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Comment by gobbo | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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...

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