Tooth to Tail Ratio

[Steve Walmsley]

Its a combination of several factors, but it basically boils down to logistics and supply.

Everything you just said was spot-on. The note about skeletal changes in longbow archers we have actual historical evidence for - the English warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545 and was well-preserved in the bottom mud. When she was raised in 1982 she provided an incredible wealth of archaeological finds, and one of them was the skeletal deformations of many of the crewmen that you mentioned; mirroring a lifetime of practice with heavy-draw bows.

The longbowman I was talking had a medieval war bow with a 140 lb draw, plus a modern competition bow, which had a much lighter draw - might have been about 35 lb. The technique used to draw the two bow types was completely different, because you couldn't draw the war bow using a modern competition stance. The modern bow was an upright stance, whereas the war bow was almost a rotational draw with his back taking most of the weight which ended up with a forward-leaning stance and a bent leading knee. Totally different. I tried drawing the war bow and couldn't get even close to drawing it fully.

[Demetrious]

Its a combination of several factors, but it basically boils down to logistics and supply.

Everything you just said was spot-on. The note about skeletal changes in longbow archers we have actual historical evidence for - the English warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545 and was well-preserved in the bottom mud. When she was raised in 1982 she provided an incredible wealth of archaeological finds, and one of them was the skeletal deformations of many of the crewmen that you mentioned; mirroring a lifetime of practice with heavy-draw bows.

The longbowman I was talking had a medieval war bow with a 140 lb draw, plus a modern competition bow, which had a much lighter draw - might have been about 35 lb. The technique used to draw the two bow types was completely different, because you couldn't draw the war bow using a modern competition stance. The modern bow was an upright stance, whereas the war bow was almost a rotational draw with his back taking most of the weight which ended up with a forward-leaning stance and a bent leading knee. Totally different. I tried drawing the war bow and couldn't get any even close drawing it fully.

That's amazing. I've been trying to get into archery myself with a home-made 30 pound bow (it turns out that PVC plastic is a thermoformable materiel, so with a little effort and a campfire you can make some https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVid9WVMSO4"[/youtube]really incredible bows.) The same mad genius who did that has also demonstrated a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYp2rDeatS8"[/youtube]]120 pound capable bow made of PVC that I've wanted to try. I had no idea I'd have to modify my drawstroke so much for that - I had better get back to the gym sooner rather than later!

[Migi]

I think there are lots of factors which add up to longbows being amazing weapons when deployed en-mass, but with a number of large strategic costs and limitations which led to their demise.

On top of that, the heaviest bows took a great deal of time to train up to use. To punch through increasingly heavy armor, took increasingly heavy draw weight bows. To use the top end heavy bows, the archer literally had to be trained for years to build up the strength to use them. They were so heavy that it literally left skeletal changes on the archers, and the heavy ossification that resulted took years to build up.

The training and physiology has been mentioned above, but I think is one of the more important.
If you want to field longbowmen, you need to start training about a decade before the war.
Your pre-war training rate is a hard cap on your supply of new recruits for the whole war, whereas with crossbows or muskets you can draft people and have a functional unit in a matter of months.
Even if you win every battle and don't lose any longbowmen to direct combat, you'll still lose them over time from disease, desertion, or accidents. If your training rate isn't high enough to counter attrition, you'll lose strength over time. If you do lose a battle or skirmish, any longbowmen you lose are more or less irreplaceable.


Another thing I remember reading that producing arrows was a bottleneck for English armies.
It's a multi-step, multi-material process, you need an arrowhead, a shaft, and the fletching. The fletching needs glue, a protected space to dry, and time. I'm not sure to what extent archers made their own because of this. I'm not sure if it would be all that difficult to mass produce them compared with gunpowder, but transporting the arrows would take much more space, as others have mentioned. Volume is just as important as a limiting factor as mass when considering logistics, even in the modern world.
Mass production and industrialisation were concepts that developed over time, so I wonder if arrow production would have been a non-issue in later times.

[Arwyn]

Just to clarify my earlier post, that was 815 MILLION pounds in todays equivalent to field all the arrows for Agincourt. In comparison the London police budget is around 66 million pounds per annum. Thats a LOT of arrows.

As far as making them, production was a massive problem for the English. The crown actually had to sponsor "goose gatherings" every few years to get enough feathers to fletch arrows. There was a the medieval equivalent of a military industrial complex, just to supply the English army arrows.

Maintaining the longbows in the army extended to foreign policy as well. The English started levying port taxes on ships coming into to English ports that required 2 bowstaves per ton of cargo. By the 16th century that was up to 10.

By the end of the 16th century the English appetite for yew had rendered the tree almost extinct in Germany, and the English were going as far afield as the Baltic to try and find yew wood. Ironically the largest surviving stocks of yew were in France, who was in no conceivable way going to let the English have any of their yew wood, as they had experienced it on the receiving end more than a few to many times at that point.

[skoormit]

815 MILLION pounds in todays equivalent to field all the arrows for Agincourt.

If nothing else, this number makes me feel a bit better about occasionally throwing downrange, in the span of a few minutes, more than a quarter of my entire empire's annual economic output.

[misanthropope]

suffocating the enemy under several feet of money, it's the American Way

[serger]

I'm an owner and have an experience of training with "historical" bow / eastern shooting style. That's only a training bow, not so strong to be a weapon really, although obviously strong enough to kill an unarmoured man up to 50 meters or so with 1-2 shots.
Aside of arms strength that's also a point of finger roughness - it's better to use archer's thumb rings; have these also, my thumb just isn't even nearly rough enough even for this weak bow.

As for building a skill with this Easterns style archery - it's apparently even harder comparing to Western (English) style, because Eastern style was an adaptation for mobile combat archery (horsemen and mobile light infantry), shooting on the move or with very short stops. It's not an easy trade, obviously it's better to train from the early childhood to achieve a sound level of skill without being some inbred unicum. Yet even on the early stage of training you can catch some strange feeling, I just cannot describe without obviously irrelevant words, such as singing or liberation. That's great and I regret there is no opportunity now to practice with a bow.

[GodEmperor]

Its a well known conundrum of industrialized military - For X people to be a competent fighting force you need 5 times X people supplying them and then 5 times the 5 times X people producing supplies, fuel, ammo etc.

[Jorgen_CAB]

The more modern musket men of 16th-17th century was way more effective in general than one armed with bows. A musket with a bayonet also was a very good close combat weapon. The shock from massive fire of the musket should not also be underestimated. All this when you factor in the training and everything made firearms allot more attractive than using bows.