A pike isn't easier to master then the manual of arms. Try to wield a 12' pike, march with one for miles, while balancing it over your shoulder, effectively use it in a mass formation, learn to change formation, coordinate with other infantry arms, and hold the line vs other pikes. Pike vs pike is all offense, no defense, a man with a musket can better defend himself in close quarters fighting, especially if he has a bayonet. After a very short time you'll want to trade weapons with another sucker.
I'd want to trade weapons so i could fight back on a battlefield dominated by firepower, not because the pike is too hard to wield. Humrey Barwick considered a pikeman better trained after six days than a musketeer was after sixty, and he had a much better idea of what war was like in the 16th century than either you or I do.
That was the opinion of Knights. Bowmen spent a lifetime training with their weapon. The average man can't learn to shoot an 80 lb bow in an afternoon, and certainly can't learn to fire 10-15 rounds a minute. Most Longbowmen could shoot with great accuracy, while firing rapidly. They know how to string, and maintain their bows, and what arrow heads to use in the right circumstances. They know archer tactics, including their limitations. Archers often had to fight with other weapons. At Agincourt agile English Longbowmen slaughtered dismounted French Knights with daggers, knives, and short swords. That was hardly an act of poorly trained militia. What happened at Agincourt was hardly a unique event, when archers ran out of arrows they usually joined the melee, and more then held their own.
No, it was the opinion of Robert Barrett, and Englishman who fought among the French, Spanish, and Dutch armies in addition to the English in the later 16th century. He considered the bow, like the bill, a weapon any man could handle, so it would could serve as a stopgap for untrained men who could not be equipped with firearms. Similarly, captain Yorke, serving in the 1593 siege of Rouen, thought the bow a natural weapon for the laborers of the army, that they may do something besides digging.
Do you have any evidence longbowmen shot with much accuracy while shooting rapidly? Considering the fighting at Agincourt lasted four hours ish, and there were 5,000 archers, and each archer carried 24-72 arrows, the average rate of fire was well under one shot per minute. If there isn't actual evidence of them shooting at such a high rate, I think it's far from proven that shooting 15 arrows per minute was a necessity for an effective archer. Moreover, those other points apply just as much to musketeers re: knowing limitations, tactics, and fighting with other weapons, so the bow is hardly at a disadvantage in that light. The archers' attack at Agincourt was also much aided by the fact that the French cavalry had stampeded into their own vanguard (who were probably already out of breath from advancing with visors down) immediately beforehand, so one shouldn't overestimate their hand to hand skills based on a superficial look at that phase of the battle.
Of course, a bow was not something unique to England. However, only England was producing big numbers of archers with the powerful longbows. No other European army had the numerous cadres and the French attempt to create ones failed. Of course, if you can produce the data showing that the big numbers of peasants in Germany had been routinely trained with the longbows, or that the foot archers (not English) played a significant role in the battles of medieval Europe you’ll prove your point but otherwise it is just unsupported claim. An “ordinary” bow was quite popular in Eastern Europe due to the contacts with the nomadic neighbors but it was usually too weak to be effective even against mail, forget about the plate armor.
The shooting guilds of Flanders for one had large contingents of longbow archers, who played a major role on the battlefield, repeatedly defending i.e. Lillies from the roving armies of their larger rivals and driving out bands of pillagers. French archers also played an important role in the victory of Formigny, as well as the sieges of Caen and Harfleur in 1449, so it's a stretch to call that effort a failure. They had earlier scotched a program to raise a corps of French archers because they became too proficient too fast, becoming a potential threat to the manorial order, so raising archers wasn't exactly a massive obstacle.
About the archers. You are clearly falling into a popular trap of confusing the available pool with the professional soldiers. Available pool were all these peasants who regularly doing a shooting practice. Only a tiny fraction of them had been making it into the fighting army. Of course, the standing regular armies were not, yet there but these archers we are talking about had been as professional as it was possible by the standards of time and their equipment was not cheap.
I'm not confusing them in the slightest. Obviously there were far fewer men in the English army at Agincourt than were available for recruitment; that's kind of my point. It wasn't lack of men who had weapons and knew how to use them that kept medieval armies small, which is why i take issue with the idea that firearms dramatically increased the potential pool of soldiers and increased the size of armies that way.
Each of them (at least during the 100YW) had a horse, a helmet, some kind of a protective “armor” and a sidearm which they know how to use. Their tactical deployment was not one of the unprepared farmers either: they were using the deep formations with the regular intervals between the archers and (seemingly) salvo shooting.
Couple points. Foot archers without horses were a common feature of medieval armies, so mounted archers weren't exactly a crucial component of the English system. They probably formed up in relatively shallow formations, about four ranks or so, since direct shooting is both much more effective than indirect and difficult to pull off with more than four ranks. This is corroborated by studies of battlefield terrain, which give us a sense of the expected front for a given number of men. There's also no evidence I know of of coordinated 'salvo' shooting.
Of course, learning to shoot a bow is rather easy but it is not the same as to become a battle-worthy archer even making allowances for the fact that as often as not they were doing a barrage shooting. Pulling these 80 pounds a dozen times in a short sequence is not the same as shooting couple arrows at your leisure and then go to take a drink with your reenacting buddies (the main modern source of information on the subject). 😜
As for the “horribly complicated” process of reloading the firearms, it actually was not so complicated that an average person could not learn it within a reasonably short period of time. The beer-bellied burghers of the city militias had been mastering that skill and as soon as the regular drill had been introduced in the armies, the loading had been done by commands shouted by the sergeants.
The physical hardiness required for using a bow in battle was well within the reach of most people of the time without extensive training, and was more than outweighed by the relative simplicity of archery compared to musketry. Not only do modern users state from experience relatively heavy bows can be shot by normal people, but contemporary sources confirm it. It's technique, not muscle, that enables strong shooting, and the technique isn't that complicated.
The point I've been making is that if you wanted to raise big armies fast, pikes and longbows were perfectly viable options for the infantry in terms of time/expense. The complexity of firearms meant forces using them took a hit in terms of speed in raising large armies, but it was well worth it for the gun's superior capabilities.
Regarding your doubts about the army sizes, doubting things is your right but there are things that we do know:
1. Appearance of the firearms did not automatically result in the bigger armies. Armies of the 30YW were not noticeably bigger than those of the Italian Wars. Needless to say that in both cases we are talking about the professional armies in which “noble” element was only a fraction and the bulk of these armies even during the Italian Wars was an infantry.
2. We do know that invention of the pistols allowed to create a new numerous (and relatively cheap) type of a cavalry, the reitars and that this cavalry almost completely squeezed out the gendarmes from the battlefields of the Western Europe. As a byproduct, the armies of the 30YW period quite often had a very high proportion of a cavalry, sometimes up to 50%.
3. We do know that a serious growth of the army sizes started only during the reign of Louis XIV and began in France with the rest of Europe being forced to follow to the extent of their resources. The firearms had been around for quite a while and already became a dominant weapon so it was mostly a matter of finances and resulting ability to maintain a big standing army. BTW, it was still an age of pike and shot formations but the “shot” component was steadily overweighting the pike. In the army of GA at least 50% of infantry had the firearms and in the army of CXII the pikemen amounted only to 1/3 of the infantry. With the new more effective recruitment systems the “pool” of potential soldiers grew and so did the number of people capable of handling the 5 meter long pikes so unavailability of the candidates was not a factor. In some cases a physical shortage of the muskets was forcing to arm big numbers of soldiers with the “half pikes” or the partisans (as in Russia during the GNW).
1. Mostly agree, but Italian Wars armies had more cavalry than you give them credit for.
2. Lots of Western European armies had high cavalry proportions well before the proliferation of Reitars. Charles VIII invaded Italy with an army of 50% cavalry, and French armies of the Hundred Years War had similar proportions.
3. Mostly agree. The main caveat is that I don't know if it really was lack of money that kept medieval armies small; doing some envelope math, the French estates' 1355 proposal to raise funds for 30,000 men at arms could have paid for an army of 200,000 infantry, which would have been more effective if some other force, obscure to me but probably known to the men at the time, did not prevent them from raising such an army.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]
