English war bow

Here's a chart I came across a while ago.. on bows.

Originally posted by Constantine XI Well I agree with that for the most part, but rather than it being an issue of arrogance I would say it was an issue of professionalism. The English entered the Hundred Years War with centuries of fighting behind them engaging the Welsh, Scots and Irish. France was always a nation famed for its military during the Middle Ages and still engaged regularly in war. Yet interest in the Crusades had died down, the Spanish were increasingly able to handle the Moors on their own and the once powerful Holy Roman Empire in Germany was increasingly splintered and reluctant to engage in military offensives against France as it once used to. When the English began a serious invasion they did so with highly professional troops who had some of the best experience in warfare. In Wales the hill country had taught them the value of fielding scores of men as missile troops, they adopted the tactics of the enemy which they had conquered thanks to the perceptive Edward Longshanks. In Scotland the defeat at Bannockburn taught them not to rely on their heavy cavalry to simply charge in and win for them, they adapted by updating the ability of their infantry. Ireland and Scotland were never properly conquered for long but always provided the English with a good training ground to refine their skills and toughen them into professionals. France, basking in its newly earnt economic prosperity and peace, could field men but most of these lived on the antiquated traditions passed down by troubadors and aspired to a romantic ideal which did not reflect the reality of war. Consequently it took the French a while to adapt to an enemy who was professional, and was also well led. The English had some excellant commanders in the persons of Edward III and his son the Black Prince, Henry V is also very noteworthy. One cannot help but feel some sympathy for France when comparing Henry V to the psychotic Charles, but can see clearly why the fortunes of war began to change when Charles and Henry both died. Another thing I neglected to mention was the use of the bodkin arrowhead. This arrowhead was sharper and thinner than normal ones and the English made extensive use of it. The result was an arrow better able to pierce armor, which was of particular usefulness against the French knights who possessed some of the heaviest armor in the world.

Edited by pekau - 16-Jun-2007 at 17:50

Wow, that sounds cool Tar! Do you have any photos of them?

That is very cool Tar! How long does it take you to make one? And what do you do with them?

Originally posted by John the Kern most of the other european countries had proud traditions, France and her brave Knights(cough, idiots, cough) my ancesteral home Eire had good javalin throwers, the Germans heavy infantry and later horse, italians were a trading sea nation, most ofhtier infatry was mercinary, simply the Longbow/ Warbow had always been a favortie amoung the english

Err ... well no. English were using a much smaller weapon up until the 1200s. They acquired the longbow during Edward's campaign to subdue Wales; it is a Welsh weapon (although, the Welsh being the original Britons, if you go back far enough, they might have been using it in England in pre-Roman times - I don't know).

Originally posted by Gavriel Does anyone have any ideas on the decline of the Bows?Common wisdom suggests at the invention of the gun but surrely a battalion of Archers could of outshot a battalion of Wellingtons smoothbore muskets. gavriel

Absolutely ... the longbow - and probably many other types of bows - were far superior to firearms, probably until rifling was invented. It was more accurate and it had a much greater rate of fire. It even had more kinetic force than early firearms. And, of extreme importance, it did not require a supply of gunpowder which was often a problem in many early modern campaigns (especially in places like Ireland during the Nine Years War, where the Irish had difficulty acquiring it and the English had difficulty getting enough of it to their front lines). But, there were essentially two big problems.

One was that longbowmen had to be trained literally from childhood - it literally took a couple of decades to produce a longbowmen, while one could produce a functional musketeer in half an hour. This meant losses on the field were irreplaceable for longbowmen, but easily replaced for musketeers. Also musketeers didn't have to be as able-bodied as longbowmen; in a pinch, such as during a siege, grandmothers could fire weapons if it was necessary.

Second big problem was that having a peasantry armed with such a weapon was a liability for rulers, as insurrection would be a much more viable proposition for a bitter populace. If such a thing happened there was also no way a ruler could really impact the production of the arms or their ammunition, something which was much more easily achieved with firearms - gunsmiths were visible and collected in urban centres, and gunpowder was a vital commodity which could be controlled to some degree. Longbows were generally produced by scattered bowyers living in rural areas all across the country. Surely other European rulers considered adopting the longbow, but rejected it for the above reasons. The English were able to adopt it because they were an island people, and the only breakaway ethnicities already had longbows and schiltron tactics; the French at that time were a disparate collection of ethnicites with no common language, and a country in which the question of rightful kingship was at times dubious in the eyes of some of these groups.

Benjamin Franklin suggested thier use during the American "Revolution". Ignore my previous post in this topic. From what i know the best Bows were made of Italian Yew any source this? I have a 65lb longbow(which i havnt shot in ages)

The Hedeby bows are Viking bows, I think? Not Saxon?

The Saxon and Norman archers shown on the Bayeux Tapestry certainly don't look like they are using 6 foot longbows. Unless it was an artistic convention to show them smaller than they really were. The Utrecht Psalter also features illustrations of Saxon archers:



Certainly longbows much earlier and far from Wales have been found - Otzi the Iceman had one - but were they used in war or just hunting weapons?

Originally posted by edgewaters The Hedeby bows are Viking bows, I think? Not Saxon? The Saxon and Norman archers shown on the Bayeux Tapestry certainly don't look like they are using 6 foot longbows. Unless it was an artistic convention to show them smaller than they really were. The Utrecht Psalter also features illustrations of Saxon archers: Certainly longbows much earlier and far from Wales have been found - Otzi the Iceman had one - but were they used in war or just hunting weapons?

Yes, Viking bows. The bow was made of yew, 191cm long (6 feet, 4 inches). I don't know about �tzi's bow, but hunting bows do not require the extreme strength of war bows (40pds is more than enough to kill a bear).

Originally posted by pekau Originally posted by Constantine XI Well I agree with that for the most part, but rather than it being an issue of�arrogance I would say it was an issue of professionalism. The English entered the Hundred Years War with centuries of fighting behind them engaging the Welsh, Scots and Irish. France was always a nation famed for its military during the Middle Ages and still engaged regularly in war. Yet interest in the Crusades had died down, the Spanish were increasingly able to handle the Moors on their own and the once powerful Holy Roman Empire in Germany was increasingly splintered and reluctant to engage in military offensives against France as it once used to. When the English began a serious invasion they did so with highly professional troops who had some of the best experience in warfare. In Wales the hill country had taught them the value of fielding scores of men as missile troops, they adopted the tactics of the enemy which they had conquered thanks to the perceptive Edward Longshanks. In Scotland the defeat at Bannockburn taught them not to rely on their heavy cavalry to simply charge in and win for them, they adapted by updating the ability of their infantry. Ireland and Scotland were never properly conquered for long but always provided the English with a good training ground to refine their skills and toughen them into professionals. France, basking in its newly earnt economic prosperity and peace, could field men but most of these lived on the antiquated traditions passed down by troubadors and aspired to a romantic ideal which did not reflect the reality of war. Consequently it took the French a while to adapt to an enemy who was professional, and was also well led. The English had some excellant commanders in the persons of Edward III and his son the Black Prince, Henry V is also very noteworthy. One cannot help but feel some sympathy for France when comparing Henry V to the psychotic Charles, but can see clearly why the fortunes of war began to change when Charles and Henry both died. Another thing I neglected to mention was the use of the bodkin arrowhead. This arrowhead was sharper and thinner than normal ones and the English made extensive use of it. The result was an arrow better able to pierce armor, which was of particular usefulness against the French knights who possessed some of the heaviest armor in the world. � Great explaination. I am still unsure about how English men were trained against Irish and Scottish rebellions. English armies would easily crush these rebellions without even the need of proper training. Did the English deployed armies including longbowmen to suppress these revolts? Moving that huge army would be expensive. English are most likely to use the Scottish and Irish nobles to deal with the revolts, and station some troops in some small forts in case the situation is serious enough for the English to send their armies. I don't think that happened that frequently. In medieval era, the only crisis I can think of is Scottish rebellion against Longshank... but that was over a hundred years ago... � And we should remember the Black Death. While the English were successful against French armies in the Battle of Cr�cy, the spread of Black Death caused both English and French to call for truce... at least until disease died out and English were able to recover their financial losses. Wouldn't that allow French some time to prepare for longbow massacre? France was,�at that time,�the center of the world, after all. France had more population, knights, war tacticans, farmers, soldiers... bascially, they had numerical advantage and had more bright people... so France should have seen it coming, no?

I believe the English were even more direct in using their conquered enemies.
It's fairly simple; you defeat the Welsh, then recruit them to fight the Scots, the French, the Irish etc. Since getting on top of the Welsh was a drawn out process, Wales got all the hallmarks of a militarised border area�- society put on an almost costant war-time footing, lots of experienced troops to be recruited. Wales worked like a kind of mercenry-factory in the British Isles. On the continent Flanders ("the men of Brabant") and the Basque countries filled the same role. And yes, it seems the longbow was originally the weapon of choice of, and very much identified with, the Welsh.

And Wales wasn't properly controlled by English kings until the very end of the 13th c. The last serious rebellion was in the first years of the 15th (Glyndwr's uprising, first Welsh parliament, recognised independance by France, of course), and Henry V assembled the largest army on British soil in history to put it down. Glyndwr himself had been fighting the Scots as a mercenry in the English army. There were companies of Welsh archers fighting in the HYW already, switching sides depending on pay. In the end Henry could recruit a lot of Welshmen into his own army after his victory, not least longbow archers, and use them against the French at Agincourt.

So the English kings first defeated the Welsh, then used the thoroughly militirised Welsh against the Scots and the Irish. Eventually they could draw upon the defeated, but by then highly militirised Irish and Highland societies to fill their armies. By the 19th c. the British army's own estimates was that as much as half the British army consisted of Irishmen.

As for the French waking up to smell the roses, they did after Cr�cy. It was discussed whether it would be a good idea to have commoners train archery, but the idea was dismissed as inherently too risky. The French nobles were pretty jealously guarding their military privilege. The north French nobles absolutely hated the mercenary troops, who were commoners (as said often from Flanders or the Basque countries) and would massacre them immediately if captured. Since France was also beset by some pretty serious peasant uprising, armed French commoners were considered a greater risk to them than invasions of professional English armies, even if they were filled with commoners as well. The internal threat, and messing with the social fabric, was felt to be riskier than the external threat.

I think we can chalk it up to different social dynamics that the English kings by Henry V's time had far better logistics for continuous warfare, more professional troops, and better access to them possibly, than the French nobles he ended up fighting.
For starters the English king ever since William the Conqueror held sway over a vastly more centralised kingdom than the French king, whose power was at times almost only nominal over most of the territory of France. It was the great nobles who called the shots, including how the fighting was to be done. The Capetingians of the 13th c. seems to have had a good mix of troops of different abilities, and a decent grasp on the reins of power.
By the 14th c. it might be that the interests of the nobles in safe-guarding noble power hurt not just royal power, but indirectly the ability to wage war. The combination of renewed concentration of power into the hands of the king and gunpowder, was what it took to give France the upper hand again.

I've always had a soft spot for Prestwich' theory of medieval (well, any premodern army, really) army effectiveness (which can be read in his Medieval Warfare - The English Experience), namely that a premodern army will, after the relatively limited training in large-scale formation movement the individual parts of the army can afford due to logistical restraints, the army will get better the longer it campaigns together. He lists a number of 12th century examples of mercenary forces of the same  background recruited either individually (in which case they perform rather badly) or as units who have already fought - or at least campaigned - together (in which case they tend to perform better than "permanent" retinue forces). It's very much a case of success breeding success; while you can get a lot of people in the field spread out (he estimated Edward II's armies close to 100,000 men at the most) it is pulling them together on the battlefield and giving them experience there that counts the most.