Longbow(s)

[Tuuvi]

I can never resist putting in two penneth when longbows come up.

IIRC weren't the neolithic bows of of a flat D crossection which makes them more powerful than the more standard type but more complex to make and therefore the sort of specialist kit a hunter would use.

Many of them were, but flatbows have been found also. I could be wrong but I do not think that bows with a "D" cross section are harder to make than other bows, as a matter of fact D cross sections are and were pretty common. All that is meant by a "D cross section" is that the belly of the bow is round. I think (but I'm not sure) that the main factor determining how the bow is worked is the type of wood used, and if that's not true than I'm sure that wood type does play a large role in it. Yew bows are usually skinny and made with a D cross section; what allows them to be made that way is the high elasticity of the wood. White woods, which are not as elastic however, have to made wider and have flat cross sections. If a bow made out of a white wood such as hickory or ash were made the same way as a yew bow, it would be very prone to breakage and would not be able to achieve the same cast as the yew bow.

Also while I'm at it I would like to add a quote from The Traditional Bowyer's Bible Vol. II that I missed while skimming through it, I feel that if I would have quoted this before it would have helped my previous posts make more sense.

It is also important to note that all evidence says that the oldest bow artifacts (and lots of others since then) were as tall as the men who shot them. This is an important element in keeping string follow to a minimum. Unbacked shorter bows will show more string follow, on average. As string follow increases, cast per pound drops.

For those of you who don't know, string follow is when the limbs of the bow become permanently bent. All bows will develop some string follow after being shot several times, however the less string follow the better.

[B-Wing]

I don't know nearly enough about archery, modern or historical, to add anything factual on this matter, but I must say that Khorak's response (2nd paragraph) seems most realistic in regards to the martial properties of longbows. To sum it up, if units in the game do equip longbows (of European design), they ought to have relatively high attack ratings without armor piercing. Improved range over shorter bows may also be reasonable.

If it were up to me to implement them however I saw fit, with my extremely limited knowledge and understanding of the time period, I would expect longbowmen to be a medium-level (Tier 3 MIC, perhaps) regional unit available in small geographical pockets. This in contrast to having low-level factional archers armed with longbows as though they were simply the norm for any particular culture.

[Saxby]

Yeh longbows weren't as powerful as people imagine and i bet a lot of people would be supprised at their range (which wasn't as huge as some people seem to think). They were powerful weapons especially as the english were able to mass them (something continental armys coundnt do for some reason (social patterns maybe?).

However as mentioned above it was the generals who kicked the french at these battles not the longbows. If the generals had switched over i doubt you would see the english winning. As luck would have it England was blessed with good generals and more importantly a militarily competant king and royal family. It was the opposite in france at this time and their tactics seem compleltlly insane if you read up on them now.

So yeh popular culture has exagurated the longbow. Even generally competant authors have made it worse such as bernard cornwall whos grail series exagerate the longbowmans power and accuracy hugely. Sorry just realised this is a bit off topic with regards to EBII but i'll post it anyway.

[Ludens]

However as mentioned above it was the generals who kicked the french at these battles not the longbows. If the generals had switched over i doubt you would see the english winning. As luck would have it England was blessed with good generals and more importantly a militarily competant king and royal family. It was the opposite in france at this time and their tactics seem compleltlly insane if you read up on them now.

Not to take anything away from the English generals, but they wouldn't have done well in command of a French army either. The English had something approaching a professional army: the nobility paid scutage tax rather than do feudal duty, and the king used the money to hire mercenaries. The French used the old feudal host. This meant that every unit was loyal to its own commanders rather than the king, which was a problem since the French nobility was very independent-minded. Every count fancied himself a general. Furthermore, because the noblemen only owed 40 days of service to the king, the campaign (and that included assembling and marching to the enemy) had to be done quickly or the crown would have to pay extra. As a result, large armies (more high nobility, more assembly time) were almost unmanageable: the French seem to have done better when their army was smaller.

[Macilrille]

You could also find a worse commander, for example, than Bertrand de Guescelin.

However, we are supposed to discuss antiquity and the possible use of LB there.

[antisocialmunky]

Not to take anything away from the English generals, but they wouldn't have done well in command of a French army either. The English had something approaching a professional army: the nobility paid scutage tax rather than do feudal duty, and the king used the money to hire mercenaries. The French used the old feudal host. This meant that every unit was loyal to its own commanders rather than the king, which was a problem since the French nobility was very independent-minded. Every count fancied himself a general. Furthermore, because the noblemen only owed 40 days of service to the king, the campaign (and that included assembling and marching to the enemy) had to be done quickly or the crown would have to pay extra. As a result, large armies (more high nobility, more assembly time) were almost unmanageable: the French seem to have done better when their army was smaller.

I agree.

In short, the French did most of the kicking of their own butts. Terribly... terribly... kicking their own butts.

[Watchman]

In short, the French did most of the kicking of their own butts. Terribly... terribly... kicking their own butts.

Err, no. That'd have required something on the order of a civil war (though the definition thereof gets a bit fuzzy in feudal realms), which for a change they *didn't* much engage in during the period.

Amply demonstrated the command-and-control problems of feudal armies (whose relation to force size more or less follows the square-cube law), though, most certainly.

Further, they used the armour-piercing bodkin arrows, which earlier archers did not.

No offense, but that's plain poppycock. As if people hadn't been devising specialised arrowheads for specific purposes since the freakin' Stone Age, and archers hadn't had to deal with heavy armour since the Late Bronze Age if not earlier.


Anyways, as to the age of the longbow, meh. It's just a large self-bow; Stone Age tech readily manufacturable by any culture which now was in the habit of making self-bows to begin with (and had ready access to suitable types of wood; in the absence of such somewhat different design approaches, such as the flatbow, were apparently necessary). A rather more relevant question would be if people had a *reason* to carry around bows of such - let's face the facts here - inconvenient size, or found smaller staves sufficient for their needs. Something the size of a longbow is pretty much "dedicated archer" stuff, too large and inconvenient for more multipurpose troops to haul around on the battlefield - for example I'm willing to bet the bows Medieval Swedish militiamen were required to muster with in addition to their close-combat gear weren't of longbow dimensions already due to such practical considerations, although archery itself was a pretty much universal skill in Scandinavia. That the local geography tended to make for comparatively short engagement distances and obstructed battlefields - what with all the forest around - would also presumably have discouraged wielding too many soldiers as dedicated archers in the first place; one gets the impression battlefield archery in the region was primarily the purview of light-infantry skirmishers and a secondary capability of the heavy infantry.

Which is really the important bit here; archers with often quite powerful bows were by no means uncommon in the heavily forested northern Europe, in particular the sparsely inhabited Baltic region where there was copious amounts of essentially empty wilderness for the common folk to hunt in. However, unlike the English started doing (and had been standard in the East for millenia) this archery was not used in massed formations dedicated above all to firepower and -support; this makes a rather considerable difference in the receiving end AFAIK. By what I've read of re-enactor experiments with the topic, even rather small bodies of archers delivering coordinated massed fire are *highly* distruptive to heavy-infantry formations...
The ancient Greeks would probably agree, given the degree to which they modified their infantry doctrine to cope with the positively ghastly weight of fire projected by massed Persian foot. (I've seen it observed in quite a few different sources that for close-order heavy infantry faced with massed archery, the best course of action is to - if tactically viable - open ranks and close in ASAP to minimise damage, distruption and "suppression".)

[antisocialmunky]

Amply demonstrated the command-and-control problems of feudal armies (whose relation to force size more or less follows the square-cube law), though, most certainly.

Still, it was more the French forces losing rather than the English forces winning that won those engagements.