Originally Posted by
Tomaz Lazar
Curt, not to argue the technical aspects ad nauseam but some of your statements regarding the tactical issues and historical context should be examined in a little more detail.
Crecy and Agincourt were just two battles and arguably none of them was a clear cut victory for the longbow. There were in fact encounters where the longbow played a more decisive role. Scotland in particular as massed archery proved much deadlier against the lightly armored Scottish pikemen (for example Falkirk, Dupplin Moor, Halidon Hill).
Reply - Tomaz
I was referencing the 100 Years War battles specfically because we were discussing the bow vs plate.
Just as importanly, there were many cases when the English archers had far less effect on the enemy than expected and sometimes barely any at all. This was sometimes a matter of less than perfect tactical deployment, terrain that did not favor the English so decisively or just a matter of not having enough archers (or enough good ones) at hand. At Poitiers the arrows simply bounced off the heavily armored French knights and the fighting quickly went hand-to-hand. Same at Verneuil, even worse at Flodden. This is not the time or place to go into a heavyweight scholarly discussion on late medieval warfare but it does show that there was more to it than Crecy and Agincourt and that the longbow was far from the wonder weapon it is sometimes said to be.
I hope my argument stresses the fact that the bow was the most effective in conjunction with the the other troops. Combined arms and good generalship placed the archers where they could do the most damage- this made them effective.
Second, though the English tactics and the longbow unquestionably did their part in the infantry revolution during the 14th c. it was merely a sideshow if you look at the broad picture. The real impulse came from the Continent. Most notably the Flemish pikemen (and everyone else who copied them) and Swiss halberdiers (who incidentally adopted the pike full scale only much later). Though missile weapons, be it the longbow or the gun, provided valuable support it was heavy infantry armed with polearms that ultimately reigned supreme when properly led. This holds just as true for the English who understood intimately that their archers absolutely needed a strong screen of heavy infantry and dismounted men-at-arms.
France was the largest power in Europe at the time and it took them a century to deal with the English, so I hardly consider these battles a sideshow. As to the Flemish pikemen and the Swiss halbardiers that is who I was thinking of when I said that the bow was only the beginning of the end of the dominance of feudal cavalry. Infantry that could stand its ground against cavalry absolutely changed the face of warfare.
What I admire most about these troops is they took war away from the nobility and gave it back to the common man. Along with a lot of other factors, they contributed to the great social changes of the next few centuries.
Third, any claim of the longbow being a "wonder weapon" of the middle ages should take into account a few important facts. The longbow had been around since the Neolithic and was familiar to pretty much all Europeans. But only the English managed to put it to really effective use, and then only for a relatively short period of time.
Now we are on ground that I'm very comfortable with. The existing examples of the Neolithic long bows are not just like the English or Welsh if you will bow of the middle ages. The generic term 'longbow" is used loosely to describe bows generally over 5 foot in length with straight limbs. the existing samples of neolithic bows do come close to the performance of the medieval bow due to limb shape - orientation of grain in the wood etc. This is well documented among the primitive archery community who have duplicated and shot both types. this includes using hand made strings of period a materials and arrows the same. by the way in the case of the Neolithic bows some of the use stone and wood tools to fell the trees, split the logs and shape the bows.
Consider the simple fact that very few European nations other than English even tried to adopt the longbow en masse. Yes, the French did experiment with it but with poor results. Then the Burgundians, who through close contact with the English went to quite great lengths to imitate English tactics during the second and third quarter of the 15th c. Unfortunately, at that time the English tactical concept as well as the longbow itself were already outdated. So the Burgundians paid dearly for their military experiments when their armies were completely destroyed by the Swiss.
The great weakness of the longbow was that the archers were specialists who trained from child hood to be able to effectively use the heavy bows. This gets overlooked a lot - it took a very special man to draw a 150 lb bow.
I can't do it and I'm 6'3" tall - 235 lbs and have have done hard physical labor all my life - oil field , millwrighting - construction etc.
Far from being an innovative superweapon the longbow was really considered quite primitive on the Continent. It is interesting that literally millions of longbows were made for export to England in central Europe but were never used locally for military purposes. There were simply better alternatives available and warfare generally evolved in a different direction. So it is fascinating that the English managed to put such a simple weapon to such good use.
The simplicity or primitveness of the long bow was an asset - the bows were brought to the field in sheaves and shot until they gave out and replaced with another. The simple "d" design allowed a lot of bows to be made from a single log. A bowyer could whack out an English longbow in a couple of hours. they were effective , cheap, disposable weapons.
A composite horn/sinew bow such as was prevalent among the Magyar, Poles, Tatars , Turks etc. could take as long as 2 years to make due to curing time for the glues. These were complex and beautiful weapons and devastatingly effective - technically vastly superior to the longbow, but they were expensive and slow to make, and you better not get them wet.
The same with the crossbow - a powerful technically superior weapon and didn't require such intense early training to gain profficiency in its use. Perfect at sieges from either side of the wall, but too slow in the field against the English longbow -see Crecy.
But then again, it was not a flawless concept and once their enemies devised effective countermeasures it was the English who faced total failure on the Continent by the late stages of the Hundred Years' War.
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