Rise of English Muskets

Against someone in a full plate of armor, the musket was superior to the smaller hand canon and the longbow. Also, there is no need to worry about losing strength during battle and weakening fire. A musketman was not defenseless in melee like an archer (actually, English archers usually brought along spikes, but presumable there is some advantage in not needing a separate ranged and melee weapon)

However in the 1600s, there were disadvantages a msuketman might have had over the 1300s longbowman. The rate of fire of the latter could easily be triple. A longbowman actually had slightly longer effective range. Arrows can slightly arc over low obstacles. They can attack silently. And until the flintlock, both bows and muskets sucked in the rain.

I don't know about everyone else, but according to TvTropes (an evil site where you visit and waste your time clicking links and reading) the English started preferring the musket due to... being able to train a user in a few weeks and that musketman could carry into battle 3 musketballs and the requisite powder for the shots for every arrow an archer could bring into battle. Well, that sounds like a dumb reason. If those were the reasons and not battle fatigue that the commanders were worried about, why not have bowmen for most of the army and use muskets for specialized units? It seems silly that the English gave up the longbow not for a tactical reason but for training and ammunition purposes. Of course, come reliable flintlocks and muskets get better, but the Europeans grabbed the musket before the matchlock.
 
That reason you deem silly is a pretty huge one. Training and ammunition are big deals.

Firing a bow and firing it effectively is a challenge, a challenge which limits the potential people you can have as effective archers, nevermind a longbow which is much harder to pull off (pun intended). Anyone with two hands however can use muskets, meaning it is much easier for anyone/everyone to use them and thus dramatically increases not only your potential recruits, but guarantees all your recruits can use it.

There are also practical considerations. 17th century muskets are comparitively easier to temporarily not use. At a distance, you can use them as normal, sling them for melee range and then get back into formation to fire again as soon as possible, allowing formation warfare a major advantage. Longbows on the other hand are super unweildly, being larger than the average man and thus a pain to sling unless you are dedicated to that role specifically (run away to fire again) or have to abandon that role (drop the Longbow to fight).
 
Let's expand on this a bit. An English longbow was between six and seven feet long and had a pull of between 75 and 100 pounds; the variance is because each was custom made for a particular archer. This means that archers needed to be both tall and strong, which necessarily limited the supply of potential archers. Now add in the several weeks of training and subsequent regular practice needed to create and maintain the necessary skill to make the archer effective in combat and you further limit the number of effective archers available, because some of those strong tall men were needed for other roles. Furthermore the supply of suitable bows and arrows is limited, because the number of bowyers and fletchers was limited, as was the time available to them; both bows and arrows were individually crafted and not mass-produced. Even if the resulting archers were superior to handgunners (and for two hundred years after the introduction of firearms they certainly were) their numbers were necessarily limited.

Now for the handgun. Weighing between twelve and sixteen pounds, fired from a rest with a slowmatch, these were also individually crafted, so not initially in large numbers. In contrast, though, anyone with two hands and at least one eye could learn to use a handgun effectively in a matter of hours, and the ammunition could be made in quantity by anyone with the requisite tools and materials and a few hours of instruction. Initially the handgun's accuracy and reliability were abysmal, but that could be and was improved over time, while the longbow was already near its peak and very little if any improvement was possible. And, given that the only limiting factor on the number of handgunners was the number of handguns available, the potential number of handgunners was very large.

As for the amount of ammunition carried into battle, usually between forty and sixty shots, whether you were archer or handgunner. Enough so you won't run out halfway through, but not so many that resupply becomes too much of a problem. If you need to engage in close combat you have a backup melee weapon (sword, axe, or hammer usually).

If you are an English lord looking to add missile troops to your military force which are you going to choose: Scarce expensive archers? Or cheap plentiful handgunners?
 
From what I remember one of the problems was that Yew wood was overharvested, and that there were severe shortages of pieces suitable for creating longbows, England was having to import from the continent by 1500 from what I recall

One must also recall that there is a difference between the heavier Arquebus/Musket used early on, and the lighter ones adopted in the mid 17th Century and later, which sacrificed range, accuracy and power for rate of fire, handiness and usefulness in melee. A heavy Arquebus/Musket of the period was considered deadly at 400-600 yards, and could fire indirectly out to 1000 yards. It is worth noting that in the 16th century experts were divided over whether the bow or gun was more accurate, as to aim a bow one had to have it drawn which was tiring, while a gun was aimed from a rest. The Gun also could be stopped by the heaviest of plate armor, but would go through anything lighter like chainmail, while even a longbow could be stopped by lighter armor like that, it is worth noting that people claiming the longbow was better emerged after people stopped wearing lighter armors like that
 
From what I remember one of the problems was that Yew wood was overharvested, and that there were severe shortages of pieces suitable for creating longbows, England was having to import from the continent by 1500 from what I recall

Well, that would make longbows impractical. And since muskets beat lesser bows at range...

There are also practical considerations. 17th century muskets are comparitively easier to temporarily not use. At a distance, you can use them as normal, sling them for melee range and then get back into formation to fire again as soon as possible, allowing formation warfare a major advantage. Longbows on the other hand are super unweildly, being larger than the average man and thus a pain to sling unless you are dedicated to that role specifically (run away to fire again) or have to abandon that role (drop the Longbow to fight).

This is true, but I think letting the musket go into the ground puts the fuse out doesn't it?

Even if the resulting archers were superior to handgunners (and for two hundred years after the introduction of firearms they certainly were) their numbers were necessarily limited.

As long as the archers were rested longbowmen anyways. Other bows, while still having a better rate of fire than muskets, were not as long ranged and had slower velocity so might do less damage even to an unarmored target than our subsonic sphere of metal. At Agincourt Henry V actually worried dysentery might weaken his men so much that only the first 3-5 volleys would have any effect, which was unfounded for that particular battle.

If you are an English lord looking to add missile troops to your military force which are you going to choose: Scarce expensive archers? Or cheap plentiful handgunners?

I guess I'd have to go with the handgunners since we just learned the English were stupid enough to overharvest their Yew wood. Needing to get the wood from a ship probably means that the price of the bow itself is tripled and we haven't even trained anyone yet.

Initially the handgun's accuracy and reliability were abysmal, but that could be and was improved over time, while the longbow was already near its peak

This is important in the long run, but didn't finish yet yet. In the 17th century the barrels are only mostly smooth (any imperfections adds to inaccuracy). The accuracy of the musket probably equaled the longbow shortly after the coming of the matchlock (the matchlock itself didn't improve the rest of the musket, but people were always tinkering with the musket and powder composition and it's a nice coincidence in time). Notice I didn't ask why the Brown Bess was favored over longbows. Still, I guess that with the physical requirements needed for a longbowman and the shortage of Yew wood meant that even before that point the longbow had to go.
 
RE putting a musket on the ground: not necessary. You can sling a firearm to your back in a way you could with a bow but not with a longbow.
 
From what I remember one of the problems was that Yew wood was overharvested, and that there were severe shortages of pieces suitable for creating longbows, England was having to import from the continent by 1500 from what I recall

I guess I'd have to go with the handgunners since we just learned the English were stupid enough to overharvest their Yew wood. Needing to get the wood from a ship probably means that the price of the bow itself is tripled and we haven't even trained anyone yet.

I think there is a historical misconception here, yes 14th and 15th English Kings talked and did a lot about increasing the Yew supply and yes they occasionally imported Yew but there was never an absolute lack of supply (at least above a local level), England like almost all pre-modern societies was depedent on wood for fuel and building so it required high prices and royal compulsion for Yew to persuade people to grow Yews for bows not faster growing trees like birch for firewood or oaks for building. Naturally when you have high prices for a commodity imports from places where prices are lower (the Med mainly) are going to occur and they were attractively encouraged by the English monarchy for the obvious reason that more bow wood was a good thing. In price terms despite shortage of yew a good longbow was significantly cheaper than even a basic arquebus (metal working was expensive) however a bow had a much shorter lifespan than an arquebus so over time the firearms was cheaper.
 
Something else to consider: both arquebuses and longbows are essentially only of much use for war; you don't need a full fledged longbow for hunting (and it's massively unwieldy for one). That means that people have no incentive to keep trained (and longbow use, in particular, basically requires a decade+ of training/practice to be reasonable; longbowmen skeletons show notable changes from the effects of constant training), so you have to basically constantly enforce peacetime drill on a populace when both the people themselves and their employers would rather they be doing other things (i.e. farming and otherwise making food and money for themselves and their employers). Remember that even "professional" soldiers (of which England had relatively few) spend most of their lives not engaged in warfare, and the ability to raise a force, train them for a couple of weeks and send them out to fight seems a lot more useful.

More broadly, English armies post Wars of the Roses tended to be fairly small, and not of particularly high quality. The Tudors and Stuarts were both regular participants in the various French-Habsburg wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, but largely ineffectual ones. When they did raise armies to go overseas, they were generally reliant on mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries to make up a good chunk of their army (fighting the Scots was different, but the Scots in this time period tended to perform even worse than the English). There wasn't enough demand to support a large standing force of longbowmen (which is what you'd need to justify the expense of keeping them trained), and even if you dispatched an army of longbowmen you'd have to deal with a mixture of whatever your foreign mercenaries/allies brought anyway (and often, such as during the Dutch Revolt, the foreigners were taking the lead to start with). It also didn't help that the English Crown from Henry VIII on was perpetually short of funds for even basic needs (and Charles I's "creative" funding measures eventually contributed to getting his head chopped off).

Finally, the original post tends to overplay the longbow's advantages in general; there's a reason that basically no one outside the British Isles adopted it, and why the English still managed to lose the Hundred Years War despite it.
 
The range isn't made up and the English armies weren't as bad as you say for most kings (Ok yeah there was Charles I) auxiliaries were used to supplant the main army due to a lack of quantity not quality. Comparing the English to the French is like having a baseball team that has 9 men on the field face off against a team with 12 for a seven game series and using that to say the larger team is better because they won more games.
 
However in the 1600s, there were disadvantages a msuketman might have had over the 1300s longbowman. The rate of fire of the latter could easily be triple. A longbowman actually had slightly longer effective range. Arrows can slightly arc over low obstacles. They can attack silently. And until the flintlock, both bows and muskets sucked in the rain.

The notion that bows had a longer effective range than muskets is a myth; as this website says:

There are some common threads running through all these accounts, facts and eyewitness opinions that keep coming up, and one of the strongest is this: in every case where one weapon is said to outdistance the other, it is the musket which has the range advantage.

I have not found a single instance of a battle where the musketeers were unable to return fire because the archers outranged them. This true of battles everywhere in the world. Some examples:

Silent attacking might be useful in, e.g., ambushes and night attacks, but such actions were a small majority of total engagements, so it made no sense to optimise your equipment for them at the expense of much more common sieges and pitched battles.

Also, quite contrary to what people have asserted on this thread, people of the sixteenth century thought that muskets required more training than bows, chiefly it seems because poorly-trained musketeers had an unfortunate tendency to blow themselves up accidentally.
 
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Finally, the original post tends to overplay the longbow's advantages in general; there's a reason that basically no one outside the British Isles adopted it, and why the English still managed to lose the Hundred Years War despite it.

All of Charles the Bold's longbowmen didn't do much against shoeless angry mountain-German peasants with pikes. Didn't help Brittany stay independent either, and that was before any muskets happened.

It's a good weapon but it's not magic, and it's not as good a weapon as 16th c. firearms.
 
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We have a mirror in the rapid take up of matchlocks in Japan which allowed mass armies of quickly trained peasants to replace the previous massed polearms supported by small numbers of trained archers.

Yew is a very good wood but not the only one.

There is a difference in the use of skilled archers and massed peasant musketry. Skilled archers trained to shoot at targets at the limits of the physical range of the weapon. Skilled both in accuracy and a built body strength. The musket peasantry is unable to aim at maximum ranges. Due to the lack of sighting and practice, the musket ball becoming unstable as it drops through the transonic range at 100-200 yards and the lack of vision from the smoke from massed musket fire so the target cannot be seen.

They are therefore used in different ways on the battlefield. In modern infantry weapon terms the archers are indirect fire mortars. Muskets are direct fire close range weapons. Both do not act with precision fire but massed fire to make a beaten area.

Contrary to popular stories arrows cannot easily penetrate plate armour. The best arrows at close range might sometimes do so but the whole point of plate armour was to defeat pointed and edged weapons. Musket balls could penetrate plate armour unless it was of such a thickness that the weight was untenable. Hence the gradual diminution of plate armour with the rise of the musket.

BTW I used to practice the longbow and currently shoot with my muskets.
 
Can I suggest reading this blog Bow Vs Musket(not mine) where the author has gone to a great deal of effort to gather source materials and contemporary histories in a real effort to better understand the transition from bows to firearms.

In it he explores some of the myths, such as training; there is a particularly English reference to the fact that bows are considered acceptable weapons for the "untrained" men in the English Trained Bands.

Musketeers Were Not Easier to Train than Archers Being an example conclusion for those too time pressed to visit the site themselves I have included a sample below:

Like most English military men, Barret’s opinion was that the bow and bill were obsolete, but he didn’t think that the bows and bills England already owned should be thrown away. They could still be used by untrained men:

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, The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warre, Page 25

The blog also has a handy collection of links to online versions of several English discourses on the subject written by contemporary advocates of both bows and firearms:

English Books on the Bow vs. Musket

On the subject of Japanese "Peasant" Musketry the Koreans were devastatingly impressed by the power of Japanese firearms in comparison to traditional war bows.

Imjin War related articles from the same blog

Again a brief sample:

This quote by the Korean official Yu Song-nyong, for example, is pretty damning:

In the 1592 invasion, everything was swept away. Within a fortnight or a month the cities and fortresses were lost, and everything in the eight directions had crumbled. Although it was [partly] due to there having been a century of peace and the people not being familiar with warfare that this happened, it was really because the Japanese had the use of muskets that could reach beyond several hundred paces, that always pierced what they struck, that came like the wind and the hail, and with which bows and arrows could not compare.


Now none of the above represents my own independent finds but I have found this blog to be far and the best for informing my understanding of a complex subject and the most assiduous in seeking out reliable or nearly so, source materials.
 
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