#English longbow

[admiralnelsoniii]

The Battle of Hastings. The signal that ended the supremacy of the armored knight. Where the English longbow proved that it could not only defeat plate armor completely, but could do it at long range. The Yew Longbow became the ultimate infantry weapon that day. To the lament of many a noble knight.

[liberty1776]

Common Myths About Medieval Archery (And the Truth Behind Them)

[racefortheironthrone]

How come the longbow is so associated with the English and their use of the longbow?

I imagine that there have been multiple societies that used the longbow (before or at the same time as the English), but it seems that the English are the most well known users of the longbow (at least in popular culture/thought).

The longbow was originally Welsh, but the English very quickly adopted it as one of their main weapons of war during and after the Edwardian conquest of Wales - that campaign ended in 1283, and by the time of the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, we see the English army now mainly made up of longbowmen (a lot of them Welshmen).

Moreover, the English monarchy enacted laws that reinforced this shift to a longbow-based army: the original Assize of Arms of 1181 had focused on requring freemen of England to own chainmail (or gambesons if you owned less than ten marks), helmets (or just an iron cap if you had ten marks or less), and lances as their main weapon. By the Assize of Arms of 1252, freemen with nine marks or more were required to "array with bow and arrow." By the time of the Statute of Winchester of 1285, even the poorest freemen is expected to have "bows and arrows out of the forest, and in the forest bows and pilets."

Thus, when Edward III starts up the Hundred Years War, the armies that win stunning victories at Crecy and Poitiers (and establish the lasting associaion between England and the longbow) were based on his grandfather's model. Edward would further reinforce royal policy towards longbows by enacting the Archery Law of 1363, which required that "every man … if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make use, in his games, of bows and arrows… and so learn and practise archery." Thus, longbow practice every Sunday and feast/saint's day became mandatory in England.

The English love affair with the longbow also continued much longer than in other nations. Even after the French began to use cannons against the formations of English longbowmen, and thus regained the upper hand in the Hundred Years War, (something often attributed to their adoption of the longbow, but in reality artillery was the main French adaptation) the English kept on fielding armies of mostly longbowmen. The Battle of Flodden in 1513 was largely fought with longbows; when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose went down in 1545 she had 250 longbows on board (which form the material basis for a lot of our archaelogical understanding of medieval longbows); when the English militia was called up to fight the Spanish Armada in 1588, longbowmen still made up about 10% of their forces.

[tgirlwithreverb]

You ever think about how longbow hype is (net very) low key white nationalism?

[liberty1776]

Nice post, but you dont fire an arrow you shoot it. Few if any women would have had the upper body strength to shoot a longbow, while my petite daughter was able to frighten off in intruder by just displaying her AR 15.

[beardedmrbean]

[blumineck]

Would a greatbow (bow from the souls games) work? It's about the size of a person and shoots huge arrows, they were made to kill dragons but I'm wondering if you could actually use a person sized bow in real life.

It really depends on what you think qualifies! English/Welsh Longbows and Japanese Yumi bows are both very long, and can easily get well over 6' end to end. Yumi in particular have a very long draw (as do e.g. manchu bows), and use very long arrows (3ft+).

The draw weight on some of these bows also goes very high (warbows are generally 80-180lb, but can hit 200lb in extreme cases), so drawing them is also like lifting a person.

The thing that video games, etc. Often get "wrong" (though tbh it's generally a deliberate stylisation choice) is that just making a bow bigger doesn't make it inherently more powerful- a well-made asiatic war bow could hit similar weights to a longbow, while being a good foot or so shorter, and due to their different speeds, may shoot arrows that have greater range and more energy on impact. (But the longbow is designed for heavier arrows so it gets complicated when looking at armour tests, etc.)

Similarly, if you just keep making the limbs thicker, you'll get diminishing returns, and eventually the material will hit its limits and it won't function like a bow any more. Or it will, but nobody can physically use it.

So essentially yes, but there are limits.

[whencyclopedia]

Battle of Poitiers, 1356 CE

The Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356 CE was the second great battle of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453 CE) after Crécy (1346 CE) and, once again, it was the English who won. Edward the Black Prince (1330-1376 CE), son of Edward III of England (r. 1327-1377 CE), masterminded victory largely thanks to the continued domination of the powerful longbow weapon, Edward's excellent defensive positioning, and the outdated reliance of heavy cavalry by the French leadership. The French king, John the Good, aka John II of France (r. 1350-1364 CE), was captured along with many other knights and their ransoms provided the English treasury with a massive boost. A major consequence of the battle was that it allowed Edward III to keep 25% of France under the 1360 CE Treaty of Brétigny. The battle also cemented the reputation of the Black Prince as one of the greatest of all medieval knights.

Aftermath

After Poitiers, France, without its leaders, descended into the abyss of chaos. Most immediately, the disbanded French mercenaries who had fought so poorly caused havoc as they raided the surrounding area. Then King Edward pressed his advantage by marching on Rheims in 1359 CE, fully intending to have himself made king of the French where their monarchs were traditionally crowned. Rheims proved impregnable, though, and a harsh winter so reduced Edward's army he was obliged to start peace talks. In May 1360 CE a treaty was signed between England and France. Under the Treaty of Brétigny, Edward's claim to 25% of France (mostly in the north and south-west) was recognised and, in return, he gave up any ambition for the French crown itself.

The Hundred Years' War carried on as Charles V of France, aka Charles the Wise (r. 1364-1380 CE) proved much more capable than his predecessors and began to claw back the English territorial gains. Edward III was now too old to campaign and was showing signs of senility. The Black Prince died, probably of dysentery, in June 1376 CE and so England's martial prowess suffered a serious setback. Now, the only lands left in France belonging to the English Crown were Calais and a thin slice of Gascony. During the reign of Richard II of England (r. 1377-1399 CE) there was largely peace between the two nations but under Henry V of England (r. 1413-1422 CE), the wars flared up again and witnessed the great English victory at the Battle of Agincourt in October 1415 CE. Henry was so successful that he was even nominated as the heir to the French king Charles VI of France (r. 1380-1422 CE). Henry V died before he could take up that position, and the arrival of Joan of Arc (1412-1431 CE) in 1429 CE saw the beginning of a dramatic rise in French fortunes as King Charles VII of France (r. 1422-1461 CE) took the initiative. The weak rule of Henry VI of England (r. 1422-61 & 1470-71 CE) saw a final English defeat as they lost all French territories except Calais at the wars' end in 1453 CE.

Continue reading...

[liberty1776]

English Archers, 100 Years War.

[falconfate]

Hello ranger’s apprentice fandom can we talk real quick about the stupidest thing Flanagan ever wrote

It’s about the bows. Yanno, the rangers’ Iconique™️ main weapon. That one. You know the one.

Flanagan. Flanagan why are your rangers using longbows.

“uh well recurve arrows drop faster” BUT DO THEY. FLANAGAN. DO THEY.

the answer is no they don’t. Compared to a MODERN, COMPOUND (aka cheating) bow, yes, but compared to a longbow? Y’know, what the rangers use in canon? Yeah no a recurve actually has a FLATTER trajectory. It drops LATER.

This from an article comparing the two:

“Both a longbow and a recurve bow, when equipped with the right arrow and broadhead combination, are capable of taking down big game animals. Afterall, hunters have been doing it for centuries with both types of bows.

However, generally speaking and all things equal, a recurve bow will offer more arrow speed, creating a flatter flight trajectory and retain more kinetic energy at impact.

The archers draw length, along with the weight of the arrow also affect speed and kinetic energy. However, the curved design of the limbs on a recurve adds to its output of force.”

It doesn’t actually mention ANY distance in range! And this is from a resource for bow hunting, which, presumably, WOULD CARE ABOUT THAT SORT OF THING!

Okay so that’s just. That’s just the first thing.

The MAIN thing is that even accounting for “hur dur recurves drop faster” LONGBOWS ARE STILL THE STUPID OPTION.

Longbows, particularly and especially ENGLISH longbows, are—as their name suggests—very long. English longbows in particular are often as tall or taller than their wielder even while strung, but especially when unstrung. An unstrung longbow is a very long and expensive stick, one that will GLADLY entangle itself in nearby trees, other people’s clothes, and any doorway you’re passing through.

And yes, there are shorter longbows, but at that point if you’re shortening your longbow, just get a goddamn recurve. And Flanagan makes a point to compare his rangers’ bows to the Very Long English Longbow.

Oh, do you know how the Very Long English Longbow was mostly historically militarily used? BY ON-FOOT ARCHER UNITS. Do you know what they’re TERRIBLE for? MOUNTED ARCHERY.

Trust me. Go look up right now “mounted archery longbow.” You’ll find MAYBE one or two pictures of some guy on a horse struggling with a big stick; mostly you will actually see either mounted archers with RECURVES, or comparisons of Roman longbow archers to Mongolian horse archers (which are neat, can’t lie, I love comparing archery styles like that).

Anyway. Why are longbows terrible for mounted archery? Because they’re so damn long. Think about it: imagine you’re on a horse. You’re straddling a beast that can think for itself and moves at your command, but ultimately independently of you; if you’re both well-trained enough, you’re barely paying attention to your horse except to give it commands. And you have a bow in your hands. If your target is close enough to you that you know, from years of shooting experience, you will need to actually angle your bow down to hit it because of your equine height advantage, guess what? If you have a longbow, YOU CAN’T! YOUR HORSE IS IN THE WAY BECAUSE YOUR BOW IS TOO LONG! Worse, it’s probably going to get in the general area of your horse’s shoulder or legs, aka moving parts, which WILL injure your horse AND your bow and leave you fresh out of both a getaway vehicle and a ranged weapon. It’s stupid. Don’t do it.

A recurve, on the other hand, is short. It was literally made for horse archers. You have SO much range of motion with a recurve on horseback; and if you’re REALLY good, you know how to give yourself even more, with techniques like Jamarkee, a Turkish technique where you LITERALLY CAN AIM BACKWARDS.

For your viewing enjoyment, Serena Lynn of Texas demonstrating Jamarkee:

Yes, that’s real! This type of draw style is INCREDIBLY versatile: you can shoot backwards on horseback, straight down from a parapet or sally port without exposing yourself as a target, or from low to the ground to keep stealthy without banging your bow against the ground. And, while I’m sure you could attempt it with a longbow, I wouldn’t recommend it: a recurve’s smaller size makes it far more maneuverable up and over your head to actually get it into position for a Jamarkee shot.

A recurve just makes so much more SENSE. It’s not a baby bow! It’s not the longbow’s lesser cousin! It’s a COMPLETELY different instrument made to be used in a completely different context! For the rangers of Araluen, who put soooo much stock in being stealthy and their strong bonds with their horses, a recurve is the perfect fit! It’s small and easily transportable, it’s more maneuverable in combat and especially on horseback, it offers more power than a longbow of the same draw weight—really, truly, the only advantage in this case that a longbow has over the recurve is that longbows are quicker and easier to make. But we KNOW the rangers don’t care about that, their KNIVES use a forging technique (folding) that takes several times as long as standard Araluen forging practices at the time!

Okay.

Okay I think I’m done. For now.

[arulens-least-horny-jongleur]

starting this rant off with the fact that i love RA. i adore Rangers Apprentice and i have since i first read it at age 8, but holy hell does Flanagan have a lot to answer for in terms of the archery.

Flanagan was in no way an archery expert, and neither am i, but i have been shooting recurve bows since i was old enough to hold them (my first time shooting was hysterical, the bow was bigger than me) and i know a bit about the differing types of bow, arrow, fletching, etc. and how different bows are designed for different people.

my first issue is that fact that Halt, who is canonically Short As Hell, uses an english long bow. this has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with the fact that the bow is bigger than him. he MIGHT be able to bring it to 3/4 draw with his arm length. i’m 5’4 and cannot possibly shoot more than 30” (apologies for the imperial, i’m north american) arrows, and long bow arrows are usually at least half a foot longer than that.

we stan one Short King but it doesn’t matter how buff you are, shooting a longbow is basically pointless if you can’t even bring it to full draw

[groovysarity]

Did You Know? The History of the Middle Finger...

Well, now...,.. here's something I never knew before, and now that I know it, I feel compelled to share with my intelligent friends in the hopes that they too, will feel blessed in having gained more knowledge. History is way more fun when you know more fun facts about it, don’t you agree?

Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as 'plucking the yew' (or 'pluck yew'), Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew!

Over the decades Americans have since changed up the words , the 'pluck yew' is now "f**K you" and the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as 'giving the bird.' And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing. 😁😁😁

[firstknightvulion]

Do you understand how much strength it takes to pull a longbow much less string the damn thing. All these waifish elf archers would win every arm wrestling contest.

'elves are inherently frail and weak' trope my behated

[howtofightwrite]

If I had a character in a medieval fantasy setting who was a short-statured young woman with some limited basic training in short bow archery and other combat arts, but generally a bit weedy, how quickly could she adapt to a longbow? The bow is notably too big for her, having been inherited from a large adult man. The process of learning and gaining the strength is intended to be difficult. Thank you!

I feel like I'm repeating myself, and we may have covered this recently, but the process of using a bow will result in a lot of upper body strength. It's fairly strenuous exercise and that will result in some bulking up. I've mad the joke that archers will be absolutely ripped, but it's also true. If she's pulling eighty to ninety pounds of force with every shot, that will quickly build muscle. That's true of both short bows and longbows. This should be fairly self explanatory, but less weight in the draw, the less power the bow has. If you have a very light draw (say, around 30lbs), then your bow won't be useful for much beyond short range target practice. Short bows tended to start around 80lbs. This is contrast to modern bows (usually used in hunting), which rarely exceed 60lbs as their maximum draw weight. There's debate on the draw weight of a historical English longbow, but estimates range from around 80 to 185lbs. (There was also a belief at the time, that you had to be raised to use the English longbow, because of it's extremely high draw weight. So, under conventional wisdom at the time, it wasn't a weapon you could learn to use later in life, you needed to be raised from childhood to use these things.)

So, here's something kind of goofy about this, that's really worth thinking about. The English longbow was ~6ft long (about 1.8 meters.) This is the average height of an adult male (at least, in theory, the statistical average is a few inches shorter.) Now, if you've ever looked at a bow, you may have noticed that you don't hold it on one end. In fact, you grip the weapon at the mid-point. Meaning, that while the weapon itself is 6ft long, only about 3ft of that protrudes up or down from your arm. Similarly, the draw length of the English longbow is slightly under 3 feet. (I don't have the exact draw length, but the arrows used were 3ft, and for obvious reasons, you can't overdraw beyond the length of the arrow.)

So, just how small is your character?

Arm span will be slightly greater than an individual's height, but for someone to be too small to draw the bow, they'd need to be under 4ft tall. They also wouldn't have meaningful difficulties aiming the weapon unless their shoulder height was less than 3ft from the ground. That works out to someone who's about 3'10.” Going by modern growth rates, that would put her at around six to eight years old. (Ironically, this correlates to roughly the age where children would begin training on the English longbow.)

So, you're telling me, your character is smaller than a 10 year old?

Also, to be clear, we're talking about the English longbow, one the largest handheld bows ever fielded. If you're using, “longbow,” in the more modern colloquial meaning, and referring to something like a war bow, the bow would be significantly smaller. So, for weapon size to be a serious issue, they'd need to be even smaller than I'm estimating.

Before someone says, “maybe they meant the siege bow,” yeah, that's not a real thing. Siege bows are (as far as I've ever been able to find), a modern item. They're roughly the same size as an English longbow, and it's possible that someone once referred to the longbow as a, “siege bow,” but I've never seen that. The closest thing to what the name evokes, would be the ballista, which was an actual artillery piece, and is slightly closer to a crossbow than a bow. Somewhat obviously, your character is not going to be trying to carry around and deploy a ballista from her backpack.

I get the whole idea of the, “small girl, big weapon,” (and, yes, I know you described her as a woman, but then proceeded to try to infantilize her by giving her a weapon too large for her to effectively use.) Adult women, on average, are not that much smaller, on average, than their male counterparts. If a weapon is too large for a woman to use, it's too large for a man to use. If you're trying to say, “well, she's little and weak,” you are deliberately trying to infantilize her. Please, cut that shit out.

And, while we're on that subject, if she's an archer, she's going to be absolutely ripped. Now, no judgment whatsoever if that's not the mental image you had planned out, and yes, because of their layer of subcutaneous fat, women tend to display less of their musculature development than men with similar builds. (Actually, both men and women rarely display much of their muscular definition unless they're intentionally dehydrating. Regardless, she's not going to look like a body builder.) All this really means is that her muscles would be stealthier, and trying to hide from casual examination, but, you're also talking about a character who could probably bench press you, before she started training on the longbow. (And, yes, I'm saying this without knowing your gender or overall level of fitness.)

How quickly could she learn? That's not incredibly clear. On one hand, my perspective is that a bow is a bow, and while there would probably be some learning curve, it is still the same weapon. Beyond that the hard part would be adjusting to the higher maximum draw weight. However, contemporary sources claimed that learning the English longbow required that you start training with it in childhood, and that it was effectively impossible to learn later in life. I'm inclined to believe that this wasn't exactly as impossible as those authors believed, but they also documented that the method of drawing the English longbow differed from methods used with other bows, and that could create a serious issue for an archer trying to learn it later in life. (Specifically, the description states they would put their body weight into the draw, which sounds like a fantastic way to seriously injure yourself, so clearly I'm missing something here.)

-Starke

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[askganon]

Great King, you've mentioned before that you struggle with a bow, not for a lack of skill or practice, but because you'd snap more bow strings then arrows fired. I have yes to see a single bow in Hyrule and the Great Desert that wasnt some form of short/small bow, but in our realm which you access through a portal there are far more types of bows. May I suggest trying an English Longbow? They measure at 6ft tall with draw weights between 100 - 180 pounds. It was common to use heavy arrows along with them that could piece the thickest of metal and stone from up to 200 yards away. These bows also required the most practice to use effectively with a high skill ceiling, not to mention the English, at least at the time these bows were used, were one of the most evil people in our realms history and had nearly the entire world conquered at one point which the negative effects are still potent and in effect today. I think it'd be a great fit for you.

While bows are indeed not a preferred weapon of mine, I did take the time to master it as I did many other weapons.

In fact, I had a bow made for my specific requirements, including an impressive draw strength and a frame that would not bend easily.

Its design was similar to that of your realm's yumi.

[finnified]

so-called “free thinkers” when @elmushterri posts an original story with a prompt to make your own oc:

anyways this is my TKHB oc orion castellanos… hes of greek descent if the name didn’t make that obvious… but i chose not to give him a greek weapon but rather to give him a standard english longbow bc thats the weapon that killed him! a bit morbid! but i think in his lifetime he died trying to protect people during a historical reenactment gone wrong. he was quite close with his older brother in his life and when he found out that his brother was one of the casualties of the attack/hijacking, he decided that he would never really need to go back to the mortal world in disguise as he had nothing there and no good reason to leave gallantia other than to serve his purpose as a knight.

in the context of TKHB canon, i think he’d be a jules sympathizer… i think he’d understand what it feels like to be lesser and less than worthy of the position that he has, so he would want jules to be able to achieve some kind of justice for herself.