Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did? | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

peterleeson.com

269 pointsblacksqr174 comments

Interesting. Although this point of view might be a bit simplified, there's another example of a weapon, which was both relatively cheap to make - and really hard to use unless the whole society was built around the skills required to use it.

Mongols! Light cavalry using composite bows was both unbelievably effective and hard to copy for everybody but steppe nomads. All Mongols were hunters, they practically lived with their bows on their horses. So the whole population could do warfare.

While back in the days, in both Eastern and Western Europe, contemporary warfare was rotating around heavy cavalry, and one can't have too many knights. Even if somebody managed to gather an army more or less comparable to Mongol hordes - heavier cavalry would just be meat for lighter riders making circles around them.

Besides, feudal lands never managed to be centralized enough to counter mongols. In medieval Rus' the need to centralize led to the rise of Moscow - and it took quite a while anyway.

It's hard to compare Mongols to Europeans. The composite bows rely on animal-based adhesives, which are great in cold and dry climates, but fall apart in humid and warmer climates.

Also, light cavalry armies are useless against castles and fortified cities as the ones found in most of Europe, specially when you don't have huge, flat battlefields that allow light cavalry to circle any target.

In other words, Mongol warfare was perfect for the environment they were created for: vast empty dry lands with few geographical features and settlements which are far from each other.

Re: "light cavalry armies are useless against castles and fortified cities as the ones found in most of Europe"

Not true, as the Chinese cities at the time were much more fortified than Europe. The Mongols were able to plunder the surrounding lands.

Also, despite Europe's fortifications, a scouting party led by Subutai of 20,000 horse archers, widely wiped out a much more significant force of Central Europe soldiers, greatly outnumbering the Mongols. Fortified cities may cause trouble, but by this time, Mongol dominance had incorporated Chinese siege technology that fortified central european cities had not seen.

I read a long discussion about this on Quora. What I could gather from that was there were far more castles in Europe than China. Also Europe has too little plains to be able to support a mongol army very long. They each had something like 5 horses. There isn't enough grass for a large mongol army like that. One the debaters claimed e.g. that European castles were very well supplied for long sieges and would run out of food much later than an occupying mongol force which would be vulnerable to counter attacks.

European heavy cavalry was not useless against mongols. It is just that they were seldom effective when mongols could just run away from the battle field. Easy to do when they were much lighter armoured. But if Mongols maintained a siege they had to stay in position which would have made them vulnerable to European nights which were probably superior to mongol soldiers if they could not perform hit and run tactics.

Apparently the mongols beat the Hungarians initially but when they came back and the Hungarians had built lots of castles, they were soundly beaten. The sieges dragged on and they would get harassed by Hungarian forces which could always retreat back to castles while mongols starved.

My understanding is that the Mongols managed to conquer the more hilly southern China by using conscripted Chinese soldiers. So they were not really using standard Mongolian tactics there. Duplicating this in Europe would have been difficult because unlike China Europe did not have the same kind of central government which would have allow the conquest of a few cities to gain huge tracts of land and extra manpower. They would have had to conquer huge numbers of castles which would have dragged out in time.

In fact Machiavelli talks about this in the Prince. The Ottomans, Roman Empire, China etc were far more centrally controlled which made them one strong unit but once you conquered the central city of government you would control the whole country. The Feudalistic European countries however might not as easily marshal huge combined forces but they were extremely difficult to conquer because you had to conquer every little vassal state one by one. Considering that every one had a castle this was no easy task.

One should not completely discount the effectiveness of European military. During the crusades, the muslim forces would usually use Mongol like tactics to wear them out. But whenever the crusaders managed to corner a muslim army they crushed it with their heavily armoured knights.

The Mongols lacked siege engines when they first rolled into China, but they quickly conscripted Chinese siege engineers from conquered areas and used them. The Mongols were very good at recognizing who would be useful among conquered peoples and conscripting them. If the conscriptees did good work for the Mongols, they would be rewarded.

China was full of stone fortifications at the time. Fortresses and fortified cities were common in China and the siege engineers were among the best in the world.

After the Mongols begin expanding elsewhere, they took their siege engineers with them. Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and Europe. Fortifications weren't a problem for them.

The Mongols weren't bothered much by a lack of plains. Their horses were hardy and could survive on what was available.

The Mongols strength wasn't that their warriors were so much better individually. An individual European knight was much harder to beat than an individual Mongol. It was that they worked very well together. Their teamwork and discipline was unprecedented, and their lack of a supply train, their excellent mobility, and their incredibly good coordination allowed them to attack from multiple directions simultaneously. They struck where they weren't expected and could ride circles around other armies.

Their ability to divide and conquer their enemy was also very good. They'd take advantage of divisions in their enemy and exploit them. They turned the Hungarian people against the Cuman horseman who had fled to Hungary, depriving Hungary of large numbers of steppe horsemen.

The Mongols drove deep into Europe during their conquests, devastating Poland and Hungary, and making it as far as eastern Germany. The only thing that ended up saving Europe wasn't Europe's political system, fortresses, knights, or feudalism. It was the simple fact that the Mongol khan had died and the Mongols turned around and went back home. Europe would have been toast otherwise. The Mongols had far larger military forces at their disposal and the brutality to keep their conquered peoples in line.

They never made a concerted effort to conquer Europe again, although they dominated Russia (including the heavily forested areas) for centuries. They used conscripted Russians against each other as well, so often the Mongols themselves didn't even need to get involved to keep their lands.

Interestingly, at the Battle of Mohi, the Hungarian army managed to hold on against the Mongols for a while when they were both fighting at close quarters across a bridge. With fighting like that, the Mongols were at a disadvantage.

The Mongols got tricky and attacked the bridge during the night, and bombarded the Hungarians with all sorts of artillery. There were explosive devices used that night, and some historians speculate that there could have been gunpowder used in that battle. It also could have been just burning pots filled with flammable material. The Chinese did have gunpowder at the time, although it wasn't being used for guns, so the Chinese engineers may have used it.

At any rate, that whole attack was just a diversion. The Mongols had also crossed the river during the night, and when morning arrived, the Hungarians were surrounded. The Mongols left an escape path purposely, prompting the Hungarians to start to panic and run through the gap in the Mongol lines. Then it was easy to chase them down and kill them. European knights are a lot easier to beat when they have flung away their armor and a fleeing in panic.

The Mongols may not have been the toughest individual warriors around, but their trickiness, teamwork, brutality, and ability to make up for their weaknesses with skilled conscripts got them very good results. The army that wins isn't always the toughest one, but the one that doesn't panic and run.

If anyone's interested in the Mongols, I recommend listening to some older episodes of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. He had five two-hour episodes about the Mongols that were very interesting and well researched.

5 horses is quite a bit of food to feed the army... the more the army eats the more grass you have left for the horses... so when the castle is running out of food you have 1 good well fed horse and 1 good well fed soldier who has to win or he doesnt have enough horses to go home

i think that wins

That's fine for the first siege (assuming an extra couple months was all you needed), but now you have to supply up with 4x(number of horsemen) for the next one to be in the same position. Tens of thousands of horses for even a smallish Mongol army. And at least some of them must be trained for war, specifically in the Mongol fashion, not just any ol' training. In short, it's not gonna happen on any reasonable time scale.

Plus you lose whatever advantage the extra horses gave you until you get more—I mean, I'm sure they didn't keep them around just for fun. Greater travel speed by resting them off, extra cargo/loot capacity, whatever their reasons were.

> What I could gather from that was there were far more castles in Europe than China. Also Europe has too little plains to be able to support a mongol army very long. They each had something like 5 horses. There isn't enough grass for a large mongol army like that.

Just noting that these claims are highly speculative and not widely accepted by historians.

> European heavy cavalry was not useless against mongols...

Agreed. The mongol skirmishers were not the superhero units some people make them out to be but otoh they were experts at inducing their opponents into favorable engagements.

> Apparently the mongols beat the Hungarians initially but when they came back and the Hungarians had built lots of castles, they were soundly beaten. The sieges dragged on and they would get harassed by Hungarian forces which could always retreat back to castles while mongols starved.

This is basically correct but I'm skeptical the larger conclusion is proper. The Hungarians learned something from the first Mongol invasion that had success in the second. Some people's takeaway from this is that stone castles were some kind trump card against the mongols generally but given experience in China and elsewhere it's more likely just a weakness of that specific invading army. The mongols showed up in Russia/Eastern Europe with Chinese siege technology which was enough to beat most everyone they faced ... until it wasn't (2nd invasion of hungary, etc.). They ran into the same problem in China, personified by the Siege of Xiangyang but over years the mongols learned lessons too and increased their siege technology with Arab trebuchets and then every fortified city they faced afterwords in China fell like sand castles. Presumably the same pattern would have repeated in an extended invasion of Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Xiangyang#Aftermath

> My understanding is that the Mongols managed to conquer the more hilly southern China by using conscripted Chinese soldiers. So they were not really using standard Mongolian tactics there.

They used all sorts of troops and tactics including lots of Mongolians.

> Duplicating this in Europe would have been difficult because unlike China Europe did not have the same kind of central government which would have allow the conquest of a few cities to gain huge tracts of land and extra manpower. They would have had to conquer huge numbers of castles which would have dragged out in time.

I find this unconvincing, letting the mongols take you apart a small kingdom/castle/city state at a time was not a successful strategy anywhere as even if you had equal or superior troops the mongols could bring overwhelming numbers to bear on you. This is basically what happened to Russia and most of central Asia. Also Song China had tons of fortified outposts.

"Not true, as the Chinese cities at the time were much more fortified than Europe. The Mongols were able to plunder the surrounding lands."

That's a bit of an oversimplification. China was much closer to the Mongols' logistical base. By the 1240s, as the Horde pushed into Central Europe, they were experiencing rebellions in Asia that threatened their supply lines. So extended sieges were not feasible.

It's telling that the limit of their incursions pretty closely adheres to the boundary of stone fortification diffusion in Central Europe at that time. Polish and Russian nobles still favored wood fortifications, though Western Europeans had brought back defensive masonry techniques from the Crusades and rapidly developed stone castle infrastructure in their home regions. Stone fortifications increased the time required for a siege and increased the cost in men and material, even with the Mongols' relatively effective siege tactics. The Mongols could not afford to conduct such sieges so far from their logistical base on the steppes, especially not while maintaining control of their often fractious conquests in Central Asia and Russia.

So it's a confluence of factors that limited the Mongol advance, including the relatively challenging terrain of Central European mountains and forests and the increasing frequency of heavily fortified stone-walled fortifications as they pushed farther west.

That said, outside the particular example of the 13th century Mongols, the effectiveness of steppe light cavalry against fortified European cities is at best questionable. The Avars and Hungarians were defeated by western nations once they attempted to push into fortified territory, despite the lack of stone fortifications in 9th and 10th century Europe. And, as you say, it was the incorporation of Chinese siege tactics that permitted the Mongols to succeed against fortified cities, not their prowess as light cavalry archers.

Just a note: there was no such state as "Russia" back then. The whole region was a number a big and small duchies left after the fall of the older feudal state, Kievan Rus'.

Later, by the end of the 15-th century, most of them were reunited under the rule of either the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or the Grand Duchy of Vladimir and Moscow (which would, two centuries later, become what we know today as Russian Empire, or Russia).

Anyway, Mongols had no problems crashing both quite a few times between 13-16 centuries. :-) Every state there was in the region back then had to paid the Horde.

Fortified european cities caused a lot of troubled. Most Mongol siege victories in Europe where Pyrrhic, with massive losses that couldn't be replaced that far from their homeland.

They ended up controlling most of the Hungarian countryside, but almost none of the key fortified cities, the same in Croatia and other areas, rendering their gains useless, since forces could march out at any time from the multiple forces and strike them.

I don't know much about Mongols in Central Europe, so probably true: they were far away from the steppes, probably lacked siege machines, etc.

Also, in the lands of Rus' stone fortifications were a very rare thing - there's almost no suitable stone for contstruction, so most castles and fortresses were wooden, so they did burn.

None of the stone fortresses in the north, where there are suitable materials, were plundered, AFAIK, so you must be right.

or Europe got lucky and Ogodei died just as Subutai was about to roll over the entire continent (we may never know for sure).

The Hardcore History podcast did a nice series on it.

http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-o...

Their light cavalry was also fairly effective in forested places like Hungary or Manchuria. Genghis was far from the best Mongol general but he personally achieved some impressive victories by attacking from the rear of his opponent after going over mountains or by luring his opponents up onto mountains after him.

But really both light and heavy cavalry were important parts of the regular Mongol forces as well as the hordes of arrow-fodder they would levy from captured cities. And while the Mongols didn't start out with much in the way of a siege train they had the world's best siege engineers by the time they finally finished off the Jin dynasty.

The hot, wet environment of India was a big barrier to their expansion as was their navel weakness. But Europe benefited mostly by being so far away and from the fact that the Mongols hadn't finished off the Song by the time the empire started to fragment.

Sources: A number of things over the years but I recently finished Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy.

History has also shown that France gave up their bow technology to the Germans, hampering their bow tech progression (and ultimately harming fellow neighbors to boot).

> In other words, Mongol warfare was perfect for the environment they were created for: vast empty dry lands with few geographical features and settlements which are far from each other.

hardly an accurate terrain description of Mongol Empire at it's peak.

"Huge, flat battlefieds" were a norm everywhere. Medieval battles were ONLY possible on flat surfaces, as the main force of the time - heavy cavalry - requires that.

Besides, Mongols completely plundered Rus' and the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, and most of those lands were and are forests/lakes/swamps. For example, they used rivers in winters to travel through the countryside.

Also, after conquering China they also had military engineers, and could build assault machines.

Agincourt wasn't fought in a huge, flat battlefield. Neither was Tours, Hastings, Crecy, Poitiers, Patay, etc.

European wars were fought in a very diverse range of battlefields, and most commanders, specially the outnumbered ones, would try as much as possible to use the battlefield in their advantage.

And that was at least as much the key to the English victories as the longbow was: good defensive terrain that was unsuitable for the French cavalry charge. When the French did have room to charge, England lost. The longbow was only a single factor in a much bigger system.

Indeed, in Agincourt, the mud was probably a much more decisive factor than the longbow.

From what I've read European wars didn't feature much large scale battles of the type done of plains in central asia. Siege warfare, skirmishes, harassment etc dominated.

Anyway the mongols used huge number of horses which would need a lot of grass. It is my understanding that that was simply not available to them in most of Europe.

"It is my understanding that that was simply not available to them in most of Europe."

I hate to break it to you, but Europe has a lot more grass than Afganistan or Middle East. Of all problems, the supply of grass was the least of them. The main "problem" that kept them out of Europe was that they as people started to change. They stopped being the frugal people living savagely in tents all around steppe. Little by little they become city dwellers and started to embrace luxury and other "decadent" stuff continuously supplied through tributes, enjoying their life rather looking for new conquests. That's how I come to look at it anyway (the Golden Horde).

I wonder if that's why we have the term "battlefield" today.

Castles and cities weren't the problem: the Mongols were also good at siege warfare. Their main obstacle blocking westward expansion was the simple fact that steppe nomads are primarily good at the steppe, and not so good in the forests and mountains of central Europe.

The composite bows rely on animal-based adhesives, which are great in cold and dry climates, but fall apart in humid and warmer climates

What kind of glue bound the layers of wood together on a longbow?

The English longbow was constructed from a single piece of wood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longbow#Design_and_constructio...

Don't know if you're sarcastic, but a longbow doesn't have layers of wood to glue together. That's the difference between a simple bow and a composite bow.

Not quite. As the article explains, the longbow is composite, but made from a single piece of wood:

"Figure 1 illustrates a yew trunk cross section and how a longbow stave was carved out of the tree to incorporate both its sapwood and heartwood components. The former was used on the bow’s back, which faced away from the archer, taking advantage of the fact that flexible sapwood performs well under tension. The latter was used on the bow’s belly, which faced the archer, taking advantage of the fact that hard heartwood performs well under compression. Together the two types of wood created a natural composite bow that, when made from a long and thick stave, was remarkably powerful."

So, nature glued the parts together.

No sarcasm, I wasn't aware that they avoided lamination entirely.

The commenters in this thread are experts at Age of Empires II.

Yeah! I was remembering that campaing mission with the mongols where you had to conquest three chinese civs.

And on multiplayer the mongols are quite hardcore too

Total War player here.

Those damn Golden Hordes ruined my plans to conquer eastern Europe.

tl;dr:

The abstract does a wonderful job. It is will worth reading.

Longbow was cheap and technically superior, but required training. Crossbow more expensive, required less training. Rulers of England less worried about rebellion, OK to invest in training. Rulers of France/Scotland not so happy because of fear to give potential of overthrow to the people (Scotland not in title, but in article along with France).

Perhaps an analogy could be painted with companies today. Those that churn, and those that nurture skills.

If I remember correctly (and I'm still looking for a better source than this[1]), the Duke Of Wellington had requested a corps of longbowmen be made ready for use against the French in the Napoleonic wars, but was advised that no one with the skill needed to train them still existed (the training being the most difficult part of the technology). The last use of trained english longbowmen seemed to have been by some of the royalists during the English Civil War, and after the parliamentary victory practical knowledge of longbow archery as a military arm had been lost without anyone really noticing.

It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history. For another military technology example, the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.

[1] http://everything.explained.today/English_longbow/

Actually one of the points made in the book Guns, Germs and Steel is that technology and inventions aren't developed because there is a need for them. Rather inventions pop up and disappear all the time through history in different cultures. But what makes the technology stay around is that it ends up getting used.

E.g. South America did invent wheels, but since there was no ox or horse to pull the invention had not real practical application beyond toys and never got developed.

So according to this view I guess technology is always in danger of disappearing if it isn't being used.

E.g. the Apollo moon rocket can't be build anymore because the engineers, companies and machines needed to build all the parts and assembly it are no longer around. One would have to recreate a 1960s American industrial base to do it.

I still find that a little mind-boggling, that in, say, pre-Colombian Mexico, they had wheeled children's toys, and nobody thought to scale that up and build a wheelbarrow or a two-wheel dogcart. I mean, they must have been using rollers on some level to maneuver the massive pieces of stone that they used in construction.

The Saturn V's F1 engine was just 3D scanned and reverse engineered by NASA and is the base for the new F1b engine coming online in the next year or so to power the new Space Launch System series or rockets.

Surely Llamas could have pulled some cargo. This says that an adult llama can pull cart loads of up to 200lbs: http://workingllamas.com/?id=93

That's significantly less than a draft horse, but probably roughly the same as a pony.

Actually, the issue there is terrain. Llamas are very agile and can carry loads to areas that neither horses nor carts can reach. Smaller loads, of course, but still much more than a person can carry.

Even today, horses aren't really a thing in the Andes, compared to say, Patagonia.

> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.

That's the premise laid out at the start of the Top Gun movie. That the Top Gun school was created to bring back the art of dogfighting.

I highly recommend _Boyd: The Fighter Pilot that Changed the Art of War_ (http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780316796880). He was lead instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School.

The previous commentator is right that there was a loss of air combat skill but the advent of jets and missiles lead to a diminished emphasis on Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) and over-emphasis on technology. Boyd was one of the "fighter pilot mafia" that pushed a return to basic combat flight skills and the improved kill ratios proved him and others right.

The book details the battles waged inside the Pentagon over ACM, the F-15, the F-16, the OODA Loop, the reformulation of the Marines into the tip of the spear they are today, and maneuver warfare in general. Boyd was in the thick of it all.

Interestingly, Gen. Schwarzkopf doesn't come out looking that great.

EDIT: added lots more about the book.

As an aside, I have wondered how universally true this was. For instance, did the USAF recognize a similar issue during this period?

USAF kill:loss ratios were as low as near 1:1 initially in Vietnam while Top Gun trained Navy/Marine Corps pilots were achieving 4:1 or better. The F4 was purpose-designed as a missile-launching platform and was initially fielded without any kind of cannon.

Remember they had reorganized to wage nuclear war. Many people thought that conventional fighting was dead, and that the Air Force of the future would be intercepting bombers with nuclear rockets.

A conflict like Vietnam was seen as a sideshow from a 1950s point of view, and wasn't really planned for.

So, the generals actually planned for the _next_ war, but ended up fighting the last war again, while the next one never came?

Wow, didn't expect the saying to be so wrong.

Not the only example of this: Towards the end of the Vietnam war, the US had developed a fairly comprehensive counter-insurgency (COIN) program. By Iraq 2, they were pretty much only equipped for state on state warfare again and had to relearn COIN - and were actually doing an okay job by 2008. Ironically, given the withdrawal from Iraq, they're probably going to have to relearn it again the next time they're forced to put boots on the ground.

It happens quite regularly. Military forces have to adapt to the problem of the day.

Who paid for the training? Rememeber that you didn't have national armies in those days. If the sponsors of the training became unwilling or unable to fund it, it would just go away.

Lots of modern examples exist. We build unneeded submarines specifically to maintain production capability for some advanced welding techniques.

No one, that's the beauty of it.

Commoners trained themselves, in times of war, sample bias of the soldiers returning home loaded with treasure was incentive enough to put a generation of kids to practices for hours. In times of peace, the nobility subtly encouraged their people to participate by the way of organizing archery contests with prizes.

It was very popular, in a sort of proto sport way. I read once that an early version of football was banned by the English crown because it distracted the peasants from their archery practice.

The paper mentions laws banning leisure activities that weren't longbow practice. Worth reading.

> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.

The air war in Vietnam was radically different from WWII so I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The art wasn't lost, the state had just changed so radically that it was no longer applicable and new strategies had to be devised.

In WWII the dogfighting was typically between interceptor aircraft engaging bomber escorts at high altitude. You won the day by either out maneuvering or out gunning your opponent. At the end of WWII, arguably the best dogfighter in service was the P-51D Mustang which was incredibly fast at the time with a top airspeed of ~430 mph and was equipped with 6x 50 caliber machine guns. It was designed as a high altitude bomber escort and was one of the fastest and most maneuverable aircraft of the time with a high offensive yield.

In Vietnam with the introduction of long range air-to-air missiles and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), close air-to-air combat was thought to be a thing of the past by the US. Tactics had shifted from bombers escorted by fighters to extremely high altitude bombers which hoped to avoid missiles by sheer range, and close ground support aircraft like the A-1 Skyraider and A-6e Intruder which utilized low altitudes, slow air speeds, and high maneuverability to avoid being engaged by SAMs. Fighter aircraft like the F-4 would provide theater support and engage enemies at range using air-to-air missiles. These tactics were designed around engaging the Soviet Union or other Super Powers, the Vietnamese however were utilizing Mig-17s, which still prescribed to the WWII method of air engagement, and was a natural evolution of the WWII fighter being fast, maneuverable, and heavily armed for air-to-air combat. What you ended up with were a bunch of aircraft ill suited for engaging one another.

The A-1 and A-6 could fly incredibly low and slow in comparison to the Mig-17 and with much greater maneuverability at low speeds making it difficult for the Mig-17 to engage them with missles. The Mig-17 would have to perform slicing runs with machine guns which made it vulnerable to those aircraft coming and going. The Mig-17 could easily outpace them however making it difficult for either US aircraft to act offensively.

The F-4 could offensively engage the Mig-17 at range and could easily out run it if necessary but the F-4 was far less maneuverable and lacked on-board machine guns making it ill suited for a close range dogfight. The gun pod on an F-4 was initially hampered by the fact that it couldn't operate at low speeds because it was air turbine driven and also lacked lead sighting so the gun was inaccurate at high speeds. F-4 pilots used a spray-and-pray approach if engaging a target in close air combat. The F-4 though was not an easy target for the Mig-17 because it was equipped with electronic counter measures and raw engine power that dwarfed the Mig.

In the end completely new tactics had to be devised and lots of lessons were learned from the mistakes in Vietnam but there really wasn't a losing and rediscovering of an art.

The "art" or "skill" wasn't lost, just not available promptly in battalion-size units.

> It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history.

This has happened quite a bit throughout history, actually. Complete social collapse, as has happened many times throughout history, can have a really bad effect on technological innovation. Focusing specifically on the Roman empire (because that's what I'm more familiar with), here are three off the top of my head:

* The various methods to making various different kinds of concrete have been lost and rediscovered several times [0]. Early concrete-like materials were used as far back as 6500BC by the Nabataeans. In both Roman and Egyptian times it was re-discovered that adding volcanic ash to the mix allowed it to set underwater. The Roman methods for making concrete were lost again following the collapse of the Western empire and were not rediscovered in Europe until the 1400s.

* Roman roads were extremely well engineered [1], to the point that some are still around today. While this wasn't "lost" per se (we could always go dig up a Roman road and see how it was made), the Roman road system in Europe deteriorated because of lack of resources and skills to maintain them. [2]

* The Romans made extensive use of plumbing [3], but much of that was again lost in Europe after the fall of the Western empire. The Roman Empire had indoor plumbing, meaning a system of aqueducts and pipes that terminated in homes (at least of wealthy people) and at public wells and fountains for people to use. [4] Lead pipe was used (okay, so maybe that part wasn't so great), and there were sewer systems [5]. Even the word "plumbing" derives from the Latin word plumbum for lead. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, plumbing development virtually ceased for centuries except for isolated cases of plumbing installed in palaces and castles.

These three things are so integral to the modern world we probably don't even think about them much, just assume they were always there. But not too long ago (at least on the scale of human civilization), they weren't.

TL;DR the Romans were awesome engineers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#Construction_and_e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_road_transport

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sa...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_water#Pipe_materials

Re: roads under the Roman Empire

Apparently, in France, when they tried to build some of the high-speed train lines, they discovered some Roman roads which were forgotten/buried.

The reason they found them was that they were trying to make the lines as straight as possible between the cities they were supposed to link. The Romans had actually done the same and with great precision several hundred years earlier !

Yes, the Romans really were awesome engineers. They were even more awesome when you realize that they were completely hamstrung by the utterly idiotic Roman numeral system! Can you imagine doing complex calculations in that?

I guess they also might had some math tricks that made it easy, tricks that you may now count as another "art" lost. But then would you try to rediscover some art about how some people dealt with something imperfect (because they had to) or you would rather look for something better that doesn't require clever tricks in the first place? Now I come to think that (at least) some loses present opportunity value in themselves!

I'm pretty sure Roman Numerals arithmetic algorithms weren't lost, I looking for the source but in the meanwhile here's some of them: http://turner.faculty.swau.edu/mathematics/materialslibrary/...

The Sharpe author Bernard Cornwell wrote a couple of novels set in / around Agincourt and from memory there are a few extras to throw in - but I love your last sentence's conclusion

1. The extra training was enormous - thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock, not Kevin Costner.

2. The "cheap" idea is misleading - in preparation ofr agincourt a huge amount of the English economny was turned over to making arrows. During Agincourt an estimated 3/4 million arrows were fired. When looking at economics of ranged weapons, don't compare Bows to guns, think RPGs

3. Agincourt changed everything for a generation. Thanks to mud, foolishness, and yes, longbows, France lost an entire generation of aristocracy in one day. The english were being chased out of the country and suddenly ... owned everything.

4. finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster, you are not tied down to a specfific class of army recruits and you dont have to feed Arnie.

> thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock

As a nitpick: No, he would not. You don't achieve anything near build of Arnold or The Rock without steroids (both have admitted to steroid use), nor do you achieve it with more endurance focused training rather than maximising load for a low number of reps. Big and strong, sure, but much more compact.

A boxer would be a more natural comparison.

Maybe professional arm wrestler would be even more apt.

Here is Devon Larratt (225 lbs) easily beating Hafthor Bjornsson ("The Mountain" from Game of Thrones; 419 lbs) without breaking a sweat. Specialization wins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkkL-bAH8H4

You need some pretty specific muscles for bowmanship, which don't really equate to a bodybuilder's physique. That goes both way, I wouldn't be sure whether Arnie in his best days could draw a 150 lbs bow, and I'm dead certain that Daffyd Longbowman didn't look like a candidate for Mr. Universe.

But you still had some pretty healthy specimens, which brings to mind one important factor that's often forgotten: It's not like archers were suddenly useless when they couldn't fire their bows anymore. They were decently well armed and armored, and if you're swarmed by guys with mauls (and possibly deep in mud), your fancy chain & plate doesn't really help you all that much.

The wreck of the Mary Rose has provided numerous well preserved skeletons of well trained longbowmen, and sailors (for comparison) and allowed studies of the effect upon their body. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17309665 - they found a significant difference in the lower arm bones of archers and non-archers.

Very interesting. I see that asymmetry is one of the indicators: "In fact, on one of the skeletons we have looked at, the surface area of the joint between the lower arm and elbow is 48% larger than on the joint on the other arm."

I believe there was a lot of arm-and-hand labor in being a sailor, but without the bias that archery creates.

> finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster

But the army you raise is less effective; quantity vs quality.

A country which did not want or could not afford to train longbow men may have had a deeper flaw: its model. Perhaps the real reason England could beat France had been a long time in the making: a strong economy, and politically society that afforded it a more equipped better trained army.

I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.

> I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.

There are many, many, many examples throughout history of this happening. In WWII, the British kept the European theatre alive until the Americans finally showed up. I learned in a Quora thread that opposing soldiers thought the British incredibly disciplined and reliable, while the Americans were absolutely nuts, making up in sheer bravado what they lacked in training.

People will fight very, very hard to save their political system when they are personally invested in it.

In the French Revolutionary wars, the generals led from the front of the army. Absolutely fearless, total badasses, fighting for the glory of the French Republic. Things changed of course after Napoleon grabbed the brass ring, but Napoleon did not make the army himself, it was the efforts of his revolutionary predecessors that forged the army that Napoleon commanded.

Strongly democratic nations enjoy virtual invulnerability in battle, particularly when defending.

The political stability is important when creating a national army that could conceivably be usurped by internal threats. The economy is essential for that oft-overlooked aspect of conducting a war, managing the supply train. Unless you're the Mongols, everything you use to wage war has to be maintained, and fed. Democratic countries simply do this better than autocratic ones.

> Strongly democratic nations enjoy virtual invulnerability in battle, particularly when defending.

Tell that to all the smaller countries overrun by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. (Or the native north-American tribes.)

(Lots of them did put up a great defence, though.)

> I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.

Yes. There was an article that reached the top page here about the cultural/organizational problems of information-age Arab armies from the perspective of a US Army soldier who had worked with several. Let me see if I can dig it up.

http://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars

At Agincourt, England beat France on pure fluke. We were effectively running away to Calais when the French trapped the English and attacked. The battle was lost more than won - the French just bunched up and got stuck in mud, and got slaughtered

It was not a reflection on any economic models.

Ps on the crossbow front - the cost of arrows relative to the firing mechanism is key

The quote from Stalin comes to mind, quantity has a quality of it's own.

Yep I also thought of that as I wrote that line. I wonder how that sounded to his cannon fodde^H^H^H soldiers...

It probably didn't sound like anything because it's most likely a misattribution (see the more detailed answers here: https://www.quora.com/Who-said-Quantity-has-a-quality-all-it...). Not saying that Quora or Wikipedia are authoritative sources, but many of this sort of alleged quotes by Stalin are usually either what someone thought Stalin might have said, or coined by Western authors writing about Stalin and later misattributed to him.

Most references I've found point to an American saying this quote (or similar) in the 70s.

That last sentence is the conclusion of 'The Logic of Political Survival', by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, et al.

Unfortunately, I haven't gone through it in ten years, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have some faulty methodology.

> Perhaps an analogy could be painted with companies today. Those that churn, and those that nurture skills.

Those that nurture skills would only be powerful in their own niche, and unable to significantly project power without a cohort of allies?

In the age of the longbow, England dominated the British Isles, whose other denizens were significantly smaller in population and economy. The French, on the other hand, kicked England out of the continent, and were a continental power. The English won some key battles, but at the end of the age of the longbow, the scorecard was in France's favour.

You forget that there is no citation of any of medieval sources that support their claims. I cannot believe that rulers decide on something important like war technology without leaving history trails in literature.

Not entirely; see, for example, page 703.

Kevin Hicks is a great resource on the longbow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvKJcxa8x_g

He is also very knowledgeable about all things from this period of history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUYd6pNy6QU

There is also some more detail regarding the make up of the "English" army bowmen here: http://www.bowyers.com/bowyery_longbowOrigins.php

Sidenote:

- Bowyer: Makes the bow

- Fletcher: Makes the arrow

- Stringfellow: Makes the string

- Arrowsmith: Makes the arrowhead

Sounds like somebody figured out the single responsibility principle

See http://www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes/

Ah, that thing of some names being derived from areas of work / professions. Taylor, Fletcher, Smith, Carpenter, ... It's there in other countries than European ones too. Wonder if there is a list of such names anywhere. Would be interesting to read.

http://surnames.behindthename.com/names/source/occupation

Oh cool, thanks much. Some good weekend reading now, and more so if one follows links or topics in a bit of depth :-)

This reminds me of Arrowsmith: I Don't Want to Miss a Thing

This seems a good place to post about Mad Jack Churchill, who brought his longbow to France in 1940 and shot a German with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill

Thanks for posting this!

my favorite bit:

"He startled train conductors and passengers by throwing his briefcase out of the train window each day on the ride home. He later explained that he was tossing his case into his own back garden so he would not have to carry it from the station"

I see a possible problem with this theory: in few words, according to the authors the French and Scots did not adopt the longbow for fear of rebellion. Still the nobles participated to the very battles that saw them being defeated by the English and their longbow. If the longbow was cheap and relatively easy to adopt, a noble aspiring to the crown would have been able to develop the technology independently from the (unstable) central government and have an even easier road to glory against their own technologically inferior king.

I admittedly did not read carefully the whole paper, but this possibility does not seem to be addressed.

The paper does address exactly that point. The longbow required sustained central support over many years which prevented rebellious nobles from quickly adopting it:

"These features of longbow technology had two important implications for those interested in adopting it. First, centralized efforts were necessary to create a culture of archery. As shown above, these efforts in England consisted of laws supporting bow ownership and practice, restrictions on competing leisure activ- ities, subsidies for bows, and festivals and tournaments focused on archery skills. Because of this, the longbow could be adopted only by, or with the permission and support of, a nation’s ruler, who alone wielded the authority and resources required to undertake such e orts. Indeed, given the nature of longbow technology, to have even attempted to adopt the longbow without his ruler’s permission, a noble, for example, would have needed to successfully hide the fact that he was continuously training large numbers of archers for years—a highly improbable proposition. Second, conditional on a nation’s ruler adopting longbow technology, a usurper noble with an eye on the Crown, or a prince interested in independence for his territory, could lead an effective rebellion against his ruler by supplying the inexpensive weapon to large numbers of citizens, whose ruler-sponsored training and practice with the bow had made them proficient archers. Thus, to be willing to develop longbow use in his country, a ruler had to be confident that his efforts would not be turned against him."

Yes, I read that, and of course it is possible. Nevertheless the fact that the centralized government was unstable and news would not travel too fast makes me think that it is a bit strange nobody tried it in 150 years. The maps of France they present also shows that lots of territories would not recognize the French crown for long time. Those could have developed the technology and either take over the throne or give the crown one more reason to develop the technology themselves.

Maybe the line is thin, but given the long times it seems strange to me that there has not been at least an attempt to this (at least to my knowledge, but they don't cite any such event).

The various French barons probably saw more advantage in maintaining their ability to repress their own people than deeper alliance with them to defeat others. Being King of France sounds nifty, but there wasn't actually much that King could do against the more powerful or remote barons. One of those barons might have had more power over the others by training archers, but the real power would be with the _archers_, and the baron would access that power by their acknowledgement of his authority. This makes it difficult for the baron to tax the bejesus out of the serfs and take their daughters. All of which was the really fun part of being a baron, and never mind about being King.

When your political status depends on your ability to beat the crap out the people around you, and that ability depends on you having expensive armor that they don't have, you have no interest in teaching them to kill you at 150 yards with a piece of wood.

One of the notes does actually address this point:

23 At the battle of Courtrai, for instance, the small principality of Flanders was able to muster an army of archers larger than the army of the entire kingdom of France, which consisted of knights and men-at-arms (Rogers 1993, p. 252). In this sense, a weapon like the longbow allows for the military enfranchisement of commoners, which institutionally constrains the ruler

It doesn't go on to discuss this further, but it shows that while maintaining a large force of archers required a population widely practiced in archery, where a region could muster enough longbows it enabled them to effectively combat the central control of their country.

Actually the descriptions of the battle I have seen do not mention archers.

Rather it looks like a militia on foot was able to defeat a cavalry-based army by choosing (and preparing) the battlefield. It seems that both armies used crossbows, and that actually the French did better with them.

References: http://www.liebaart.org/slag_e.htm http://www.military-history.org/articles/the-battle-of-court...

There's another major problem: preventing peasants from being a threat whilst still yielding some benefit from the longbow could easily have been achieved by restricting archery training to nobles and selected privileged guards, who had more time and inclination towards military training than the peasantry anyway. This would have resulted in less firepower than the English mass armies, but far more than the crossbows they used instead (indeed, since the principal advantage of the longbow over the crossbow was rate of fire, it would have been even more important to take advantage of in an army with a relative shortage of archers)

Alternate hypothesis: the French lacked the experience of the English/Welsh in making longbows and training people to use them, so struggled to see any evidence of superiority when experimenting with longbows over the crossbow technology they were more familiar with. A local maximum.

And the posited relationship between (in)stability and training regimes for the wider population looks more plausible flipped on its head: the less stable English kings paid less attention to the promotion of archery than Edward III not because they hoped laxity in training would result in any peasant armies raised against them being worse shots, but simply because they had more important things to worry about than archers.

>There's another major problem: preventing peasants from being a threat whilst still yielding some benefit from the longbow could easily have been achieved by restricting archery training to nobles and selected privileged guards, who had more time and inclination towards military training than the peasantry anyway.

That was pretty small number of people in the middle ages, and they would already have been trained as mounted knights or men-at-arms so retraining them as archers would not be a net gain unless one archer was more valuable than one man-at-arms which I don't think is likely.

The advantage of the longbow is that once trained, you could raise a large army quite cheaply but that army only worked as part of a combined arms operation that also had armoured infantry and cavalry. That means that you don't want to sacrifice the other elements of your army in order to build a longbow capability.

There's also the whole concept of feudalism to throw into the mix. Longbows were cheap so you could require your peasantry to own and practice them - or at least for a community to supply X archers per Y population.

Knights are significantly more expensive, and again require years of practice. The principle of feudalism was landholding being tied to military service - you hold the land from your feudal lord and in return this supports your ability to provide military arms.

Take away the requirement for you to provide expensive armour and destriers (the war horses knights rode) and you remove the need for you to hold land, which undermines the political settlement of the Kingdom.

At the very least though, you'd have thought they could have sacrificed crossbowmen to achieve that improved rate of fire from longbows. Presumably the reason they didn't had less to do with fear of better bowmen and more to do with inability to provide the quality of longbows and training that would convince crossbowmen to change their weaponry.

The authors do consider these issues (though perhaps not to your satisfaction). They say that the longbow was only really effective en masse, requiring the participation of the yeomanry, and that the duration of the period of English longbow dominance, and the number of against-the-odds English victories in that time, provided both the motivation and opportunity for its opponents to develop the same capability. They argue that the French were well aware of the threat that English archers presented, and frequently avoided battle on that account, preferring to recapture territory after the main English army had moved on. In the quote on page 703, they offer a contemporary account of the French beginning to adopt the longbow, but reversing the policy precisely out of a fear that it would enable insurrection.

From my limited knowledge of medieval society, I think the nobility would have considered archery to be completely beneath their dignity, and an affront to chivalry. Their proper place was on a horse, in armor and wielding a broadsword or lance.

Your alternate theory is particularly interesting. We forget that in days gone by, technology spread with difficulty, and certain crafts had their knowledge particularly well-hoarded. It's one thing to say "you make a longbow from a yew tree in this manner", and another to actually do it effectively. Even if you had a few people who knew technology X in the local population, they may not have wanted to share that knowledge for fear of diluting their own power and prestige, regardless of what Mr King wanted.

Monarchy doesn't really work like that.

In what way? I think royal power at that time was less well defined than we might think (e.g. the Scots statement that Robert the Bruce was only King as long as he kept defeating the English and if he failed to do that he'd get replaced).

I still remember being blown away when I realised how institutionally organised longbow practice was as I read this Rosemary Sutcliff as a child

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1195105.The_Armourer_s_H...

The intro still assumes that the battles won by the English in the Hundred Years War were due the longbow (alone), which AFAIK is quite debatable (at least outside of England, where Agincourt is a bit of a national myth, even more than e.g. the Black Legend).

And never mind instability, the French also weren't as geographically isolated as the English and thus it was easier to hire mercenaries. Genoese crossbowman being a particular example.

The penetrative ability of the longbow is also greatly exaggerated, citing a book that did some pretty shoddy testing (flat sheets of poor quality metal used as targets, but hardened bodkins as penetrators, 10m distance, no padding).

Exactly. The longbow alone doesn't win anything. It has to be used in the right situation, preferably on defensive terrain, on a hill, with dismounted knights protecting the longbowmen.

Dismounted knights was a no-go for the French nobility, who loved their glorious cavalry charge. If you're going to charge, the longbow is a lot less useful. And in battles where the French charge succeeded (because the English lacked a good defensive position, for example), the French were a lot more likely to win.

France won the Hundred Years War.

My bad, of course I meant the famous English victories, changed the post to reflect that.

Doesn't exactly help the case for the longbow.

I think that the way this paper discusses on the longbow as being the superior weapon may obscure a key fact here. Man for man, a crossbow is a superior weapon; requires less skill to operate, has longer range, much easier to aim, better penetrating power. The main advantage of a longbow is how simple and cheap it is.

Speed of reloading is another advantage the longbow has, but I think this article overstates it. While some crossbows do require using a stirrup or crank to load them, there are others that you can reload against your hips, and shoot from there, to increase your speed considerably, at some cost to accuracy. I know people who have managed to get 6 bullseyes at 20 yards on a crossbow in 30 seconds. Meanwhile, archers would not be firing at the maximum possible rate in battle; ammunition is a limited resource, and with the draw weights of warbows fatigue would set in quickly. Overall, with the archers they had and bows they had at the time, it is likely that the longbows were able to be a little faster than the crossbows, but it's not a night and day thing; and the range, accuracy, and penetrating power on the crossbows were better.

The simplicity became an advantage in a few battles, which came after substantial rainstorms that caused problems with crossbows more complicated mechanisms. But the main advantage was how cheap and fast to produce they were; you could easily arm a large populace quite quickly. In order to take advantage of the longbow, you had to do that; you needed a very large number of archers to effectively take advantage of longbows, while you needed fewer archers to be effective with crossbows. But because it was cheap and simple, it was feasible to do that.

I think that cost and simplicity of the longbows were their biggest advantage; speed perhaps a secondary factor, but the sheer numbers were likely to be more important.

There is, of course, an interesting parallel here with some trends in modern military spending. The Joint Strike Fighter is a technological marvel; one of the most advanced pieces of military equipment ever. However, they are staggeringly expensive, and not actually the best dogfighters in the sky. You wonder how much more effective spending that money on more and simpler weaponry might have been.

Actually, some papers written about crossbows seriously doubt that the penetrating power was that much better -- if at all. The poundage certainly was, but it had to be -- crossbow arms are short and the arrow doesn't travel as long, thus less time is available to transfer energy.

And "large populace" makes it sound like they just handed out crossbows to peasant levies, instead of them being very highly paid mercenaries. I mean, I can hand a bill or halberd to a peasant, too, but that didn't stop the Swiss from getting hired by most of Europe...

Hmm. I'd be interested in seeing your source for that. Yes, the power imparted to the arrow is the integral of the poundage supplied by the bow or prod, over the distance that it is propelling the arrow, and that distance is shorter on a crossbow than a longbow. But you can have a much higher poundage and still be usable with a crossbow; you have two arms to draw together, and are supporting none of the draw weight while aiming. I've seen the analysis of draw weights of longbows on the Mary Rose; do you know where there are sources for that of crossbows?

And yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like they were just handing out longbows. Longbows do require significantly more training. In part, the tradeoff for longbows is that you have cheaper weapons but need to put more into training the archers.

Payne-Gallwey's "The Book of the Crossbow" is at least in the same category as the paper's cited "Great Warbow". At one point he tests a 15th century siege crossbow with a draw weight of 1200 lbs, which is probably close to the upper limit (and requires a heavy cranequin). IIRC the Mary Rose longbows were about 150 lbs.

But that's a steel bow, which is stiffer than wood, and the draw length is pretty small.

W.F. Paterson published a test that compared a 70 lbs bow with a 740 lbs crossbow, and the initial velocity was about the same.

Now how that equates to actual damage is another issue, and I haven't seen a really good test about that. One major factor that one has to consider is that damage varies with range, too. So what might look comparable at close range might be completely different at far range. (I think the Genoese were out-ranged by the English at Crecy.)

In fact http://www.bowyers.com/bowyery_longbowOrigins.php says the contrary to what you are claiming, and in their account of the Cercy battle they clearly mention how the longbow outranged, and out-powered the crossbow (look for paragraph "Crecy 1346: the Longbow's Finest Day").

Excerpt 1: "The crossbowmen had a lethal range of up to about 80 yards, and took up an initial position 100 yards from the English, in line across the field. Unfortunately for them they quickly found out that the longbow now had a lethal range of well over 100 yards. "

Excerpt 2: "They were shocked to find that the longbows could now penetrate French armour, and could also down the horses."

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cr%C3%A9cy#The_Frenc..., and of course take with the same grain of salt applied to anything on Wikipedia, I don't have the sources on hand to cross check):

  The French army moved forward late in the afternoon, around 
  4pm after it had formed up. As it advanced, a sudden 
  rainstorm broke over the field of battle. The English 
  archers de-strung their bows to avoid the strings becoming 
  damaged; the Genoese with their crossbows could take no 
  such precautions, resulting in damage to their weapons.[26] 
  The crossbowmen began their advance, however they had left 
  their pavises back in the baggage train, and thus had no 
  means of protection as they loaded their weapons.[27][28] 
  The Genoese moved within range and discharged their 
  weapons. Damaged by the rain, the slackened crossbows had 
  little effect on the English line. The English archers shot 
  their bows in retaliation, inflicting heavy casualties on 
  the Genoese, causing them to retreat. The knights and 
  nobles following in Alençon's division, seeing the routed 
  mercenaries, hacked them down as they retreated. Froissart 
  writes of the event:

    The English, who were drawn up in three divisions and 
    seated on the ground, on seeing their enemies advance, 
    arose boldly and fell into their ranks... You must know 
    that these kings, earls, barons, and lords of France did 
    not advance in any regular order... There were about 
    fifteen thousand Genoese crossbowmen; but they were quite 
    fatigued, having marched on foot that day six leagues, 
    completely armed, and with their wet crossbows. They told 
    the constable that they were not in a fit condition to do 
    any great things that day in battle. The Count of 
    Alençon, hearing this, was reported to say, "This is what 
    one gets by employing such scoundrels, who fail when 
    there is any need for them."[29]

So, it doesn't sound like the crossbows were in pristine condition. Rather, their range was limited by the fact that their strings had gotten wet, while the relatively simpler (and easier to string) longbows were able to be protected from the rainstorm.

You are directly contradicting a researched paper that explicitly contradicts everything you just said. Why do you think you're right?

Read page mid-page 691-693.

I'm also not sure what the point is of you talking about today's modern crossbows which are unsurprisingly easier to reload.

First, this research paper is about a game theory analysis about a political situation that may have made the French and Scots leery of being vulnerable to usurpation by arming a large population. The material on pages 691-693 is all background material, not the actual research material of this paper.

I did read 691-693. I am not contradicting any of the information in it; merely saying that I think they are overstating the direct superiority of the longbow. Strategically and tactically, it's clear that arming a large number of archers and using them in the early battle is superior, and the cost and simplicity of the longbow makes that much easier; but it's not because a single longbow is better than a single crossbow. I think that the longbow was a superior weapon, in the sense that the armies that adopted the longbow strategy clearly beat those that relied on crossbows, but I think that the way that the paper couches its introduction makes it sound like, side by side, a longbow was a superior weapon to a crossbow.

I'm not talking about modern crossbows, I'm talking about reproduction medieval crossbows. I do medieval recreation as a hobby, I shoot longbow, I know people who shoot crossbow. The longbow is faster, though as I mention, I know people who can reload and shoot from the hip and get 6 accurate shots off in 30 seconds. And the crossbow is more accurate, gets better range, delivers more power, and is easier to shoot.

Now, I don't shoot a 160 pound warbow, I don't have the strength for it. If I did, I would get some more power and range out of it, at the expense of accuracy and speed, as I would fatigue much more quickly. With a crossbow, you can use both arms and brace against your hip to draw, so even without any stirrup or crank, you can shoot a much heavier crossbow than you could a longbow. That extra power means more penetrating power and a flatter quicker flight (or more range if you increase your angle), and the fact that your muscles are not straining to hold the bow drawn means you can aim more accurately.

It also doesn't make that much sense to begin with. Part of the cost of using the longbow is the years of training and feeding the longbowman, and the cost of that training could easily buy multiple crossbows. If it weren't much more effective than a crossbow on a per-soldier basis, they would not have seen much use.

It's my understanding that a longbow has a greater range than a cross, especially one in the 1300s.

I wonder if this practice of arming citizens with easily procured long-distance weaponry that in a less stable country would be feared to become useful in a rebellion also could be considered one of the memetic ancestors of modern American firearm culture.

I don't know, maybe because bow is a peasants' weapon, and France had knigts?

Western Europe had its share of stupidity, like kings leading charges instead of commanding battles on a tactical level.

"I don't know, maybe because bow is a peasants' weapon, and France had knigts?"

If you read the abstract (I'm not saying you didn't), you'll see that this is what they are saying. The TL;DR version is that using longbows meant training peasants, which will pose internal security problems. England was more stable at this time so it was less dangerous for them to train peasants to fight.

from the abstract: Rulers choosing between missile technologies thus confronted a trade-off with respect to internal and external security. England alone in late medieval Europe was sufficiently politically stable to allow its rulers the first-best technology option. In France and Scotland political instability prevailed, constraining rulers in these nations to the crossbow.

Not sure there was much option at that time - to get to be a King, or keep your position, quite often required being a direct hands-on stupendous badass.

> stupidity, like kings leading charges instead of commanding battles on a tactical level.

Why exchange one form of stupidity for another? If you're going to ping medieval Europe for military stupidity, then instead suggest that the people commanding the battles should be trained military specialists, as they are today. There's nothing magical about kings that make them better at battle tactics.

The problem with kings leading charges is that there's nobody to command the battlefield, not that they were skilled or not. Eastern Europe had that much better.

Ah, Agincourt-fetish, one of the few fetishes you can display in public without looking too ridiculous (in the English-speaking world).

Longbows are great in open battle, yes. But the hundred years war was a war of sieges and raids (by the English and the great companies), and for those the stonemason is infinitely superior to the longbowman.

For the French, the winning strategy was always to avoid pitched battles and fortify river crossing points until English armies had run out of supplies, then patiently retake lost fortified places through siege.

An apparent preprint: http://www.peterleeson.com/Longbow.pdf

Ok, we changed the URL to that from http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/684231.

Asimov wrote an essay on this back in 1980, called _The Unsecret Weapon_, in the collection _The Sun Shines Bright_. Same conclusion, IIRC.

However I've never found a copy online, which is a shame because I remember it has being one of his best.

surprised there's no discussion of the importance of chivalric values in the French military. French knights were so married to the idea of valor that employing yeoman infantry was seen as dishonorable. Obviously this is directly related to the political context of state security but it's worth considering the cultural factor as well

Absolutely. The French nobility loved the heavy cavalry charge. The English knights had to fight on foot to protect the longbowmen. It's a totally different culture and attitude. You can't just pick one element out of a different system and expect to copy the successes of that system.

Last summer I did a workshop with the longbow. It's real fun, and has many links to meditation, finding your center etc. I had seen it before, never liked it, but it was great.

In the end I shot at a 1.5 meter target about 100 meters away. You could barely see it, as it was lying flat on a hill. At first I could not believe that I had the power to get that far, but it worked out. I missed it by about 12 meters, which was not bad looking at the competition that day.

You might like the book "Zen in the Art of Archery" by Eugen Herrigel, first published in 1948 / 1953 (German / English).

Makes me want to learn how to use the longbow.

It seems a challenge that this skill has been lost, and is interesting in that how long it took to develop.

I own one and they are very fun to shoot. But it take a lot of practice to be accurate with one. There is no sight or even an arrow rest on authentic english longbow so learning to shoot consistently takes a while.

A paper about the hundred years war that doesn't cite a single French-language source except Froissard? Not very serious.

>Yet the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) lasted longer than a hundred years—plenty of time for England’s enemies to learn that their defeats were heavily influenced, if not caused, by the longbow.

Didn't England lose the Hundred Years War? At least looking at the map before and after - it lost everything on the continent, incl. last remnants of Angevin and Normandy lost to France, with France rising up significantly bigger and stronger as a result of the war.

While long bow is a nice nostalgic weapon, the crossbow is technologically more advanced, and in our civilization technology wins :

"Plate armor that could be penetrated by large crossbows, but was impenetrable by longbows, was uncommon in Europe until about 1380"

(funny that while a child i was initially making bows, yet soon switched to making crossbows - and they were interesting until i made my first single shot handgun at the end of the 1st grade :)

Yes, England lost. The thing is, field battles don't really win wars; sieges do. At least when the war is about territory.

England did a lot of damage to France, but couldn't really hold on to the territory. And besides, it was really only a handful of field battles they won so spectacularly (not just due to the longbow, but due to a more comprehensive strategy involving longbows together with knights on foot and good defensive terrain).

It's funny how the article quietly assumes "Scotland+France+England" = "Europe".

Can you provide a concrete example ?

I really can't see this assumption made anywhere in the paper.

> For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to the technologically inferior cross- bow.

> England alone, for a 150-year window in late medieval Europe, was politically stable enough to render the longbow its rulers’ optimal technology choice. In contrast, in France and Scotland political instability prevailed, rendering the crossbow the optimal technology choice for rulers in these nations.

Yes, I read those, but I still don't see the assumption made.

The first more general sentence does not imply that the all the countries mentioned in the second make up the entirety of Europe.

It makes sense that the author would make a specific comparison with the countries involved in the war, rather than doing so for all the countries in medieval Europe.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. It's just that I disagree with both sentences.

Mongol composite bows were superior ranged weapons and were used in Europe since 14th century.

And there were other politicaly stable countries in that period, including Teutonic Order, Poland, Venetian Republic among others.

Like the difference between crossbows and longbows, they were superior in some ways and inferior in others.

Since they were composite, they were dependent on glue and cord holding them together; they were somewhat more susceptible to weather. They were also more expensive to produce. However, as recurves they had better power with less stacking (force required to hold them at a full draw), and they were also shorter so could be used from horseback, a huge advantage for a nomadic people on the steppes.

Your point is well taken, however, that the paper is really only comparing a very limited portion of Europe over a fairly limited amount of time. It's an interesting analysis, but I don't think it has enough data or broad enough application to make it definitive.

Saying "Goofus does X; by contrast, Gallant does Y" is not suggesting these are the only two humans in the entire world.

It's an article about the military advantages the English had because of the longbow while fighting the Scots and the French and why the latter never adopted it as a weapon.

Explains the large number of hackathons we have these days: "...a ruler who wanted to adopt the longbow had to create and enforce a culture of archery through tournaments, financial incentives, and laws supporting longbow use to ensure sufficient numbers of archers."

I've only read the abstract, so I'm not sure if this is covered, but the longbow requires huge amounts of practice from a young age to be effective. You had to be incredibly strong just to draw the string. A crossbow, by contrast, was easier to draw, and men could be trained to use it in a far shorter time. English Kings had constant problems with procuring enough men capable of using a longbow, passing all sorts of laws banning all sports except archery etc. Perhaps the French simply couldn't find enough trained men?

> I'm not sure if this is covered, but the longbow requires huge amounts of practice from a young age to be effective.

It is covered, the paper lists a number of measure the English crown took to force people to train with the longbow in their spare time.

> the French simply couldn't find enough trained men?

The French could have taken the same measures of mandating longbow ownership and strongly "encouraging" longbow training (by setting up tournaments and forbidding other types of leisure)

It's covered:

"The longbow took years of continuous training to master. Not only was there the matter of the physical strength necessary to draw 120-plus pounds with one arm over and over again, but because the longbow arrow was drawn to the ear, aim was largely a matter intuition rather than sight. Thus, if war erupted, it was not possible to recruit a company of men untrained on the longbow and train them to use the weapon quickly. A stock of proficient archers had to already be in place, prepared to serve."

It's an interesting paper but "politically stable" isn't the right term.

A population able to defeat the infantry technology of the time requires a different social and legal position than one that doesn't have that ability. That is, the government needs more cooperation and consent of the governed. That government is stronger than other governments, because it can kill their armies. But it is more dependent on that population and so cannot abuse it in the same manner as those other, "weaker" governments.

A historian friend claims this is bollocks. England was not significantly more stable, and the longbow was not a superweapon on its own. It was part of a system of combat, of combined arms, involving knights fighting on foot and choosing the right terrain.

And when they didn't have the right terrain, those English longbowmen also lost plenty of battles. They had some spectacular victories at Crecy and Agincourt, but they also had their fair share of losses.

Excellent weapon, but no silver bullet.

Interesting discussion, including the comments below respecting how Barons didn't necessarily want an armed populice because it made it harder for them to stay in power. Does any of this sound familiar or applicable to today (gun control debate)??

I fail to see their references to support the claim that france or scotland was more politically unstable.

Also how about the rest of european powers, I am not certain there is support that england was the only politically stable entity is europe during the middle ages.

Pages 699-702 address this in detail:

“The land (France) was divided into loose and shifting territories that owed little or no allegiance to any central authority, ruled across large swathes by noblemen who were little more than warlords”

and

"Flanders, too, had great autonomy from the French monarch and strong ties to Germany and England (Sumption 1990, p. 35). In 1384 Flanders united with Burgundy to create a principality in France that fell in and out of French control for over a century."

and

"Most critically, (Scotland) was bitterly divided into three warring parts: the English- speaking southeast, the Gaelic-speaking northwest, and the lands that fell between"

There's a bunch more detail there along with references to the papers they draw those conclusions from. I'd say they support that part of their argument soundly.

I think Scotland was split into a lot more than just three warring parts - there were battles between clans up to the 17th century!

[NB This probably explains why we have such an incredible number of castles here in Scotland.]

Well, England did have the distinct advantage of being the largest power on an island - while they didn't manage to conquer the Scots the Scots weren't really much of a threat to them. So they got a certain amount of stability largely through geography.

Not strictly true - Cromwell conquered Scotland after yet another of the interminable invasions of England by Scotland. It was more a case that after Edward I, England simply wasn't interested in conquering Scotland - there were richer prizes elsewhere.

Cromwell comes after the age of longbows, though.

"We determined the true solution of medieval war puzzle. The medievals truly had to reason just like we do. We cite no such reason in medieval literature sources, just use indirect proofs that we are right."

A good reason to laugh, I guess.

The Brits have had the advantage of a technologically superior political system for a very long time. I usually make an argument that is quite similar to this to explain their rapid and unprecedented rise to imperial splendor.

As far as Europe is concerned: Roman Empire? Charlemagne? Otto? How is the British Empire "unprecedented" exactly? Is it a matter of scale?

Tiny little island that lost most (all really) of its continental holdings by 1700. Compare with other continental empires.

tl;dr -- The longbow is worthless in most applications except military. The monarchy made it compulsory to train in bow use, so anyone recruited for the militia was ready in some shape or form to use the bow, so in a relatively short amount of time anyone can be trained to use a longbow for battle. They forced bow imports and kept prices very low throughout England.

The rest of the world couldn't enact such rules and thus could not make the Longbow a successful military weapon. It required years of training, not something you can do to a soldier who just got conscripted.

Because France was playing Orc and researched lighter throwing axes instead.

Anybody going to draw a parallel between this, and modern gun-control efforts? Or is that too contentious to be helpful in illuminating this centuries-old issue.

Here is a contemporaneous control effort:

We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.

Canon 29, 2nd Lateran Council, held 1139, under Pope Innocent II

The council also forbade "jousts and tournaments". Apparently the original text has not survived, so only secondary sources and translations are available, some of which vary.

In any case, the prohibition appears to have been ineffective.

Interesting read of the introduction - and very good points. Perhaps yew was also way too hard to come by / expensive for the Scottish?

Also, it does make sense that training long term military personel was reserved to the ruling feudal class. Still, producing a longbow compatible population (of strong, loyal) men might have had other costs then political ones. Precision wise, a longbow is not a real tournament weapon - and you needed tall, strong men to wield it.

> Perhaps yew was also way too hard to come by / expensive for the Scottish?

One of the first point the paper makes is that the domestic supply of english yew was of poor quality and way outstripped by the demand, and the country imported yew from throughout continental Europe. So while yew availability may have been an explanation for Scottland, it definitely wasn't for France.

> Still, producing a longbow compatible population (of strong, loyal) men might have had other costs then political ones. Precision wise, a longbow is not a real tournament weapon

The longbow is a tournament weapon if you set up longbow-only tournaments and legally forbid other sport tournaments.

Golf and football were actually forbidden in Scotland for a time in the 15th century to try and encourage archery practice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_in_Scotland#Etymology

It's nice to see the conventional wisdom confirmed for once, but... isn't this the conventional wisdom?

I thought so as well - the abstract doesn't seem like new information.

Is it? I always thought crossbows were way more effective than longbows at range and accuracy.

I'm mostly thinking of the battle of Agincourt, which has long been celebrated in the English-speaking world as the victory of the common man over the elite, heavily armored knight, all thanks to the longbow.

If anybody wants to go more in depth on this I suggest A Distant Mirror. Brilliant work.

I thought this was going to be about the AH-64D Apache Longbow.

Great paper. Nice to see the authors include Edward III's compulsory practice longbow after church on Sundays for two hours.

Plain BS.

I learnt "canne d'arme and baton d'arme" the "fencing of the i-gnobles".

From feudality to absolute monarchy the raise of monarchy has been made at the costs of "Jaqueries". Peasant revolts of the "non nobles" "ignobles" in latin derived french.

The central control brought by the carolingien and then the bourbon as resulted in strong traditions: knights and nobility are also a force to squalsh revolts.

This and the dissolution of Lances towards "regular armies" after azincourt defeat (longbow involved) has been used to cut the fraternity at arms between feuds members. (Lances were like organic units of versatile men at arms doing their best to bring everyone alive the local feud included).

The strength of the knight were enforced like in feodal japan, by preventing the crowd to gain power.

For this, metal was considered the weapons of only knights.

Which means that when using the old franc laws for something as rude as sullying a women in a church out of the accepted "traditions", the divine judgement could be called ... a duel.

Needless to say peasants were not authorized to have metal ... officially.

So with all the jaqueries going on, you don't really want the peasants to have weired ideas about efficient wooden weapons.

And still monarchy was a vast joke at this time and era, cousins of the royal families were lending each others money, and were often tight by blood.

England had no interest to destroy the french society.

French kings had no real interest in defeating england. They were mainly aiming for weakening the local suzerain. The feuds.

Of course it backfired. Louis XIV almost get killed during the "fronde".

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