Sure, we all recognize that modern firearms are obviously superior as war weapons as bows. But when early muskets made an appearance - with dismal accuracy, and a 1 shot per minute firing rate, why did armies adopt these in favor of the bow?
The only immeadiate reason I can think of is that a truly skilled bowsman requires more training than a musketeer. However, in either category, you could train someone to be roughly equally proficient in the same amount of time.
The bow allowed for more accurate fire at longer ranges than early muskets - and much more rapid fire.
I just thought of a possible reason: Armor piercing capabilities. I don’t know the ability of each, so it’s just a guess. Anyone wanna take a stab at it?
We went over this just a few weeks ago in Longbows vs Muskets ?, but the short answer is that the only bow that was as powerful as a musket (or arquebus or whatever) was the longbow that required much more training and practice than a firearm. In fact, the longbow required so much effort to maintain proficiency that they had already falen out of general use before firearms became common. The bowmen had been yeomen under the feudal system that was breaking up. When they got free of their feudal obligations, they quit practicing the bow. It required the emergence of professional armies to maintain the training required and, by the time such armies were organized, the musket had already begun to come into its own.
Muskets did pretty much make armor useless, although a longbow could also pierce armor.
Partly armour penetration, partly the length of time it requires to train in a bow. To become a profficient archer requires months of training at least (based on my experiences). To become proficcient with a gun requires about 6 hours. Big differences. With the coming of cannon and various political goings on in Europe the old armies with a core of mounted armoured knights and specialist fighters with a backup of conscripts were becoming a thing of the past. Conscripts, volounteers, militia etc. were becoming far more important and it’s easier to make these people deadly with a musket than it is with a bow or a hand weapon.
BTW archers had firearms largely supplanted archers by by the late 16th centurey in many places, before the flintlock was in common use. Ecen the faitly orsinary and limited matchlock was considered an improvement on a bow.
Per this link the musket did have it’s problems but I would imagine the musket ball was considerably more destructive than an arrow if it did reach its target.
A musket has no rifling to spin the ball. It is “smooth bored” and will shoot both ball or shot, or a combination of the two. The firearms of the period used blackpowder. Blackpowder leaves fouling behind when fired. For this reason, the balls used by the military were undersized, so that the troops could quickly seat the next load down the barrel. The British musket, (the Brown Bess), was 75 calibre and they used a 69 calibre ball. The French musket (the Charleyville), supplied to the Americans, was 69 calibre and fired a 65-calibre ball. They were long barrelled (about 42 inches) and could mount a long triangular shaped bayonet on the barrel. The armies used paper cartridges to speed the loading process and reduce the risk of loose powder being around sparking guns. A wooden dowel about the diameter of a ball was used as a former to make paper tubes. Into this a ball and the proper amount of black powder was put, and it was sealed.
To load, a soldier opened his cartridge box, grabbed a cartridge, bit off the end to expose the powder, and poured a small amount into the pan of the lock, closed the pan, dropped the cartridge (powder first) into the barrel, removed his rammer, rammed it home, returned his rammer, and then “made ready” to shoot by cocking his lock, and “presenting” or pointing, his piece to the enemy. There were no sights, just the bayonet lug near the muzzle. The soldier just looked down the barrel.
Since the ball is undersized, and the paper cartridge is just dropped into the barrel, the ball might come out spinning as the gases behind it escaped unevenly. It might spin in any direction, and fly like a curve ball or be thrown slightly to any side. After 50 yards it was very hard for a soldier to deliberately hit a man sized target."
astro, that’s good information, but by that time the bow was a thing of the far past (almost a century, I would think). The first functional guns, IIRC were Culverins, which later lent their names to fairly large cannon. After that came the Arquebis (sp) and only later did muskets appear. Early guns were so heavy that they usually needed a stand to fire properly.
The crossbow was available when muskets appeared, and they can certainly penetrate armour, were more accurate and took less time to load.
I don’t know how long it took to learn how to use one but I doubt it would be as much as a longbow, so why didn’t crossbows come into favour ?
For that matter, why weren’t short bows used more often in these sorts of things?
If your enemy is using flint locks, marching towards you until they hit 50 yards or so, in shoulder-to-shoulder formation, an equal force cranking off tons of short bow arrows (if that’s the right term for what I learned to shoot at camp - I became a decent shot in no time) would seem like it would decimate the one-shot-per-minute flintlock group.
Yet, the crossbow was a cumbersome weapon, being slow to load. On the battlefield, it was outclassed by the longbow; a trained longbowman being able to fire 4 or 5 arrows to a single bolt from the crossbowman. Behind fortifications, where its user had time to load and was protected while doing so, the crossbow proved to be an ideal weapon. Providing for the crossbow was, as we shall see later, to have a significant influence on certain aspect of castle design.
For that matter, when the massing armies were marching on each other, the guys in the back were just essentially standing around waiting for their turn at the front. Why didn’t they carry a light bow and a few arrows, and fire them in an arc over the heads of their own troops into the enemy? Then just drop the bows when it became their turn to use the muskets? Even if they weren’t all that effective in killing people, I imagine it would have caused a lot of disruption in the enemy formations.
I don’t think so. The guy is the back would be reloading his weapon waiting his turn at the front to fire. I’ m not aknowledgeable about military history, but it seems to me that the formations weren’t deep. Just the number of ranks required to allow people in the back to reload while people in the front were firing.
My understanding was that the bow indeed necessitated much more training to use than the first firearams. But on the other hand, I doubt that early firearms were given to people just recruited (though it seems to me it has been done at least once in Japan). More probably used by professional soldiers (mercenaries, for instance) who would have enough time to practice. So, I suspect firearms had other advantages.
Some wild guesses :
-bows required a great physical strenght to be efective, restricting their use a little part of the soldiers?
-The effective range at which an arrow could be targeted with some accuracy was greater. But what about not targeted rounds? I mean an arrow quickly loses its penetrating power and plainly fall to the ground. Perhaps a non aimed bullet, fired at random in the ennemy massed ranks would be more likely to kill someone at a longer distance?
-Also, I vaguely remember that the organization in early armies included mainly pikemen who were supported by arquebusers (sp?). Perhaps the arquebus was more efficient against charging pikemen (or knights) still wearing cuirasses at this time IIRC, than a volley of arrows would have, due to a better penetrating power?
I would tend to suspect the two laters were true (But still, it’s a guess). Making the arquebus more efficient at both long and short range, the bow only being useful if you were aiming at a given (human sized) target at a distance at which an arquebus bullet couldn’t be aimed. But less lethal (and possibly totally unuseful beyond a given distance)if you were firing at massed troops.
Just thought about another argument concerning the lethality of bullets vs arrows against massed troops. Arrows have a very parabolic trajectory. You have to estimate at what distance you want your arrow to aim. There’s no risk that someone situated say five ranks behind or before would be hit. On the other hand, a bullet, having a much more straight trajectory, would cross all the ranks, until it hits someone. So, it would be more likely to kill/wound someone, despite its lack of precision.
So, I would guess that the more important consideration would be “at what distance a bullet/arrow can actually kill someone?” or “over what distance an arrow/bullet can follow a straight, man height, trajectory?” not “at what distance can you actually target someone with a bow/arquebus and be likely to hit this given person?”
People have touched on the ironic thing in the development of weapons and armor–they made armor that would stop non-longbow or non-crossbow projectiles, so the guns were developed. These turned out to be easier to train people in than the longbow or crossbow, so those weapons fell out of use along with the shortbow or composite bows.
Now that all ranged weapons were guns (against which armor was ineffective), people stopped wearing armor… but nobody said “cool” and picked up grampa’s shortbow…
IANAExpert Bowman or anything, but I think tomndeb has it right here. The longbow was apparently a skill that the English cultivated with contests, etc. and was a prized skill to the English, which made a huge difference in the 100 years war (IIRC). The French used the crossbow which has a strong hitting power but a much shorter range with accuracy. Also, you can fire a longbow many more times a minute than a crossbow.
So, like long-range artillery, the English could stand back and fire at the attacking forces before the attackers could get in range. Always a good deal
There was some argument made that if the Americans has been skilled longbowmen during the Revolutionary War, the war would have been over quickly - Redcoats with no armor make great targets You can only fire a musket once a minute or so.
Well, by the time of the American Revolution, that is not true at all. I’m too lazy to look it up right now, but my memory is that redcoats were expected to be able to fire a round in something like 7 seconds. They did a lot of drilling to get it down. Maybe it was a few seconds longer but way, way under a minute. It was all about volume, not aiming (and then get in there with the bayonet).
Early arbequeses and muskettes and whatnots probably took a bit longer to fire than brown besses, thought.
And Revolutionary-era rifles did indeed take a long time to load. You need a tight fit between the bullet and barrel to get accuracy, which means you need to really work at shoving the the bullet down when loading, taking more time.
My memory of musket firing rates around 1776 was three times per minute (vs once per minute for a long rifle). One thing to remember about all these fights is that they did not follow the model of the modern firefight. The arrows/quarrels/bullets were intended as shock weapons fired or loosed in advance of the real battle that required swords or pikes (or, later, bayonets). Crécy and Agincourt were both out of the ordinary in that heavily armored men were forced to wade through soft mud to get to the defending archers and knights. That sort of advantage could hardly be counted on for most battles.
In the face of the myth of the American Minuteman simply chewing up the redcoats following the battle at Concord are the reports from both sides that while the sniping was very effective as sniping, any time the Yankees tried to actually bar the British retreat, the Brits simply sent in a squad with bayonets to clear them out of the way. The Yanks could simply not fire enough rounds to stop the Brits before the bayonets were among them. Similar tales are related about the Battle of Bunker Hill (where the Yanks had not exhausted their ammo before being overrun), the retreat from Ticonderoga, and the Battle of Bennington. Firearms did a lot of devastation, but the battles were decided by cold steel.
Individual battles with special circumstances aside, (e.g. New Orleans, 1815), it was not until the American Civil War that firepower became fast enough to stop a bayonet charge on even a *semi-*regular basis.
In combat, muskets were frequently fired with a “running ball”:
Fire.
Lower weapon.
Prime and close pan.
Ground weapon.
Load powder, drop ball in muzzle.
Rap butt of musket sharply on ground.
Shoulder weapon.
Fire.
Done this way, you could get seven or eight shots before fouling would require the bore to be swabbed. In a time when volume of fire was more important than accuracy, it was an useful technique. I’ve tried it myself, and it works, although it sure as hell doesn’t do much for accuracy. I only had the nerve to fire four shots this way, but the last round dropped in as easily as the first. I’ve no idea how far down the barrel it went before stopping, and where it went when I fired? Somewhere down-range, but God only knows where (that’s why I stopped the test: lack of positive control).
I’m no trained musketeer, and I got off all four shots in less than a minute.
Aren’t arrows and quarrels, not to mention the bow itself and the quiver to carry them, much more bulky than a powder horn and a bag of shot?
The amount of provisions carried by the soldier is also an important factor in warfare. The weight and the bulkiness of the items makes a big difference in pre-motor vehicle combat, where everything that a soldier needed on the field was carried on their backs, for the most part.
You can only fire a musket once a minute or so.