Desmostylus: Thank you my good man, that’s the little bugger alright.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG…think Crecy and Agincourt.
Also whilst crossbowmen needed no specialist training, by the time they had begun winching their bowstring up after loosing off one bolt they usually had a few longbow shafts sticking out of their soft dangly bits.
As I said before rate of fire of a longbow was 20-25 arrows per minute, crossbow 2-3, no comparison really.
Surely only the Welsh (and then their English masters) used the longbow?
And Im not convinced crossbows were that important on the Continent.
I think that armour got lighter because mobility became more important.
This was partly due to new weapons (muskets, cannon, polearms)
but also because armies developed from the chaotic feudal ones, who basically coudlnt be given orders more complicated than “Charge”, to more modern armies which could be manoevred.
Crecy and Agincourt are two battles. The utility of armor was in a lot more of them. No one else had access to the longbowmen in the numbers that the English kings did. In fact, I don’t think everyone even had the Yew tree available. No one could possibly have fielded as many longbowmen, and from Spain to Poland the knight still held sway.
Someone already pointed out that the Longbow was a wonderful peice of technology that didn’t end the use of armor. Not enough epopel could use them - in fact, Crecy and AGincourt are remembered precisely because they were so unusual, so amazing. Crossbows were wonderful peices of technology that everyone could use. In the long run, it had far more effect.
They became so feared that the CHurch tried to ban them as inhumane and unChristian weapons of war. They upset the balance of the COntinent that mcuh.
The elites were always mobile and disciplined. Knights essentially were dedicated soldiers, who did little but train and rule and fight. They were fast and agile on the field, and they charged because heavy lance charges were devastating. Regardless, later armies were not really all that agile, either.
This is just plain falsehood.
Feudal armies relied on tactics, maneuvers, strategy, discipline, etc, just as all armies do.
Interesting thing. Disciplined heavy infantry can withstand any number of heavy cavalry charges. Charging disciplined pikemen is suicide. The key is discipline. Armored heavy cavalry ruled the battlefields of the middle ages because there were very very few disciplined heavy infantrymen.
Cavalry is the arm of the nobility. An effective cavalryman pretty much must be a full time soldier, trained from birth. The exception would be nomadic light cavalry, but they were trained from birth as well, riding and shooting. Horses are extremely expensive, a dozen peasants could live on the land it takes to maintain one horse. And of course, armor was incredibly expensive in pre-industrial days.
So the cost to outfit, train, and support one heavy cavalryman was gigantic. Heavy cavalry could break and destroy any peasant formation. Once the peasants start to run, they are dead, and the knights can massacre them at leisure. The knights can break a line, or outflank a line.
But pikemen can stop them, IF the pikemen all fight together. But getting infantrymen to do this is not easy. They have to trust each other, they have to have some sort of investment in fighting instead of running away. Swiss mercenary footmen were essentially invulnerable to knights, simply because they would fight and hold formation where other infantry would run. And you could outfit 20 pikemen for the cost of one heavy cavalryman.
So why did Swiss infantry hold formation? Because they were free men, not serfs. They were earning money that they could send back to their own families. As serfdom died across Europe, infantry became more and more effective. Serfs and slaves won’t hold formation against a cavalry charge, but yeomen farmers and artisans might.
Napoleonic Cuirassiers were still wearing metal breastplates and helmets in the late 18th to early 19th century.
Which is far from being full body armour, WW1 and WW2 soldiers wore steel helmets.
The Longbowman is unlikly to maintain that rate of fire for very long, even if his supply of arrows holds up. As to the crossbowman, there is strong evidence that a crossbowman worked as a team with a partner who would load while the other fired. Reduced overall firepower, but you didn’t have to train Crossbowmen starting with the Grandfather, or feed them full rations during a supply crisis.
Crecy and Agincort were victories that had more to do with the idiocy of the French nobility than any supreme dominance of the longbow. Keep in mind the longbow was stil in use when the Spanish Armada showed up. You don’t hear about any great longbow contributions after Agincort.
(Let’s not get into the idiocy of the pre-English Civil War military dream of the ‘double-armed-man’).
LEMUR 866: Boy have you hit the nail smack on the head with your posting
He just said breastplates.
SMILING BANDIT: Most of the yew used to make the longbow came from Italy and Spain and was imported along with wine from those two countries. We had realised that their yew was better than English for making the bow.
I don’t remember the exact website address but I’m sure if you type inLongbow you’ll find something to verify my statement.
MISKATONIC: The Archer usually planted 30-40 arrows in the ground in front of him and was quite capable of maintaining a rate of fire long enough to decimate any cavalry as it was just a case of plucking them out the ground nocking them and loosing off, normally in an arc so that they fell either on the knight or his horse.
As an aside I have fired a longbow with a pull of 80lbs and managed about 50 of them, it’s not easy I tell you. Todays bows are far easier to draw because they are much lighter, the arrow is shorter and the weapon itself is far better balanced.
I guess this is a good thread to ask a related question. Since it has been somewhat addressed already.
I have always heard that Longbow were very hard to train, and a life long investment. But why? I can’t really picture what was so hard to learn about the longbow. As I understand it they were mostly used in the high arching shot in large numbers(ala Braveheart) rather than sniperish aimed shots. I’ve shot longbows at Ren faires and yeah they are damn hard to pull, but I’m a pretty big guy and could do okay. I figure with six months continuous work on the muscles involved I could get pretty good range. There must have been lots of big ol’ hoss farmboys back then who could have done the same thing. So what exactly is it about longbows that made it so hard to learn? Or is it just that physical development was so non-understood that it took people that long to develop the muscles on the common diet?
They did have to aim. Usually at moving units of men. They had to train for accuracy.
Ha! What pull did that bow have? 20-30 lbs? A war longbow of the period would have pulls in excess of 100 lbs! That’s pulling 100 lbs with a few fingers, all the way back to the back of your ear. Now granted a VERY strong person can do this a few times, but can he do it 50 + times consistently?
It takes discipline and training to acocmplish this task.
The hard life of a typical bowmen is likely to yield strong, capable men. These guys HAd to be extremely strong to do what they did.
Firing a couple of arrows at a ren fair is hardly representative of the skill, discipline and strength required to be succesful in a medieval field of battle.
Well that’s why I specified sniperish in my post. To distinguish training a guy to arc into a certain area, as opposed to training a guy to hit a fist sized moving target at 200 yards. The first doesn’t really seem like a life-long effort.
And when I used to go to the range with my friend I could shoot an 80 pound compound 30 times in half an hour, and 120 pound 10 times or so with muscles untrained for it. And I know lot’s of guys a hell of lot stronger than me. I have no idea what the conversion between a longbow and a compound bow is, or what the draw of the ren faire bow was.
I’m not trying to brag or start a fight. I’m just really curious what was the difficulty with training bowmen, was there some subtlety of technique I’m missing, or was it a simple matter of developing muscle mass, and the real longbows were that much stiffer.
Longbows, en masse, had a very short life in the English army. We all remember Agincourt and all that, and there were indeed some longbowmen around for some time after, but it was just too expensive to keep up a standing army’s worth of them.
Crossbows played a far greater role, and also note the timing. Armor did not go away during the heyday of longbows. Serious use of longbows actually faded away first.
Another factor not yet mentioned is pure army size. The size of armies fielded in Europe constantly rose. Once you are talking about 10,000s, even 100,000s, of guys on the playing field, you have to rethink the whole economics of it as well as strategy. Keep in mind that pikes and such were introduced to save $ on fielding large groups of men. The old “we’ll just overwhelm them with a whole lot of undertrained, poorly armed men” strategy. Knights just don’t fit into this picture.
(The points made about the horses being the weak link in armored cavalry is important. Once on foot against large forces, a few hundred knights are dead meat.)
I’m just guessing based on my own (fairly extensive, IMHO) archery experience, wolfman, but I would guess that speed was a fairly important part of longbow training as well. 20-25 arrows per minute, remember, only gives you two or three seconds to grab your arrow, nock it, pull, and shoot. Meanwhile, you have to aim at least well enough to hit a man sized target that might be 200 yards away. Try shooting even a light bow extremely fast and see a) just how fast you actually are (8 or 10 shots/minute is pretty good, realistically), and b) how accurate you can be while trying to shoot really really fast.
Of course since you’ve stated this it gets me wondering. How the heck did the Mogols pull 100+ draw bows while riding horseback and fire accurately? (That’s got to take some skill to pull off.)
The only way I would imagine anyone could pull that off on a consistent basis - lifelong practice :). But remember, said Mongols didn’t usually snipe in that manner - the damage came from the concentrated and coordinated blizzard of arrows impacting a group of enemies, not individual accuracy. Still required enormous skill, but it wasn’t like they were all drilling a chosen opponent between the eyes or were even necessarily aiming at individuals at all.
- Tamerlane