Crossbows vs. Longbows

[rdonj]

Sigh. Old topic is old, dead, beaten into the ground and trampled upon by dozens of reanimated longdead horsemen. Maerlande, you must die now .

[Maerlande]

Well I told you I misread!!! But Trumanator threatened me with dire consequences if I deleted my post. So all I could do in fairness was admit I misread the date.

[Maerlande]

Besides, you are just trying to pump your post count!

[Maerlande]

Which of course I would never dream of doing.

[rdonj]

Trumanator is a bad, naughty boy. He will also be punished. I hardly care about my post count, if I did I wouldn't hit the edit button so much :P

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by militarist

Sorry for my English, it's not native

"Don't get me wrong. I have never been in a crossbow or a longbow fight, but the Battle of Crecy was won by longbowmen zinging the French Knights to death, right?"

That's a nice legend, but reality can be quite far from our understanding of what really happened there. There were numerious scintific reconstructions - scientists found examples of iron, which was used in french armors, and arroheads of arrows of longbowmens. And, having estimated arrow speed (using special cameras, and devices) , sent by professional archer, they made experiment - English arrows with iron quality which was used during this fight against french armor of that time. And arrows when were hitting armor in most of cases didn't pierce it.
Of course, if there are a lot of arrows, and french knights were not covered ideally with it, and there we different armors, probably.. but they came to different theory which, by their belief explains what happened there.

The main difference between English forces and French was in a very high amount of long bowmen (which were just twice cheaper than footmen). These guys were not really protected a lot, were in cloth boots, some shirts...something very far from heavy armored french men. Of course there were footmen also, but proportions.

The field was chosen by English strategists, basing on this difference.
It was a very nerrow field, where French just could not attack from many siddes, and had to send all army through quite narrow place. It was rain, a lot of mud. A lot of French knights, trying to get through narrow part of the field, and shower of English arrows, which added to this mess. French, heavy armored knights, just struck in mood by their heavy iron boots.When you are in a mess of bodies and mood, you are heavy, and your heavy boots struck in a land, swampy from rain, you are quite limited..English longbowmen, with their cloth boots and no heavy staff, were much more mobile, and just more effective, killing them, just by stabbing their long knifes into faces and weak places of armors of the French.. Then huge amount of French just gave up. And, king of England, just executed them all because he didn't believe that he has already won and expected more French to come and to free his numerious prisoners.

I don't remember the film, where all this research was explained. Some made in UK, for sure.

So, long bows have quite cool reputation, but, really , it is based more on this battle, and in this battle it was strategy and weather, who brought victory to England, and long bows were maybe third factor,or 4th, 5th..etc.

So, one of the major effects of longbows at Agincourt was killing the horses. Now, admittedly, the French did try to charge into the narrow approach to the English position, which was pretty stupid. Given the press of knights, a dead horse throwing its rider down to the ground would have resulted in a likely dead knight as he was trampled by his fellows.

You're wrong about the reason for executing prisoners. Because the French so vastly outnumbered the English, the English did not have the man-power to adequately guard all the prisoners they had captured. So when the French made an attempt to free them, either there was confusion as to who was fighting and who wasn't (leading to a lot of slain prisoners), or the commander ordered prisoners who could not be adequately guarded slain to avoid prisoners being freed and rejoining the battle. It certainly wasn't a pre-emptive move - it was a response to an attempt to free the prisoners.

[Sombre]

Dude this whole thread is ridiculous everyone knows that longbows are awesome and ruled the world and crossbows are for peasants and sucked and japanese people fought with dual katanas like in that Tom Cruise documentary.

[Humakty]

Yeah, and Tom Cruise also shows in his documentary that the average american gunslinger is better at swordmanship than a samurai having trained all his life.PURE FACT.

It is also well known crossbows could barely hurt an englishman, 'cause god walks with them.

[militarist]

Sombre, as for executing prisoners, It is not my analysis, it's what these researchers came to, and they can base their theory either on some historical evidence, or not. But It is hard for me to imagine they would invent such idea like reason of execution, without any evidences. Though, I don't know the reality. French and English historians can see reasoning of execution quite differently. It's quite normal in history. We know the "truth" mostly from those nations who could write better or who won

As for training of longbowmen...I don't really think it takes years to train, at least if we speak about English longbowmen. Otherwise they wouldn't cost twice less then swordsmen (it's historical fact from records of vassals , who supplied their people to English army for this battle.)

There is a big difference between training a sportsmen, who needs to shoot with high level of precision, and squad of archers, whose task is much simpler - just position the bow in a proper angle to horizon and use certain amount of force to deliver an arrow on a distance which he is commanded to shout. Though it requires force, it is not real "targeting" there. You are just taking part in doing shower from arrows, not shooting into the apple on a head of a princess.

[Trumanator]

Well, longbowmen were much lower class than most swordsmen, and their equipment was also far less. The "training" bit was actually more an accident of history than anything else. A yeoman tradition of using the Longbow had spread through England and Wales, producing an excellent crop of soldiers right when England needed them.