talk is good...no?

Anyhoo, a couple of things...longbowmen are not as tuned as athletes now adays. You don't need accuracy with those things rather than brute strength. Most of us archers nowadays need to train a lot because our day to day chores don't require the use of the archery specific muscles required to draw back the heavy poundage bows. But I do know one archer who is also a rock climber. Lo and behold this guy can be absent from archery for years at a time and return with his form intact, well at least 70-80% intact, while the rest of us can't be off the bow for 2 weeks and expect to do the same. So it could be the case that back then these people are most likely doing a lot of manual labor on a daily basis.

I remember reading that it was a requirement for everyone to shoot right after church every Sunday back in those days. Now I'm thinking, that's not nearly enough practice by today's standard. These days, the elite archers train 7 days a week for 10 hours a day. If you do a lot of rowing or a lot of work like trying to pull a cart up a steep hill or such, you are working those archery specific muscles. This is why also, I see these 2 construction workers that comes by every other months or so at the range and shoot 110 lb longbows. They shoot like crap, but they don't seem like they're straining that much pulling those bows back.

@AussieGiant: that's true, at 100m an arrow trajectory that would hit someone in the chest will probably hit the guy behind him in the crotch. But it's nowhere near as flat as trajectories of bullets. Keep in mind, while it's 160lbs it's also shooting very heavy arrows.

Did the welsh field as many longbows as the english did later on though? I don't think the longbows are super weapons, but it's no slouch either. Good enough to create chaos and panic in the opposing line.