The English Longbow

[al Roumi]

I have to agree with CBR... While the test methodology seems reasonable, there is precious little about anything to with the armour tested -all the blurb is about the longbow and arrows. The images of the coat of plates and plate armour don't look at all authentic, the metal just looks like rolled steel -it is in no way representative of what contemporary armour was like. Such a flat sheet of steel almost makes a mockery of what plate armour really was.

[Brandy Blue]

One consideration is how much longbowmen were paid. I haven't found what I wanted - a comparison of how much longbowmen and crossbowmen were paid by the same employer at roughly the same time in the same general area for the same duty (garrison, escort, offensive campaign or whatever.) The coin used to pay is important too, since the value of a denier (French penny) would not necessarily be the same as an English penny.

Well, I couldn't find data like that, but I did pull up a couple of things on the web.

Apparently, longbowmen were paid 2 to 6 pence per day until the price was standardized at the beginning of the 15th century at 6 pence, except garrison archers in England who only got 4 pence. (English longbowman, 1330-1515 by Clive Bartlett - page 9.)

http://books.google.com/books?id=P21...page&q&f=false

Crossbowmen got paid from 3 pence at Dover but as high as 4-6 pence "in other places". (Daily life in medieval Europe by Jeffrey L. Singman - page 123)

http://books.google.com/books?id=SOd...20paid&f=false

So on the face of it, longbowmen started off with comparable, sometimes lower pay, than crossbowmen, but later on the situation was reversed and it was the crossbowmen who sometimes got less. Unfortunately, the numbers are not really comparable because Singman appears to be talking about the 1260's (its not altogether clear) and probably about garrison crossbowmen only (The title of the chapter was "Castle Life") who may not have had the same rate as crossbowmen in offensive campaigns.

Okay, so these numbers don't really let us make a good comparison of how much crossbowmen and longbowmen were paid, but as far as I can tell the difference in range of rates of pay was not huge, whereas Singman says ( page 124) that the "ordinary soldier" got 2 pence a day. As we've seen, crossbowmen and longbowmen might make two or three times as much. This suggests that both longbowmen and crossbowmen were quite effective. Otherwise they would not have been paid so well. That does not directly answer how effective longbows were against various kinds of armor, but it does provide some perspective.

I've run across a couple of websites that claim that crossbowmen were paid more than longbowmen and so must have been "better." However, these sites either don't tell how much they were paid or use over simplistic comparisons (Not all crossbowmen were paid 3 pence and not all longbowmen were paid 2 pence, so you can't make a sweeping statement that crossbowmen were paid a penny more.)

[edyzmedieval]

I don't know about you folks but I would rather focus on the power draw of the longbowman and the force of the longbow itself... Holding and firing a 2m yew longbow would need some MASSIVE arms and the amount of damage it can make from close quarters is something to look upon.

I fired a carbon fibre bow that took me around thirty seconds to fully pull, from 15m out. The arrow shot through 15cms of polyurethane and smashed through a 2.5cm thick wood plank. The arrow just shot right through the target and the wooden support and there was around 3.5cms between the tip of the arrow and the wooden planking, that's how much it penetrated.

Imagine the power of a longbow, which needed three or four times the amount of strength. Bodkin arrows from 200 metres can pierce armour. That's why Agincourt turned out that way.