I've seen the argument made that the longbow was soon superseded in European armies as soon as matchlocks and arquebuses came about, however the Mary Rose ship which sank in 1545, had 250 Longbows onboard along 4000 arrows. In fact it serves as one of the best representations for how the English longbow was as most original ones have not survived the years.
Have people overestimate the impact that matchlocks had with overtaking the longbow? There must be a reason why the longbow seemed to have survived past the time they supposedly became irrelevant?
The
Mary Rose had them for defence (it was a big ship, and with not that many cannons), but it's possible some of them were also planned to be transported somewhere by sea, and it's equally possible that their sheer number might have been part of a bragging rights exercise. The
Mary Rose was something of a PR vehicle of its day (pun intended). The biggest and most advanced, purpose-built miltary ship England had at that time. If you were Henry, would you not stoke it with plenty of goodies, both traditional weaponry and the latest goodies in weapons tech ? Of course you would. Before the
Mary Rose sank, Henry focused on promoting the ship rather heavily, in a sort of Renaissance equivalent to what you see with modern military parades in some nations, or even modern naval equivalents, naval power showcases to the public and foreign dignitaries, etc. If you had just a few sailors on the ship and a few slacking off soldiers, archers included, that would hardly leave a good impression. For public parading, you'd have at least a few dozen aboard.
You have to understand that the
Mary Rose was launched in the final heyday of English military archery, a holdover from the previous century. By that point in history, i.e. Henry VIII's time, England still had a lot of functionally medieval warfare traditions, augmented by newer advances such as gunpowder weapons (handgonnes, early arquebuses) and Renaissance ideas for new types of fortifications, etc., etc. It was a transitional era, with a blend of what came and worked before and newer and quickly advancing military concepts.
By the time of the Elizabethan era, several decades later in that same century, longbow archery for military purposes was already seen as being on the way out. Instead, the royal financing and focus on the standing infantry was to raise the number of arquebusiers and early forms of musketeers (specifically those using the
caliver, a proto-musket). You had similar developments in the primarily melee infantry, where traditional polearm soldiers like billmen and halberdiers were being increasingly relegated to guard duty and the main battlefield polearm infantrymen were now pikemen. Same as the trend elsewhere in Europe, with the gradual transition from a feudal muster army (though a sophisticated one) to an early modern standing army.
Here's a good article about the whole thing.
The last military use of longbows - and purely improvised by locals, because they didn't have guns handy - was during some scuffle between locals and soldiers during the English Civil War. By that point, more than a century after Henry VIII's time, no one was using longbows for fighting or even hunting anymore. Same with crossbows. By that point, Britain had transitioned into a post-archery military tradition. You see the same thing with the Thirty Years War in Europe, at that same time. Longbows were seen as recreational weapons already in the 17th century.
Furthermore,
Balaur has a good post on English military longbowmen here.
Matt Easton has you covered on some other pervasive myths and misconceptions about the role and capabilities of English longbowmen. They are either overrated or underrated in popular culture, and their role as soldiers is often misunderstood in popular portrayals and impressions.
I think the recovery of the
Mary Rose is fascinating, because not only did it provide us with a lot of new physical archaeological data on various aspects of medieval life, shipbulding, warfare, tools and weapons, it also served as a snapshot. A snapshot of an already waning era, in which the once very high importance of longbowmen soldiers in the typical English army of the time was beginning to diminish. Under the pressure of new technological advances, as well as changes in period army doctrine and period geopolitics as a whole.
Longbowmen weren't done away with because they were seen as rubbish, they were done away with because they were increasingly seen as obsolete for the new forms of warfare that were spreading throughout Europe. Just as you wouldn't have a 14th century European army use the exact same equipment and tactics as a 9th century European army, or a Roman army from the 4th century AD would not use tactics from a thousand years ago, so too would Renaissance/Tudor era England not keep longbowmen going indefinitely.
We did have a jokey thread years ago, where the WI was that England stubbornly kept using longbowmen even in the Peninsular War and other conflicts of the Napoleonic era. Quite frankly, most of us agreed that deploying military archers in the early 1800s out of stubborn tradition would be a fool's errand. Even with the less accurate nature of the era's muskets, the poor longbowmen would get moved down by volley fire.
On a final note, longbows or any other bow types are never truly "outdated", depending on the context. Sure, you won't be shooting people with a warbow (military-grade, high-poundage longbow) these days, but on the off-chance you got lost in the wilderness without a gun and had enough tools with you (a hatchet, a sturdy knife, some string adequate for a bowstring), you could fashion yourself a bow and use it for hunting, or for self-defence. In that sense, the longbow, or any other bow or crossbow, are never truly obsolete. They just wouldn't be the most powerful weapon around in today's warfare.
