Well its an interesting duel of different weapons.
An archer could of course shoot faster than a musketeer but one thing is rate of fire another thing is how effective it is. In other words sure they could shoot faster but how accurate was it?
Muskets have a much more flat trajectory compared to bows so its easier to miss with an arrow if you dont know the exact range and in a chaotic battlefield thats never gonna be easy.
From what we know of longbow v longbow fights like in the War of the Roses they didnt have heavy losses which suggests that they were not that deadly and accurate as some like archers to be. Armour is not the only explanation as a lot of the lower classes didnt have much armour.
Muskets could stop cavalry charges with short range salvos while longbows used ditches, stakes and most of time had rear ranks of spearmen or billmen to help them. Sure they could face well armoured cavalry so that of course could explain why arrows were not good enough to stop cavalry alone. But not all Men-at-Arms had heavily armoured horses.
So a longrange duel at a range of 100-150 yards would archers be able to win? If they were good I guess they could but I doubt it would be a one sided affair.
At the time when England finally went over to muskets (late 16th century) the heavy musket was a weapon with superior armour penetration. It might also have been less inaccurate than later 18th century muskets, which focused more on rapid rate of fire and therefore had bigger windage.
Training of longbowmen was free for the English king as that was part of regulations for all to train every Sunday so in a way he didnt have to care about how long it took to train them. Some of the defenders of keeping the longbow did use the argument of training, but it was the other way around as they noted how England already had well trained archers while switching completely over to guns would mean buying new weapons as well as training all archers to use them.
In reality England in the later part of 16th century was, from a military point if view, a backwater nation that still relied on the old bow and bill militias which were outclassed by the continental pike and musket armies. The bows could not be expected to stop armoured pikemen nor could the billmen be expected to defeat pikemen.
CBR
Bookmarks