Hacker News Reader

Comment by gobbo | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com