Longest continued use of the Longbow possible?
- Thread starter SeanB
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A child can kill a grown man with a gun, even if the child is not trained to handle the firearm.
But it takes years of practice to master the Longbow. It terms of modern warfare... never. To easy to form a regiment armed with rifles that may be able to hit a target than to form a regiment armed with longbows that can hit a target.
But it takes years of practice to master the Longbow. It terms of modern warfare... never. To easy to form a regiment armed with rifles that may be able to hit a target than to form a regiment armed with longbows that can hit a target.
The value of the longbow declined as partial plate armour for everyone became cheaper and more commonplace and armies also became larger.
By the time armour becomes less of a factor and longbows may once again become very useful...yeah, everyone's already using guns for everything, which are superior in every respect except rate of fire. Until they go the whole volume-first direction and guns become crap again.
Basically, the longbow has to somehow survive the end of the 16th c. and also most of the 17th.
One way is to have England involved in the Mediterranean. The Med. nations' marines used crossbows equally often to guns until the early 1600s since their opponents were rarely as well-protected and were in fact often archers themselves.
Longbows could be used like Turkish marines armed with recurves, for suppression fire. Cannons and guns would do most of the actual killing. In that context the longbow could live on.
By the time armour becomes less of a factor and longbows may once again become very useful...yeah, everyone's already using guns for everything, which are superior in every respect except rate of fire. Until they go the whole volume-first direction and guns become crap again.
Basically, the longbow has to somehow survive the end of the 16th c. and also most of the 17th.
One way is to have England involved in the Mediterranean. The Med. nations' marines used crossbows equally often to guns until the early 1600s since their opponents were rarely as well-protected and were in fact often archers themselves.
Longbows could be used like Turkish marines armed with recurves, for suppression fire. Cannons and guns would do most of the actual killing. In that context the longbow could live on.
I don't think it is that difficult to have the longbow survive until 1750 or so, going away together with the pike in the years leading up to the 7 years' war. What you need is to have England (and later Britain) to be actively involved in the mass army warfare on the continent between the Hundred Year's War and the War of Spanish Succession. The Spanish Tertia would have massive problems under a logbowmen rain of arrows.
The main problem is the size of armies and the way disease took a devastating toll. If the troops die off all the time, troops that take a life-time to train seems like a worse choice.
If England (later Britain) keeps parts of northern France and perhaps gets involved in Hannover earlier, to have a part of the 30 year's war and hygiene is advanced a bit, then the mass of longbowmen could be a battle deciding factor and be kept until the flintlock musket has replaced all wheellock and matchlock weapons.
The main problem is the size of armies and the way disease took a devastating toll. If the troops die off all the time, troops that take a life-time to train seems like a worse choice.
If England (later Britain) keeps parts of northern France and perhaps gets involved in Hannover earlier, to have a part of the 30 year's war and hygiene is advanced a bit, then the mass of longbowmen could be a battle deciding factor and be kept until the flintlock musket has replaced all wheellock and matchlock weapons.
Instead of England being involved in more continental wars, hoe about france adopting the longbow during the 100-y war?
PoD: the King reject the nobles' pressure to disband the francs-archers ( somehow, the nobles weren't too keen on the idea of peasants having longbows, knowing to use them and getting some tax exception as they demonstrated their profinency and maintained their weapons. I wonder why
). So France is putting longbows on the field in the last third of the 100-y war. Then come the italian wars and the religious wars ( supposing no butterflies during italian wars). Likely, the longbows are kept in use. Can the longbows be kept afterward?
PoD: the King reject the nobles' pressure to disband the francs-archers ( somehow, the nobles weren't too keen on the idea of peasants having longbows, knowing to use them and getting some tax exception as they demonstrated their profinency and maintained their weapons. I wonder why
). So France is putting longbows on the field in the last third of the 100-y war. Then come the italian wars and the religious wars ( supposing no butterflies during italian wars). Likely, the longbows are kept in use. Can the longbows be kept afterward?Deleted member 5719
Without armour, longbows are superior to firearms up to the Napoleonic wars. The problems are:
1. Training longbowmen is immensely time consuming.
2. Everyone would wear armour if they knew they were going to face longbowmen.
The moment you have longbows in numbers, you have armour, so the advantage disappears, and you start to use muskets.
1. Training longbowmen is immensely time consuming.
2. Everyone would wear armour if they knew they were going to face longbowmen.
The moment you have longbows in numbers, you have armour, so the advantage disappears, and you start to use muskets.
A lot of the myth of the longbow was created in the seventeenth century, when English toxophiles started writing learned treatises about it. It's not a bad weapon, but people terribly overrate it.
I don't think you can equip an early modern army with longbows. It's logistically not feasible in the required quantities - not only the need for trained men, also the supply of arrows (and staves, to lesser extent), which, unlike gunpowder, are not easily convertible to other uses or, like bullets, improvised in the field. So I'd say there is a possible continuation until the 1640s without major PODs, a little longer if you don't have Britain involved in any major land wars. As soon as the government has to raise a large army, it can not do it by relying on the men trained between the village butts any longer, even if all of rural England still regularly does that.
Mind, it is likely some people still used longbows in the Civil War. Just not many. Guns have too many advantages.
I don't think you can equip an early modern army with longbows. It's logistically not feasible in the required quantities - not only the need for trained men, also the supply of arrows (and staves, to lesser extent), which, unlike gunpowder, are not easily convertible to other uses or, like bullets, improvised in the field. So I'd say there is a possible continuation until the 1640s without major PODs, a little longer if you don't have Britain involved in any major land wars. As soon as the government has to raise a large army, it can not do it by relying on the men trained between the village butts any longer, even if all of rural England still regularly does that.
Mind, it is likely some people still used longbows in the Civil War. Just not many. Guns have too many advantages.
Deleted member 5719
I agree with most of what you post, but it should be recognised that 100 men with longbows would beat 100 men with pre-19th cetury firearms everytime (in fact the gunmens best tactic would be to sneak up on the archers and start smacking them with their guns).
It's just that getting an army of archers into the field is a massively difficult feat.
It's just that in the time one can train 100 longbowmen one can probably train 2500 gunmen...
Flocculencio
Donor
Arbalests, IIRC, had better range even if they did have slower rate of fire and early guns were much cheaper to make.
Basically if you have 100 longbowmen and I have 1000 peasants and 1000 muskets you might be able to slaughter a third of my peasants and break them but for every longbowman you lose I can just dredge up five more peasants, slap a musket or pike into their hands and point them at you. @Boynamedsue- basically it's not 100 longbowmen against 100 musketeers. Every longbowman you lose is 20 years of training down the drain. Every musketeer I lose is a peasant who can be replaced in a few months. Given equal financial resources a state ca always put more musketeers into the field than longbowmen.
Shot and pike troops are relatively easy to train in large numbers and that trumps everything else really.
The question should not be the long bow but the bow period. There is a great deal of difference between a trained long bowman and a half trained peasant using a bow with less draw in a mass formation. Plus the bow allows indirect and plunging fire. make the bow the prefered hunting weapon in the English colonies and the ARW looks very different
Flocculencio
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But still, bows and arrows are finicky and expensive to make and maintain. They're not exactly good weapons for a New World pioneer settlement because if your bowyer and fletcher die of dysentery you're screwed whereas you can ship in a crate of arquebuses andsome barrels of gunpowder when you first come and if you keep them relatively out of the damp they'll be ok. Also crude gunpowder is relatively easy to make and if you have a fire, lead and a mould a semi skilled man can cast lead balls.
Basically I can still see your trained longbowman and raise you ten half trained peasants with guns. Your longbowman can kill five of them but there are lots more where they came from- not so with him.
They still use them in some places, so you could say thay continue as long as possible.
Bows and arrows: deadly weapons of rural Kenya's war
Pic
Bows and arrows: deadly weapons of rural Kenya's war
Pic
Not so. The Longbow was inestimably superior to the regular bow. The Longbow could fire - accurately - over 300 yards. A normal bow, especially to someone with about as much training as a musketeer, has a range of about 80 yards and an accurate range of about 50. This puts it roughly on a par with the musket.
I do recall that the Duke of Wellington asked for a Longbow Corps during the Napoleonic Wars, and was told in no uncertain terms that it was beyond the UK's means to produce a proficient group before the end of the war...which was still correctly believed to be several years away at that point.
In order to bring about this, you'd need to virtually end military technology improvements, because rifling in muskets will blow away longbows through the sudden massive increase in accuracy. You'd also need to encourage a policy of small national standing armies, rather than the levee en masse and conscription ideas of the Napoleonic Wars. And lastly you'd need to somehow have the UK not only come up with the idea of testing out longbowmen, but also have the patience to wait 10-20 years, yes 10 to 20 years, for their longbowmen to gain the physical strength required to use the bow properly. There's a reason that it used to be illegal in England to not spend your Sundays practising with your bow...
It isn't really any better than a typical Eurasian-steppe style composite recurve (used everywhere from Russia to Syria to Mongolia to Turkey), and requires a good source of both wood (mature trees that you can cut long staves from) and a lot of time in training and a lot of space in combat, actually.
Yet despite having as good or better weapons mandated by both culture and regulation, both the Russians and the Turks moved away from the saadaq to the pistol/arquebousse for their cavalry/infantry respectively over time. Partly economics, partly to defeat armour which was still very common in the 16th/17th cc. Once the bow-fighting generation died, it became very hard to raise new archers. There is a theory that, for example, the rare Ottoman defeat on the sea like Lepanto had its greatest impact not in loss of ships (easily replaced) but in the loss of good archers that the Turks raised from among the rural areas as marines who were essentially irreplaceable in the long run in the same numbers.
Also, 17th-c. Spanish muskets could actually be quality weapons; even they, however, lost out to the basic 18th c. smoothbore because it was cheaper to produce and fire volume was more effective than aimed shots and had roughly the same killing power anyway.
Well yes. I agree the longbow is the like of the Eurasian composite, but that's not the "bow" I was referring to. I was referring to the standard four-foot shortbow of western and central European usage, and though the reasoning is different, the same claim of supremacy goes for the crossbow, too - heck, if a crossbow can't out-reload a musket then it's screwed. The longbow is never going to survive continual use through history, because with armoured infantry at long range it is far less useful, meaning there is always going to be a period where it goes out of usage. It was the way that Europe essentially turned its back on armour by the year 1700(ish) that makes a longbow return strategically viable if nothing else.
That's why I was trying to find a niche for it as a naval weapon so that it can survive as a living practice until it becomes tactically viable on land again. I'm taking this challenge seriously, as you see
Reason being, longbowmen on fighting platforms could provide cover fire for naval snipers or be naval snipers themselves. Sailors and marines tended to be less well-armoured than regular soldiers, mostly.
Uh...the Scots never used longbows. And the English last used them in 1642, so to still being using them "long after the English" would be quite impressive.
Flocculencio
Donor
But given the skills and intensive training needed to train a longbowman properly, as another poster said, once you have a gap of one generation where the culture ceases to be bow-proficient, your pool of recruits dries up. 14th C English armies were able to draw on peasants who had been using longbows since their teens- the same was not true of 17th C English armies since the bow culture had disappeared.