That is true but the longbowmen didn't won the battle of Agincourt.
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That is true but the longbowmen didn't won the battle of Agincourt.
Invariably it's the case that no single tactical unit wins the battle although some might be more important than others. However you said the longbow had no effect and quite frankly that is rather difficult to believe, not least of all because unless the whole French army was wearing plate armour from head to foot the arrows were obviously going to find a vulnerable area and kill or injure people.
Yes that's true but they didn't killed so many men.They killed more with their swords because the French knights ignored the longbowmen.The battlefield won the battle for the english.If it was a normal battlefield the French would have won.
Yes and no.
As I think was mentioned elsewhere the English longbowmen combined with (as you mention) the difficult terrain significantly hampered the French charge/advance, the French were weakened enough for English troops (including the archers) to wade in and massacre the disorientated French knights - the common misconception is that the massed archer fire at Agincourt caused massive casualties, they did cause casualties but it was the disruption of the archer fire and muddy ground that left the French vulnerable and therefore gave the English an advantage in the melee. It's just the sort of situation which explains the evolution of thin stabbing daggers in medieval warfare, walking around the battlefield finding crippled knights and stabbing through their visors and joints in the armour.
Composite bows have a nasty habit of falling apart when it gets too wet/cold/humid frequently. So campaigning in western Europe would be an issue.Quote:
Composite bow trumps longbow. Period.
I think the archers at Agincourt also deserve credit for forcing the crossbowmen to retire. Had they not done so the English would have been in a worse state than the French when the latter made contact.
What makes you say the archers forced the French crossbows to retire?
CBR
That has always been my understanding. That the wet strings on the corrbows meant that they were unable to outrange the longbows and withdrew because all they were doing was soaking up arrows.
That's right.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wigferth Ironwall
Look this has nothing to do with anything but I want people to sign this
http://www.petitiononline.com/2908jt01/petition.html
its for the ME2 multiplayer campaign and i hope for atleast 40,000 people to
sign. so PLEASE spread the word im only 1 person but there have been over
1,000 signitures already and if there are around 40,000 they might think of doing
it so please sign it...
SPREAD THE WORD!!!!
With M2TW so close to release I doubt CA will bother putting in a multiplayer campaign.
as said in another thread, they can't, said by a devQuote:
Originally Posted by Silver Rusher
besides it will be like this:
21 players:
1 turn costs 10 minutes = 210 minutes
on average every player attacks every turn = 21 battles
1 battle takes atleast 30 minutes
21 x 30 = 630 minutes
we have to wait for some time (toilet, dinner, etc) = 120 minutes
that makes it: 960 minutes; that's 16 hours for one turn. Yeah that means 8 hours sleeping, 16 hours gaming, no life
Let's stay on topic please.
Thats not Agincourt but Crecy. And the wet strings are actually debatable as some sources doesnt mention rain at all. Tests have shown that well waxed strings will not be effected by rain at all(goes for both bows and crossbows)Quote:
Originally Posted by Wigferth Ironwall
At Agincourt the French archers and crossbowmen appears to have been ordered back and used very little. Incompetent and arrogant nobles brushed aside the plan that more experienced commanders had come up with that did include the use of archers.
CBR
Sound like myth to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kralizec
Actually, this was standard Byzantine practice against nomad steppe cavalry. They used heavy infantry to anchor their composite bow armed light infantry, which provided support for their heavy cavalry. They defeated any number of various steppe peoples including the Turks with this tactic before the disaster at Manzikert, which seemed to happen because most of their infantry was engaged elsewhere in a seige.Quote:
Originally Posted by Temujin
In the game My English Longbowmen/Billmen will ranked up then sent to sort out them Scots Guards Double quick ,no probs ...;)
I think some of you are missing the point of English longbowmen.
On an individual, 1v1 basis, the odds are quite good that a French knight will beat a longbowman. He is wearing very heavy armor and is riding at fairly high speed; more importantly, since he is riding towards you the angle of attack is exceptionally small, especially because the longbow (and most other bows besides the crossbow) is essentially a ballistic weapon, not a direct-fire one. The longbowman has to get a very good shot on the knight or the horse because the sheer momentum and adrenaline of the charge is very difficult to stop.
What is important is that there were very few French knights (relatively speaking) because of the vast sums of money one needed to purchase and maintain a suit of armor, a sword, multiple lances (as they tended to break easily), and of course the horse itself - which could not be any "mere" horse, which themselves were very valuable, but had to be a specially trained and raised heavy charger that was able to support the enormous weight of a knight and horse armor and still be able to smash into enemy formations at a reasonable speed.
This is in contrast to the English longbowmen, of which there could be swarms of because it was a requirement of the King for virtually all of his subjects. While a good longbow is certainly a valuable commodity, it is nowhere near the worth of a French knight's equipment.
Archery in movies is usually portrayed as being an individualistic, hyper-accurate sort of scythe effect, which is ridiculously wrong; longbowmen en masse aimed at a general point in the sky to hit some general point on the ground, which was hopefully where the enemy was. This is itself a strong skill, one cultivated by years of training with a longbow, but it must be realized that individual skill didn't matter - so long as the bulk of the arrows hit the enemy target, the commander could be satisfied.
Now, imagine a group of French knights charging upon a horde of English longbows. A swarm of arrows soars through the sky and rains down upon the French formation. The sheer number of arrows will ensure that at least some will penetrate the knights and their horses.
If the knight is hit, he may lose control of his mount and fall off, and be almost immediately crushed to death by the other French knights galloping around him. The horse will either continue charging aimlessly forward or may suddenly run amok in confusion, smacking into the other horses around it, which panics them. If the horse is hit, then the knight will certainly be crushed again, but this time there is also the body of a horse in the middle of this formation. At the speeds these knights are moving at, they'll have virtually no time to get out of the way, and they may very well be tripped up by the bodies, which causes yet more disruption in a snowball effect. The dense formation of knights begins to dissolve as knights jostle to get out of the way of each other. Many, in an attempt to keep control, may slow down their mount a bit - speed which will not be regained once they return to the charge. The shock impact of the knight's has already been diluted, and by this time another English volley is probably on its way...
The upshot of all this is that by the end of the battle, whether you've won or lost, there are multiple dead French knights on the field. These cannot be easily replaced, unlike the longbowmen of the English - the King can simply call for more villagers. This is why the crossbow, which had even greater effectiveness in this regard because any idiot can learn how to operate one in a few days, if not a few hours (as opposed to a lifetime for a longbowman, and a lifetime plus scads of gold for a knight), saw multiple "banning" attempts by various kings and even the Papacy - because too many nobles of Europe were being killed by mere peasants.
(In fact, I can quite easily argue that this placing of power in the hands of the peasantry would eventually lead to the September 11th attacks, but that's a discussion for another time... :laugh4: )
You have to look at it not at individual combat effectiveness, but rather cost-effectiveness. An analogy might be the German King Tiger tank and the Allies' Sherman tank (or even the bazooka); a King Tiger could rip apart anything you sent against it, but since only a few hundred were made, if even one is destroyed it represented a major loss of German military strength - whereas Shermans and bazookas, neither of which could take on a Tiger on its own unless ridiculously lucky, were built in the tens of thousands, and so easily able to overwhelm the King Tigers...