If like many here argue that the Longbow was considered an outdated weapon by the 16th century then why did the Mary Rose sink with 250 of them?
- Thread starter Malone
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Earlier bows also didn't need to penetrate the same armour as seen in the 15th and 16th century, which allows for bows of lower draw weight. A 100 lb draw weight bow can penetrate through chain, 120 lbs a coat of plates. 15th and 16th century plate meanwhile needed 150-160 lbs to penetrate, so you may be right, it wasn't the norm earlier, but the bow archaeology in the 15th and 16th points towards much higher draw weights.
You mean the very battle where the King of Scotland was killed by none other than an arrow? Not to mention modern tests and computer analyses have in fact shown that 160 lbs draw wight bows can penetrate plate at range, but hey, Flodden itself is an excellent contemporary example.
There is a very big difference between being practiced at archery and being able to draw a war bow. There are plenty of quite capable archers today who draw 80 lb bows, but there are very few who can actually draw the 160+ bows of the Mary Rose. The skeleton (and likeness) below is one of the archers found on the Mary Rose. As you can see, that's some severe musculoskeletal deformation that has taken place in order to be physically capable of drawing that kind of bow. That is not common in English skeletons of the era. The claim that there were plenty of people capable of being used as archers like this is ludicrous and is not supported archaeologically. Once people like this died, they were gone, and its a hell of a lot easier to train up someone to use an arquebus than it is to wait 1-2 decades for the monster below to mature.
What modern tests have arrows penetrating plate? In the one that's got the most traction online now, Tod's, none of them were even thinking about going through. Regarding Flodden, the battle is notable for the ineffectiveness of English archery, the armor of the Scottish pikemen shrugging off the storm of arrows; the battle was fought and decided 'at handstrokes', with the king falling from a bill strike, not an arrow. The arrows are explicitly said to have 'done no hurt' except when it hit the Scots 'in a bare place.' They were well armored, so 'few of them were slain with arrows.' 'Bowman and ordnance were of little use'. Abiding the most dangerous fall of shot, they came upon the English in good order 'after the German manner'. Experienced soldiers writing about the bow and the gun noted that arrows could do practically nothing except against naked men and horses.
Couple points.
You're ignoring the fact that there was a constant pipeline of men able to wield even heavy warbows; archery practice was mandatory, so every year men who had gone through the long term training were becoming available. You didn't have to 'wait 1-2 decades' to replace these archers, you picked such men as there were ready off the shelf, so to speak.
Second, the arrows weren't penetrating armor anyway, so why not rely on bows anyone could handle? For all we know, the English were continuing to employ large numbers of archers with lighter warbows, so the lack of skeletal deformation doesn't mean archery was rare, just very heavy bows. The Mary Rose is a point, not a trend; the English drew their archers from different sources, and their fitness naturally varied depending on if they were i.e. indentured retinues or county militias. The English continued to recruit large numbers of archers -thousands at a time even in the 17th century-, so they weren't running out and filling in the gaps with gunners. Quite the contrary, they were replacing the archers they had as fast as they could, guns were just expensive and required the state to take on the burden of training.
Third, most soldiers in the age of gunpowder were long service professionals; if the heavy bow was so effective, why not spend that time training them to use it, and let them use guns or lighter bows in the interim? You're already paying for that time, after all. There was a spirited debate regarding the virtues of the bow and the gun in 16th century England, and I think it's rather telling that none of the advocates of guns advanced the argument you refer to, that there was a lack of archers or that guns require less training. Rather, they emphasized the gun's superiority as a missile weapon in the hands of well-trained troops. Their arguments were more convincing and won out.
The gun replaced the bow because it was more useful at longer ranges, it penetrated armor better, and bullets killed people more deader. That's the long and short of it.
Well thats mainly because generals despite what the government like to say often had to use there own wealth to rebuild and reaquipe there own army.
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue with a turkish bow and a breach-loading swivel gun. Bows were still was still standard issue until sometime in the 1600's.
To quote Edward Hall, who chronicled the battle "the King was fatally wounded by an arrow and a bill." As far as tests go, Bane's example using a bow of significantly less draw weight than typical was able to achieve partial plate penetration at close ranges. Robert Hardy's tests had actual penetration with period bows, though admittedly inconsistently. Tod's test against top notch armour certainly further shows that it is decidedly inconsistent. It of course should be noted that the Arquebus itself could not always penetrate plate, though it certainly did so much better than the bow. Against other contemporary armour though, arrows penetrate just as well as the arquebus, and that includes Brigandine, mail, and coat of plates, and of course the vast majority of soldiers on the battlefield in the 16th century are not wearing plate in the first place, which of course lines up with what I said on the first page of this thread that "100 joules of energy delivered to the body from an arrow will kill just as well as 600 from an arquebus, and it will penetrate through almost the exact same period armour."
If we come back to Flodden, the battle was largely decided by the Bill, which if we compare to the contemporaneous Italian War holds true as well (though with the Pike instead, the key factor remains the polearm however). Ranged weaponry of any kind was rarely the deciding factor, they of course were an important part of Renaissance Combined Arms, but Heavy infantry continued to rule the day for a while longer.
1. I'm not ignoring anything, that pipeline is static and slow, unlike the arquebus pipeline which can be scaled up as needed since you don't need people with ridiculous upper body strength, and which takes dramatically less time to get to a usable point. Throughput wins out, you shouldn't need a differential equation to spell it out.
2. I covered part of this above, so I won't rehash it, but arrows could in fact penetrate much of the period armour. As for the Mary Rose, sure its one point, but its also the only point we have from the 16th century; anything else is purely speculative, but for the sake of the argument I'll entertain it for the moment. If what you're arguing is true, that there were perhaps less gifted archers also in common use, then the Mary Rose would be one of the most natural places to find them, its a ship! No one is wearing particularly heavy armour while at sea, its wet, humid, and god forbid you fall off... That is the exact circumstance where you might see less draw weight bows, since you sure don't need to penetrate a ton of armour, and yet in spite of that we don't see a single bow under 100 lbs draw weight, and the vast majority of examples range from 150-180 lbs. Not exactly the most supportive of your conclusion.
3. We're talking about 16th century England, not France. England lacked a standing army for most of the period, so frankly had little in the way of professional soldiers. Its also more than just a matter of "training to use a bow," it takes years to develop the necessary strength to draw a war bow, and in the end not everyone can do it even with that time; you can't just "train it." As it stands, guns do take less training, and don't just take it from me, take if from Michael Howard - one the most widely respected military historians of the last century - who talks about exactly that fact in War in European History. Honestly, every military historian I can think of agrees that the gun is easier to train than the bow, so I really don't know where you're getting that from.
Frankly though, none of this talk about armour penetration of one vs the other matters, they're both good enough at the job of supporting your infantry - who are the ones actually winning your battles - but with an arquebus you can replace your casualties faster and get more of them sooner.
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We also need to remember that you also needed to have the skill to make the weapons too. In this period it's likely there were many more bowyers than gunsmiths in England.
Lastly, we have to remember 'outdated' does not mean 'useless' - at least by default. Another historical example can be that of cavalry; clearly outdated by 1939, but when handled well and used in sympathetic environments, could still pack a punch.
Lastly, we have to remember 'outdated' does not mean 'useless' - at least by default. Another historical example can be that of cavalry; clearly outdated by 1939, but when handled well and used in sympathetic environments, could still pack a punch.
Moisture would create more problems for personal weapons and it would for mounted weapons.
Remember we are dealing with matchlocks which one not known to be reliable in damp conditions
Which do you think finished him off, the ranged weapon or the melee weapon?
The armor in Tod's test was not top notch, the smith having deliberately backed away from the top level hardness historical, and none of the heads were even close to going through, let alone inflicting disabling wounds. With lower quality metal, the plate would have just been thicker; indeed, this is the trend we see in the 16th century, as blast furnaces and fineries churn out large amounts of wrought iron that gets made into heavy munition plate, well proof against arrows. The arrows were killing people by not hitting armor, bullets killed people by going through armor.
You really think musket shots only do 600j huh
It was decided by the bill because arrows were worthless against plate defenses, which by that point had become common enough that massed archery couldn't even slow down advancing pikemen. By contrast, firepower came to dominate the 16th century battlefield.
1. I'm not ignoring anything, that pipeline is static and slow, unlike the arquebus pipeline which can be scaled up as needed since you don't need people with ridiculous upper body strength, and which takes dramatically less time to get to a usable point. Throughput wins out, you shouldn't need a differential equation to spell it out.[/QUOTE]
Okay, show me a time when European states did what you said and levied large numbers of randos at once and hastily trained them with guns. Did this become the norm in the 16th century?
If indeed guns are easier to use, it's because they're simply better; all the skill and more an archer can acquire through practice is built into the gun itself. No archer can come even close to the energy in gunpowder, and with a stock and sights, the gun practically aims itself. Humphrey Barwick, after training years in the bow, switched to the gun and immediately started shooting better. It doesn't matter how good you are with a bow, you're better off with a gun.
More to the point, it didn't cost England anything to maintain their system for producing archers, so why not keep it and put however many death machine archers you get in an elite unit?
No; a flagship going into a major battle is the place to put your best archers, especially since they would be facing well armored enemies, munition plate protection being fairly common among galley marines. Arrows killed people by not hitting armor, so heavy bows don't provide that much of an advantage; lack of archers who can draw heavy bows (as opposed to 80# bows, which enjoy most of the same characteristics) would be no reason to stop using the bow altogether. Why wouldn't a soldier with an 80# bow be effective? His weapon is no less accurate than the 160# bow, even faster to shoot, and the loss of range is marginal. The damage to flesh comes from the cutting action of the head, not the transfer of energy, so there would be little to distinguish the terminal effect of a common bow from a heavy bow.
Yeah, I liked his book on the Franco Prussian War, but Michael Howard isn't a specialist on 16th century England, and people who do specialize in the period and especially the proliferation of firearms do point out that this is a common misconception. Next time you read something about bows and guns, try tracking down the author's footnotes; they usually don't rest on a very strong foundation.
"One of the reasons that firearms superseded bows, it is suggested, is that they could be mastered in a shorter time. Such an argument runs wholly counter to the growing professionalisation of military affairs. Training, in particular, was becoming ever more comprehensive and the specious argument that firearms required less, not more, training, bears all the marks of a propagandist’s sophistry. No contrast could be more pointed between the old assumption that levies were briefly trained en route for battle, and that implicit in the whole conception of the trained bands, that a certain minimum of discipline and instruction were essential."
Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, 113
David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth Century Europe , 19:
"In fact, sixteenth-century arquebusiers, musketeers, and pikemen required considerable training to operate with effect, as did pistol-armed cavalrymen. Even those contemporaries who were sceptical of the superiority of firearms over the bow believed that firearms needed experienced owners if they were to be used to advantage. None of them argue that the new weapons economised on training."
“The fierie shot, either on horseback, or foote, being not in hands of the skilfull, may do unto themselves more hurt then good: wherefore the same is often to be practised, that men may grow perfect and skilfull therein.” Robert Barret, The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warre, 3
"Gent: What, would you have them cast away their bowes and billes, having bene charged with the same already?
Capt: Not so, they may serve yet to many purposes. For all those weapons… [pikes, calivers and muskets], shall serve but for your trayned men: and your bills and bowes, which have every man, or most men can handle, shall, (if neede require) be put in place of service befitting them weapons." Robert Barret, 25
"[T]he musquet, as all fierie weapons, is dangerous to them who are Unskilfull, for an unexpert man may spoile himselfe and many about him, which inconvenient is not subject to the Bow.” -Thomas Kellie
“Yong souldiers unprovided and sleightly trayned, are not to be drawen into the field against an Armie exercized and beaten with long practise, for unexperimented men are fitter to furnish a funeral then to fight a field.” -Barnabe Riche, The Fruites of Long Experience
Does this sound like a weapon whose main virtue is cheap and easy training?
'Good enough' is completely missing the point. The English won at Flodden in spite of the ineffectiveness of their arrows, the Spanish won at Pavia and indeed most of Europe in large part because of the firepower of their guns. Soldiers trained with both weapons considered 500 musketeers a match or 1500 archers. The English got rid of the bows they already had so they could get more guns.
You can dress it up all you want, but a fatal wound is still a fatal wound, for which the arrow came first anyways.
I'll concede on the armour quality, you seem to know more about Tod's methodology than I do, but that still doesn't change the examples from Bane or Hardy. More importantly, brigandine was much more common as munitions armour for most of the 16th century, which both Bane and Hardy demonstrated could penetrate very consistently from quite a bit of range.
I'm really not sure if you're just grossly missing the point here or arguing in bad faith, the point therein was that they can penetrate almost the same period armour, which is true, with the partial exception of plate. Secondly, I'm talking about the arquebus, the later musket is a completely different story. As it is, the early 16th century arquebus is delivering anywhere from 600-1200 joules (and the warbow anywhere from 100-200 joules, the specific numbers herein are decidedly secondary, but you knew that, you just wanted to feel smug).
You're right, why wouldn't an 80 lb draw weight bow be effective? Well, perhaps we should ask those on the Mary Rose, who didn't have a single one onboard. It's no less accurate, right? The loss of range is marginal, right? Well, perhaps there's a reason, like say, needing to penetrate armour?
Nowhere did I say anything remotely to the effect of levée en masse, or of using peasant levees. I stated that training an arquebusser from start to finish takes less time than an archer (though my couple of weeks statement is a touch of an exaggeration). England's archery mandate doesn't cost them any money, but it does cost them time, and quite a bit of it at that. Let's work a quick example, shall we?
If you need a company of 1000 archers, it takes ~10 years for a full cadre to develop from childhood building up the musculoskeletal strength to draw a warbow. That's ~100 archers/year. For the sake of things, lets say it takes 2 years of training to develop an arquebusser (an amount of time I find rather dubious, enlistment to deployment in a modern military is ~6 months for a dramatically more complicated task, but I digress), and you want 1000 again. That's ~500 arquebussers/year (and with a 6 month turn around we're talking 2000/year...) In order to make the equilibrium favour archers you have to be losing 5 times the amount of arquebussers each year. Like I said, you don't need a differential equation to get that, it's rather self explanatory. The English got rid of archers because the economics and math don't favour them. It doesn't matter if you have to do the training officially or tell them to do it themselves, the time factor doesn't change.
In battle, a wound isn't fatal until it's fatal, and it was the billstroke that put him down, not the arrow. If arrows are so deadly, how'd he even make it into bill fighting distance?
From what I can tell, Hardy's methodology consisted of shooting a too-thin (1.5mm) flat sheet. Armor of historical thickness (~2.1mm) and with the actual compound curves would present a far greater challenge. Tod's is the most realistic test I've ever seen on this subject, and the bow was completely defeated. Bane's tests show arrows to be generally ineffective against coats of plates; only the needle bodkin, out of fashion by this time, achieved any effect, and that's highly debatable. Against the chest, about 45mm is necessary to puncture the chest cavity, while his arrow achieved less than ten. Considering the small effect of archery on the Scots at Flodden, where non-gentry would be wearing jacks, I would suspect arrows would leave a lot to be desired. Gunfire though would blast through these other defenses as if they weren't even there.
An 11 gram bullet at 500 m/s does almost 1400j, while a heavy war arrow from a 160# bow does ~120j. The difference is absolutely massive, and this was reflected in the far greater effect of gunfire on its targets, armored or otherwise. The wounds inflicted by bullets were far more serious, able to shatter bone and riddle tissue with shrapnel. Arrows only had a significant chance of killing when they punctured a major organ. Against completely unarmored men fighting native Americans on the western frontier, only about one in ten arrow strikes proved fatal.
Because in a battle, that focal point of utmost military efforts, you should use the most effective forces you have, even if the margin of effectiveness is relatively slight. That does not mean, however, that one needed to invest the time into drawing super heavy bows in order to be effective by archer standards. With an 80# bow, one can be a serviceable soldier probably after a week or so; heavier draws naturally produce advantages, but it's well past the point of diminishing returns.
The time you're referring to to train the archers is borne by the men themselves, not the state, while the state was training gunners. By having men train with the bow on their own time, you're not giving up men who could be using guns, since you can arm them with guns at any point in the archery pipeline and give them the same training you would if they were completely inexperienced. They can then pass back into civil life once their job is through and become killing machine doom archers. Think this through. You have a guy who's been training 8 years with the bow, at no expense to you. What's stopping you from enlisting him as a gunner if you think his bow skills don't pass muster [NB he would already be shooting a plenty powerful bow by this point]? You still have just as many gunners, plus a corps of archers drawn from such 10 year men as there are to supplement them.
The reason the English stopped using archers is because they stopped being worth employing at all, even with the far lower costs, because plainly better options were available. Gunners drew higher wages, but their weapon was so much more capable that the i.e. 600 gunners you could maintain with 4800 pence per day would clean the clocks of the 800 archers that would draw an equivalent wage.
Blaise de Montluc records a good example of arquebus vs. longbow combat in 1545:
So not only did the longbow have less range than the arquebus, its range was so comparatively short that the French thought the English must all be crazy brave to rush up so close to their enemies. Anyway, de Montluc lays his ambush, and as the English get close he runs out and routs them with a single volley:
So not only did the longbow have less range than the arquebus, its range was so comparatively short that the French thought the English must all be crazy brave to rush up so close to their enemies. Anyway, de Montluc lays his ambush, and as the English get close he runs out and routs them with a single volley:
Reading this makes me think the mounted Mongols would have actually made a bigger threat to the french than the english did in that period, had they still been as widespread at that time.
I'm reading a book on the Comanches and how they had quite the advantage over the ground based troops of the militias and army forces in west texas who were armed with sometimes quite accurate and powerful Kentucky Rifles. After the would fire off their first volley the mounted Comanches would ride up and loose 10-15 arrows while the troops were reloading. It wasn't until the development of the Colt Walker revolver and repeating firearms that the balance shifted radically.
If the English could loose their shots mounted it would have made that close approach less suicidal. However it would be very difficult to fire a longbow from horse. The bows used by the Mongols and Comanche were suited to firing from horseback.
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The French fought horse archers (levied from the steppes under Russian control) during the 1813 Fall Campaign, and considered them 'the world's least dangerous troops.'
That seems more related to the specific tribe they encountered than the idea of mounted archers:
Archers hitting their own troops and loosing arrows like wild is not something much attributed to the Mongols or Comanche who were known to be extremely precise.
In the passage right below where I found the above:
What the Mongols, Comanches and yes English longbowmen all had were skills developed over decades begun in childhood that were not easy to replicate by others simply picking up a bow.
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Part of the reason they had to shoot at high angles was also because they were terrified to come up close to men with firearms, too; they would rather be completely ineffective and mostly survive than get close enough to do damage and get destroyed with firepower. The Bashkirs also developed their skills through their lifestyle, as did the many horse archery peoples the Cossacks wrecked with their muskets during the conquest of Siberia. The Koreans had an excellent corps of archers when the Japanese invaded, but they got destroyed by musketry too; tellingly, they developed their own corps of musketeers, trained to a very high standard, immediately after the war.
Kentucky rifles were muzzle-loaders, I believe, and therefore took ages to reload. A unit of regular musketeers trained to fire by rank or by platoon would probably be more effective.
(Also, this was after armour had fallen out of use; de Montluc's Frenchmen would have been harder to kill.)
All muskets are muzzle-loaders. Rifles were somewhat slower to reload than smoothbores, as there was more resistance to ramming the shot down the barrel.
In 18th century battles, regular troops firing by ranks could fire three rounds a minute. But to do that, they had to be drilled to ignore everything around them and just execute the firing drill. And they were effective only against targets to the front of the unit at close range. Not skirmish cavalry.
Rifles were much slower than smoothbores, probably by a factor of three,
18th century soldiers were taught to aim when executing their firing drill; they weren't 'ignoring everything'. Musketeers in formation can present far more firepower than skirmishing cavalry, since multiple ranks of men with minimal file intervals can present their pieces simultaneously. Each rider is thus facing about six musketeers for any given length of front. Given the superior range and killing power of the musket over the bow, this is a very unequal contest.
Black powder is hygroscopic, no matter is large grains for cannons for fine for pistols, so is an issue when storing the kegs