draw weight of a medieval longbow was somewhere in the region of 60 to 70 pounds, which is quite a lot, but not beyond the ability of ordinary humans.
The first link I posted estimates the draw weight as somewhere between 80-100 pounds…
I have to find the cite but I read that it was probably 200+.
200+ pound draw weights would have been for a crossbow, I think.
The U.S. Army, searching for a replacement for the M-1, found that only wounding an enemy soldier, not killing him, is necessary to take him out of action. (One reason for the lighter M-16.)
On the show, I believe they used a machine of some kind that smacked the arrowhead into a sample of similar armor and were quite astonished to find that the arrowhead actually bent, because it was too soft to penetrate the armor.
They also did tests with another machine where, basically, they applied the weight of the Frenchmen in armor to mud made from the soil at Agincourt and found that the leg-thing simulating the soldier sunk in a few inches with each step.
Through the magic of physics and the scientific method they ran a few test. They set up a machine with an arrowhead made from the same material the English would have used and a piece of metal similiar to the ones the French would have used for their armor. Hitting the piece of armor with the arrowhead at the same amount of force if shot from a longbow failed to acheive penetratation. How accurate their test were can’t be verified by me so I started this thread.
Marc
One of the very reasons why the longbow fell out of style was the fact that like the sling, the weapon literally took a lifetime to master. It was replaced by point-and-shoot weapons such as the arquebus and the crossbow.
I saw the same show as the OP, and IMO MGibson understates the producers’ doubts about the longbows as being effective. Their tests, and I certainly can’t speak to the validity of those tests, showed the arrows not even penetrating the armor. They discounted longbows almost entirely.
They suggested the cause of many French deaths were suffocation by by crushing, similar to incidents in modern day sports arenas. Basically the terrain and their own followup waves literally packed them together into an immobilized mass. I would think, however, that the same armor that protected so well against arrows would do a pretty decent job preventing suffocation in that manner.
Maybe the French got stuck, and the English moved among them with knives and swords, literally walking on the heads and shoulders of the armored French. Wrench open a face plate, jam in the knife a couple of times, and move on. Leo Frankowski wrote a sci-fi swashbuckler novel (whose title eludes me) describing a midevil battle using similar tactocs/
All the sudden this has shot up high in my list of least favorite ways to die. Imagine you’re jammed up, and you watch this happening to 10 or 20 others before they get to you.
Better still, a wounded opponent may partially disable other enemy troops, as they attempt to move him to safety and administer first aid etc.
Well, we know a lot about the Longbow and the Archers, but we don’t know for sure the range of protection the French were kitted out in; partly armoured or full-body and head armour – and what about the horses ? Part chain mail, part armour – what about the horses ? Just chainmail ?
Seems kind of relevant.
Actually it wasn’t replaced until the gun. If by lifetime you mean no goon can pick one up and start shooting, yes. Crossbows were never a primary weapons because the rate of fire meant that by the time u got a shot off the enemy would be on you.
I doubt this. The men-at-arms would not have been as heavily armored as a knight, and there is no evidence to suggest the field was quite that bad (otherwise they would have never made it to the english, and the english advanced as well). Unhorsed knights would have had problems, but I would assume they still caused alot of damage.
Yes, but we’re talking about knights of which there were few in the first line and none in the second. Once the horse is dead its just a matter of seperating individuals and having a couple guys fight while another dispatches him. Any weapon can get in the joints and an arrow at point blank range should work.
Well, it’s been awhile but it goes along the lines of: A dead soldier is just dead, one soldier lost to the enemy. A wounded soldier requires at least two other soldiers to carry him off the field so the enemy is down three soldiers. He requires first aid, transportation, hospitalization end a whole host of other things so wounded soldiers becomes a serious drain on the enemy’s logistics. Not to mention the fact that he will probably be screaming at the top of his lungs which tends to demoralize his fellow troopers.
All of that refers to today’s armies though. I was always under the impression that in the time period of the Battle of Agincourt, the wounded were left on the battlefield for long periods of time and were lucky to receive medical care even after the battle. This would not apply to nobility of course, who could pay for their own medical care and had people tending to them.
I agree. Not sure on the validity of the tests…however, I thought the “packed mass” theory was fascinating. Personally, having been in a packed mass of people and having been crushed up against a wall at the time, it would be a damn horrible way to die.
The following is conjecture…
However, plate armor is not a one-piece, rigid shell. It’s designed to flex and move in spots. Also, underneath the armor, they were usually wearing leather padding and, possibly, chain mail. With all that stuff on, there may not be a great amount of room for the abdomen and chest to move–and so, we breathe. So if your breastplate is pressed tightly against the guy in front of you and people are pushing behind you, all that metal and leather is going to compress around you and make it damn hard to breathe.
I think we can probably discount their opinions given the records of the combatants themselves, and the fact that the English also won with long-bow heavy armies on other occcaission with no mud fields.
It probably would not pierce plate at 300 yards. Their effective range really was topped off at 220. They would be brutally lethal at anything under 100.
The lightly armored was not a requirement. It worked best against such opponents, but it was used to great effect against armored knights many times.
The hoprses were slaughtered in these battles. A man in plate is deadly. A man in plate who just went flying off his horse and lost his weapon is a lot less terrible.
That would have been true of the Genoese crossbowmen mercs or the levies, but certainly not the knights who did the charghing and most of the dying.
I have a hard time seeing this. Mostly because I’ve seen numerous other tests done at various ranges which indicate that such weapons would have pierced plate. They aren’t the first people wo have done such tests. I wonder at the range they suppoesdly tested for - it appears as if they were testing for ranges at about 300 yards. This would be an awesome mistake, because that is much higher than the effective battle range of the weapon.
The longbow as such never was in style except among the English. No one else ever really used them in such a manner - most people used shorter bows, not the 6-foot monsters of the Welsh. Crossbows were picked up on the continent, it’s true, and they did have a much higher range (but onyl 1/5th the firing rate) The crossbow had one other advantage, too, which was critical at Agincourt - you could remove the string.
Also bear in mind that 300 yard ranges probably don’t refer to Robin-Hood-style archery where the arrow flies straight and true (or even nearly so). Even with a bow of much less power than a medieval longbow, phenomenally long ranges are available by shooting up at a 30-45 degree angle - the arrow follows a very high parabolic path and comes down at quite a high speed - a significant portion of the speed at which it left the bow (subject to air resistance and changes in the level of terrain)
This technique is still practiced today (although it is somewhat obscure) and known as clout
Long ago (when I was still a spindly teenager) I took up archery and used a bow with (IIRC) a 45 pound draw weight - I could reach (and overshoot) the standard 165 metre mark for clout competition, so a 300 yard range for a medieval longbow (with greater draw weight, draw length and heavier arrows) isn’t at all unreasonable - accuracy would be patchy at best, but it wasn’t just single shots from a lone archer.