In siege contexts and
chévauchée (horseman raids / mounted infantry raids), I could see a use for it. However, I've always felt arrow-magazines for regular bows would be a firly bragging rights" improvement, with a fairly limited number of military shooting tasks they could accomplish better than simple nock-span-release shooting, one arrow at a time. Six or maybe eight arrows released a minute by a professional military archer on the battlefield is already nothing to sneeze at. You don't need to four or more arrows within a few seconds to be an intimidating archery force on the battlefield. Plus, if your arrows run out, you have to open up the magazine and start loading it. That's hardly all that great a time-saving method compared to the traditional "only a single arrow" method.
Tod already made a lot of good points about the "Instant Legolas" in the video linked to above by piratedude.
I think what most people overlook, similarly to when talking about single-shot crossbows and the two Chinese repeating types (
1 and
2), is that faster rate of shooting isn't necessarily preferrable to historical people in proper warfare. It could have its niches, sure - ones when a bow or crossbow equipped archer would grumble "Pity I don't have a faster way to nock, span and release..." - but I find the idea everyone was clamouring for a rapid-shooting weapon on the battlefield to be a bit dubious.
For comparison, even in modern day fighting, do you think most soldiers or law enforcement personnel fire their guns on full-auto, all the time ? Unlike what Hollywood action movies have taught many, pointing a gun loosely, "spray and pray" firing and hoping you'll hit someone, is not an effective way to do ranged fighting. Especially not in a military context. (Most of the movie stuff is absurd anyway: Even a small machine pistol fired on full-auto would give you plenty of recoil, often hard to handle while pointing it one-handed.) Even with contemporary assault rifles, the vast majority of people who use them, use them effectivelly. Meaning, they use them set to semi-auto firing. Some guns have
only semi-auto firing anyway, including military rifles. There was a reluctance until the second half of the 20th century to part with bolt-action rifles. They were faster and more practical than single-shot rifles, but even in these, you had to regularly work a mechanism to load another round, and you had to replace the clip in the magazine after a few rounds. Why weren't bolt-action rifles done away with entirely after the first world war ? Because they were more economical to construct, that's one point in their favour, and because the soldiers using them were forced to conserve ammo reasonably. If you can't fire something on burst, or full-auto, or even easily round-after-round, you are forced to really think about your shooting. You don't panic and avoid spending precious ammunition against an adversary or target you could take out with one or two more methodical rounds. Semi-auto firing forces a soldier to keep cool and make a shot count. Even if it's just covering fire, rather than shooting at an enemy.
And that's my point when it comes to bows, including military longbows and composite cavalry bows of the Middle Ages and early modern times. A military archer will find an arrow-magazine to be a useful accessory for very specific tasks and contexts. But it will not be a thing he will be using constantly on the battlefield. For the most part, a military archer will focus more on precision and hitting the target, rather than just wildly showing off with how many arrows he can shoot in a very short time. Could the magazine help him in certain contexts, or when he's in a pickle ? Maybe ! Would it be something that would be used uniformly on the battlefield and no one would ever bother going back to
The biggest hurdle: A lot of the bows tested with this magazine have a relatively low draw weight. If you want to take a military warbow, one with a very high draw weight that you need a real amount of strength and training to span, and use the magazine for it, the magazine might prove a hindrance, or even malfunction. It might not be compatible with the sort of warbows we see in Britain of the 14th to 16th centuries. You see the likes of Internet show-offs like Lars Andersen claiming that their speed-shooting makes them archery maestros, but in reality, it doesn't matter at all, from a practical warfare perspective. He's using a bow with a piddly draw weight. Give him a medieval military warbow, for foot or horseback fighting, let him try his speed-shooting tricks with those... and he'll have a hard time drawing back the bowstring at all. To call back to Hollywood movies again, most of the stuff where someone pulls back a bowstring and holds it for entire minutes, pointing at someone, or just nocks, spans and shoots within the blink of an eye, is bunk. Most prop-bows in those films have very little draw weight, they're often the equivalent of children's toy bows or even weaker ! If the characters in those films had a real bow for fighting, the physics of the thing would simply not allow them to do nocking-spanning-shooting that fast. This exact same draw weight hurdle exists in the Chinese repeating crossbows. They were short-to-medium range weapons. Though you could use them as a sort of submachine gun for home defence or for protecting a guardhouse or during a siege, the selfbows or composite bows of these crossbows.
These three videos are good companion pieces to Tod's video above. As much as Jason Kingsley from Modern History TV liked the arrow-magazine, he is very keen to point out where it has its defficiencies as part of a medieval military weapon in the first two videos. And the third video makes very good points as well, I wholly recommend watching that one, in addition to the first two.
Additionally, looking at Mr. Sprave's Instant Legolas design and its derivatives (Instant Robin Hood, etc.), the wooden magazine's dimensions also limit what sort of arrows you can use in that thing. Sometimes, you might need a broadhead, but if the magazine is constructed in a way that prohibits easy use of arrows with a slightly wider profile, that's hardly beneficial for varied military archery needs. Or even self-defence needs and hunting needs. If the magazine is hard to build and hard to make operational in such a way that you could use it to quickly shoot several arrows with a particular type of hunting head, or even multiple different types of hunting heads, then its benefits are more limited then it would seem at first glance. Mr. Sprave admits this himself, in the very first video he made of the Instant Legolas arrow-magazine. It's a very good and ingenious device, but not necessarily a one-size-fits all device. It does have its understandable mechanical, size and physical drawbacks.
There's a further snag for medieval military longbows specifically, particularly the British type: They do not have the same bowstave profile as a lot of later wooden longbows have, longbows made for recreational target-shooting. Those tend to have a more D-shaped profile, whereas the medieval warbow had a more O-shaped or 0-shaped, rounded or elipsoid profile. Meaning that any arrow-magazine would have to be modified in such a way that it could easily attach to a period longbow.
Historically, you had some Tatar mercenary horseman carry a small tiller tied to their saddle, with a simple trigger. They could attach their composite hornbows, commonly used for horse archery, to the front of these tillers when needed. They'd get a simple crossbow, useful for certain special roles (presumably patrol roles or shooting with more pin-point accuracy). That's about the extent of my knowledge of horse archers or mounted infantrymen looking for any tech additions to their bows. I have never heard of a nomadic people being all that interested in a more complex device that could shoot faster than their already fast nock-span-shoot combat archery skills.
When your average longbowman can put 12 arrows in the air in a minute, the point of this is what exactly? The same reasoning had the Lee-Enfield hang on later than most other bolt-action rifles. We already had the trained bowmen, other nations already had the crossbow. This device would be a solution looking for a problem where there wasn't one.
Henry VIII set effective shooting range as 220 yards. Infantry at the double would cover that in about 80 seconds. Furthest range at the butts recorded as 345 yards. Against infantry your longbowmen aren't going to engaged for more than 2 minutes before the enemy has closed to knife range. How many arrows to a quiver and how much would that quiver weigh? I doubt yer man would be carrying more than ten minutes of arrows. I doubt your argument would enter into things.
Yes, this is what I'm getting at.
People really overestimate the usefulness of rapid-fire stuff in a military context, just because something "looks cool".
