Lord Herbert wrote on Jan 26
th, 2015 at 10:08am:
freediver wrote on Jan 25
th, 2015 at 9:30pm:
I can see the point about draw force when shooting from a distance - so why not make greater use of leg bows when used as archers are traditionally depicted?
The video appears to suggest that archers would also be of great use on the fringes of the battle where they can still move around easily, and in amongst the battle as it thins out a bit. And in irregular warfare. Not being weighed down with a sword, shield and armour, but still being able to kill at a rapid rate from just outside of hand to hand combat range would be very useful.
The Battle of Agincourt was won in this way.
During the days before the battle it rained torrentially so the ground turned into sticky mud on the battlefield.
The English archers had a turkey-shoot when the battle began. The French were on horses whose hooves sucked mud and slowed them down while the archers rained arrows upon them.
It's said the mud won the battle for the British by immobilising the French in a mud-bath that kept them within range of the arrows long enough to decimate them.
The French would cut off the string fingers of English archers.
Battles are won, Herbie, invariably by the side that makes the least mistakes. The French were essentially high-born and in-bred idiots. Instead of attacking on a broad front, they attacked on a narrow frontage, in a single long, column, this meant that each succeeding Knight and his squire(s) was following into increasing churned up ground. By the time the leading rank came anywhere near the English line, the rear ranks were trying to advance through what was essentially a swamp. If, instead, they had attacked on a broad frontage, it would have made them both a smaller target, which was in the beaten zone of the archers for less time and ensured better footing for them and their horses.
Because the French chose to join battle in a field which was converging on the English line, they couldn't agree as to who should be left out of the initial charge, so adopted the already mentioned disastrous narrow frontage column attack formation, to allow all the French nobles to take part.
The French had archers, IIRC a company of Burgundian crossbow men but because of the way their crossbows were constructed, they were unable to undock their bow strings, whereas the English with their Longbows were, so because of their exposure overnight to the wet, their crossbows were rendered useless, whereas the English were able to restring their bows just before the battle commenced, therefore making them still useless. If the French had instead had normal bows, they would have had the fire support necessary to allow them to cross the danger zone and engage the English line, which was made up primarily of lightly equipped and unarmed archers.
It is a myth that the French removed the bow fingers of captured archers. There is no historical evidence to support this claim. The claim that this resulted in the use of two upraised fingers as an English insult is also a myth.
While the Longbow is the most renowned weapon from the 100 years war, the war was actually won in the end through the use of cannon, not bows. Cannons had by 1453 essentially rendered the Medieval castle and walled town obsolete and without those bases, the entire medieval system started to break down. It was also the French who were declared the winners in 1453, the English may have won many of the battles but it was the French who emerged the victors from the conflict and the financial and social costs are considered to be a prime motivator in the English civil war, the so-called "War of the Roses".
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