Quote Originally Posted by antisocialmunky View Post
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.
Quote Originally Posted by Macilrille
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".)