Interesting. I had a go at archery recently, and after an hour of training our entire group (including teenagers as well as adults) were burying arrows two or three inches into metre-round targets (or into the ground sensibly near the targets) at about 20 metres or so (what's that in yards?) Probably a third of arrows fired were going into the targets. I had plenty of distance left in mine as well, but I'm reasonably strong with a long reach and I'm still not at all sure I'd be able to fire one of those things to a hundred yards without a LOT more training. As distance increases, I imagine accuracy decreases exponentially, with training time to become an effective weapon increasing at the same time, so I could believe a years would be necessary to fire effectively at anything more than close range.
mind you we were using training bows rather than longbows, which probably skews my observations though, since by definition I would expect the training bow to be easier to use.
Longbows, used skillfully, really are devastating. Obviously they have nothing on modern rifles, but the power behind them really is startling when demonstrated, probably at least equal to antique muskets and such. At the height of their era, a skilled archer could loose a good half-dozen or more arrows per minute, all of them well aimed, which again is probably well in excess of what early firearms were capable of. Once on TV (a documentary, not LotR
) I saw a longbow fired at an armoured dummy designed to have the same sort of density/ toughness/ whatever as a human. It was fairly close range, admittedly, but the arrow went clear through the armour, through the dummy and stuck out the other side. I wouldn't have thought it possible before seeing that.
As to answering any of your questions... ummm.... don't know.
