Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
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For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-s...
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...
If you're not yet aware of it (unlikely as it made it 'big' in the overall internet), I believe the video from Tod's Workshop with actual experimentation is a must see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE
There is a sequel and many other related videos, but this one is the source for a very famous clip (at 20:50 - https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE?si=oISZqXvdv8ymoCDi&t=1239)
I thought it might have had to do with range. The description of how archers were used made me consider that have longer range bows would be an advantage and thought that might have be related to the longbow.
and that is where volley may be helpful - simultaneous hit to multiple horses and soldiers may break the pace and may cause stumbling and local pile-ups. Slow down of advance -> more exposure time to the follow up arrows.
Also, the only safe place to be in War is far from it; so by definition soldiers need to be trained to ignore a lot of threats to their wellbeing in order to do their job.
Anti-cav arrows were used at Agincourt to great effect, although it's possible the mud killed more French than the English did.
Bret, the author of ACOUP, goes in to a lot more detail here:
https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warr...
It very much depends on the historical context. Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. If they broke rank or ran away from battle, everyone including their parents, siblings, neighbors, and potential lovers would hear about it back home (and never let them live it down). Most conscripts at that time fought alongside their fellow villagers and farmers, not random professional soldiers. They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
Historical times were brutal. If they were defending their home, losing the battle would result in their home being pillaged and their family enslaved or raped. That would be a great motivator to not run
Only true in certain times and places, mostly sacking besieged towns cities where it was done in order to pressure the defenders of the next siege to surrender with terms rather than fight to the end.
Not all historical societies had slavery. It declined hugely in medieval Europe - the Normans abolished it in England, for example (people forget this because of the revival of slavery in early modern times, and of course its continuation in other cultures) not long after they conquered the country.
Most peasants during the Middle ages did not fight at all, except in revolts and uprisings, usually with terrible outcomes.
If they were taken along for the (military campaign) ride by their feudal lord, it is most likely they would have avoided the battlefield altogether, providing auxiliary services, e.g. setting up camp, feeding the horses, cooking, tending to their liege, etc.
Conscription was not really a thing until the mid-Renaissance (roughly), and the vast majority of battles in the Middle ages was fought by nobility, ranging from lower class to dukes and lords.
(of course when looked at from just a slightly different angle, it's also indistinguishable from a protection racket)
There is a sort of equivalency in a corporation and a government, I would even say a corporation is a government, it is the ruling apparatus for a group of people. Organized crime is a corporation that is trying to operate outside the law of it's parent operation.
I like to joke that the reason the government is so hard on organized crime is that they don't like the competition.
But really organized crime should be suppressed because it is a brutal warlord style government.
Conscription and use as it applied to semi professional soldiers like archers was very much a thing because they were quite useful. By semi-professional I mean their training was encouraged rather than subsidized by the governments outside of wartime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Arms_of_1252 “Whereas the people of our realm, rich and poor alike, were accustomed formerly in their games to practise archery – whence by God's help, it is well known that high honour and profit came to our realm, and no small advantage to ourselves in our warlike enterprises... that every man in the same country, if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make use, in his games, of bows and arrows... and so learn and practise archery.”
Not that I think you’re claiming this, but the Assize of Arms 1252 certainly didn’t mean archers were training in volley fire.
Free families would often have to send someone to war if the local lord called.
Conscription and Mercenary companies became more prevalent as the scale of warfare increased, and the early gunfire which necessitated coordinated volley fire.
Archers were levied. Peasant forces were often self-armed, and either levied or bought with promised wages.
Nobility led, and owned the best armor, but were hardly the only ones on the battlefield.
https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-...
In particular, the concept of 'drill' gets a lot of attention:
"Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.... The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine."
A company of archers is probably the same. They'd be working in unison following the direction of their captain. Not for shock value. But to manage fatigue, arrow supply, and ensure that they're firing with a full draw.
I agree that sitting there for minutes holding the bow taut is dumb. But something like a Attention, Nock, Ready, Draw, Loose cycle isn't that. Maybe you hold it a half second and it's slightly more fatiguing but I don't really see it.
If it is you just combine draw and loose. It will make the spread between arrows slightly larger but it's still a volley.
A diffuse but more-or-less constant stream of arrows arriving at random is presumably more distracting and harder to deal with, and therefore a greater hindrance to enemy infantry.
No, drilling was a response to the use of gunpowder weapons.
> Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own.
There's a passage from Julius Caesar where he describes how, set on from behind, the rear line of his army turned around so that they could fight in that direction instead of just getting slaughtered. It is noted mostly for the total lack of any suggestion that Caesar bears any responsibility for the brilliant maneuver.
But before you get to that point, you should observe that this was in fact a brilliant and spontaneous battlefield maneuver, not something that anyone had ever been trained to do.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150901204127/http://www.roman-...
> To take another example, Caesar’s army at Bibracte (58BC) famously manages the feat of winning when attacked in both the front and the rear by about-facing its third line and attacking in both directions at once. Notably Caesar does not say that he did this, merely that the Romans did, which is a strong indication that turning the rear ranks of the army to face backwards was a decision made by more junior officers (probably centurions).
That said, of course I disagree with GP's claim that classical and medieval armies didn't drill. They certainly did drill. Bret has a whole blog post on the topic. [1] Quote from that post:
> Josephus [...] offers the most famous endorsement of Roman drills: “Nor would one be mistaken to say that their drills are bloodless battles, and their battles bloody drills” (BJ 3.5.1).
The quote from Josephus, extended:
> [The Romans] have never any truce from warlike exercises; nor do they stay till times of war admonish them to use them; for their military exercises differ not at all from the real use of their arms, but every soldier is every day exercised, and that with great diligence, as if it were in time of war, which is the reason why they bear the fatigue of battles so easily; for neither can any disorder remove them from their usual regularity, nor can fear affright them out of it, nor can labour tire them: which firmness of conduct makes them always to overcome those that have not the same firmness; nor would he be mistaken that should call those their exercises unbloody battles, and their battles bloody exercises.
That reminds me that Plutarch's Life of Eumenes §11 has a fun story about how Eumenes kept his men (and horses) in shape despite a close siege; it's hardly evidence for regular exercises but it's an amusing example of an irregular exercise! [3]
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-...
[2] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/war-3.html
[3] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/...
https://acoup.blog/2025/04/04/fireside-friday-april-4-2025/
Quote:
> But note how, while obedience to discipline and synchronized discipline are often conflated, they’re not the same: a lot of early modern pike-and-shot armies had tremendous synchronized discipline, but were mutiny-prone and it was often difficult to get them to do things like haul their own supplies or prepare their own food.
Citation desperately needed.
SOME armies drilled their soldiers, sure. Romans and Greeks spring to mind.
All? Ridiculous. The US revolutionary army was notoriously under-trained, for instance, and relied heavily on guerilla tactics - which are anti-formation, rely on inventive individual actions instead of mass obedience to minute action directives, and have been popular since Og picked up the first rock to throw, until today.
He talks specifically in other posts about the problems with "discipline" as a term (it groups too many different things as though they were the same), and he talks specifically about "cohesion" (which is the thing I think you're getting at) in this post at several points.
Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.
Case in point the Spartan army led by Leonidas. One of the soldiers apparently really said that if the Persians will rain fire arrows on them, they will fight in the shade.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r...
I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
It's just surprising that the number's that large.
Compound bows of course you can go higher because of mechanical advantage, but either way I don't think that people realize how difficult it is to draw a 100 pound bow. Typical professional recurve bow users would rarely want to exceed 50 pounds as I understand it.
In a war setting, higher draw weights increase both distance and penetration, which are desirable.
1. https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...
A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.
Never eliminated though!
But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
> [I]n the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal.
I wouldn't want to be shot by one, regardless.
Of course longbows could and did kill - they wouldn't have been used in war otherwise! But they did not routinely kill through plate armour at range.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
I believe it's generally accepted that the longbows we're talking about delivered arrows with more force than Mongol composite bows.
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
Horses are notoriously fragile. The quote does not say that the horse died instantly, merely that it died.
No, they're not. One could argue that some of the recent breeds, designed for a particular aesthetic rather than practicality, are, but that's not really within this subject.
> horses are big and react poorly to being wounded: a solid arrow hit on a horse is very likely to disable both horse and rider. And while light or archer cavalry might limit exposure to mass arrow fire by attacking in looser formation, as we’ve discussed, European heavy horse generally engages in very tight lines of armored men and horses in order to maximize the fear and power of their impact. Unsurprisingly then, we see from antiquity forward, efforts to armor or protect horses, called ‘barding’: defenses of thick textile, scale, lamellar, and even plate are known in various periods, though of course the more armor placed on the horse, the larger and stronger it needs to be and the slower it moves. Nevertheless, the size and shape of a horse makes it harder to armor than a human and you simply cannot achieve a level of protection for a horse that is going to match a heavy infantryman on the ground, especially if the latter has a large shield.
European medieval cavalry warfare saw the development of sophisticated horse training and group tactics, which mitigates the risk that a horse would bolt at the first wound. The reason infantry with poles were the default counter against cavalry, and not bowmen, is that these weapons wound more deeply and stand a chance to overcome horse training or bleeding out the horses.
If you could flank cavalry with bows it was still a good idea to do so, largely because cavalry knights were heavily armoured and in formation, i.e. not very agile and typically locked into shock advancement. It's important to keep in mind that medieval european destrier horses were big but not tall, unlike the breeds popular among contemporary european militaries, which tend to be slim and tall.
Until mechanised warfare became dominant european warfare was highly bound by tradition and ceremony and honour, rather than efficiency. This is an important reason for the quick fascist advancements in early WWII, and the success of highly mobile mongol cavalry. Previously european militaries typically decided on whether to meet on a field and clash there, or whether one party were to retreat into a fortification and turn it into attrition warfare. Skipping past the enemy Schwerpunkt with a mobile force was more or less frowned upon, and you can see this even in modern military thinkers like Clausewitz or turn-of-the-millenium US warfare.
Deciding on where the field is, where the enemy officers are concentrated as well as their troops and entering into an honourable, decisive battle there has been the dominant mode of european and european-descendant warfare for a long, long time. It hinges on soldiers (and horses) to be trained to not bail out in the face of danger or light injury, and wouldn't be possible at all if horse mounts were frail.
It clearly died with the rider still attached. One can safely presume that the horse didn't travel very far under those conditions.
This is the standard simplified narrative of what happened at Agincourt - English archers wiping out French noble heavy cavalry - although it also seems like that was an exception.
The battlefield killing was done by light infantry wading in with daggers and hatchets apparently during a foot slog up the muddy hill which left the french heavy infantry exhausted. Another wave of killing afaik was when the captured prisoners were all executed since the english position seemed like it might be overrun by some follow up fighting.
(keep in mind the battle took hours and there was a lot more going on then just heavy horse riding up against arrows once or twice)
Wiki page is worth a read actually
First, that archers can actually be more effective against mounted troops than foot: the mounted troops ride close together, horses are hard to fully armor, and one horse getting hit in the leg can cause a lot of chaos.
Second, at Agincourt, the French knights _walked_ through the arrow-fire quite successfully, but the effort (physical, mental, cumulative effect of small wounds) tired them enough that the English soldiers could beat them hand-to-hand. And that this ability to inflict small damage before the main fighting is why archers were valuable.
They pinned his army down with a fresher army meaning to destroy them. The English infantry and cavalry were vastly outnumbered due to attrition, but what he did have were longbows. And somehow they beat a superior army while losing a fraction as many men.
The historical military analysis I saw was that with the front lines so thin, the archers essentially didn’t have to fire long arching volleys. The flatter angle of the arrow trajectory and shorter flight distance increased the penetration force, and they just absolutely destroyed every charge against them, confusing the attacking army. Arrows should not be dropping this many men. WTF.
And at pretty close range. Plate armour very effective at stopping arrows and blades, otherwise they wouldn't have worn it.
(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)
When I owned one, it had a 65lb draw with an 80% letoff. So it took maybe 10/15lbs to hold it at full draw. But my bow could still reliably throw arrows out to around 300m, basically double the range of an english longbow. Nobody ever aims a modern bow for max range. Doing so is incredibly dangerous. World record distance shots have broken 1000m.
I had a teacher that was a bow hunter. I believe he claimed it was the only arrangement fair to the deer. They had a sporting chance. I can’t imagine he fired more than a couple arrows in any hunting trip. Very different from shoot or die.
They consider it a sport, the sport requires physical discipline, and that discipline is a propos of the topic.
If you want to get into the cruelty of hunting, we will first have to decide if raising feedlot animals is less cruel than hunting, and you will absolutely lose that argument. But we aren't here to discuss any of that. We are talking about the stopping power of arrows and arrows don't care what mammal they are aimed at.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F Scott Fitzgerald, probably stolen from Zelda Fitzgerald.
Force is force, whether it is due to elasticity or gravity. The difference is that the drawing force increases progressively, whereas the weight of an object is (for these purposes) constant (as stated).
Bands progressively increase resistance as they're stretched.
Chains load or de-load resistance as they're raised or lowered to the ground.
(How much of this was known and utilised during mediaeval warfare training and drilling is unclear, but I suspect the answer is "little".)
The first two times he lifted the bag he said this isn’t that heavy, maybe he got defrauded, so he got a scale and checked. But by the time he tried to lift it off the scale he was struggling, and getting it back into the metal can was serious work.
Stamina separates the pro from the amateur, but fatigue comes for all of us.
If you're interested in archery-focused exercises - https://www.morrelltargets.com/blogs/archery-blog/9-strength...
What makes it various bow styles exceptionally difficult is the draw style -- horsebow drawing by a single thumb is especially difficult; war bow has a strange draw style I've never attempted due to shoulder issues, recurve isn't difficult as you get three fingers, and compound archery is simply cheating.
Most of these draws aren't a draw and immediate release, but a draw and hold to aim. That's where archery becomes physically exhaustive. There was some recent YTer who showed off by drawing a 100#+ bow but couldn't hit worth shit. Hitting your target takes patience and practice.
As noted in another child, draw weights are typically measured at 30", but your draw may only be 29" or may be 31", etc. You'd want a bow that fits your draw length as close as possible, though.
A couple months of training and many folks can consistently hit a soup can at 50 yards with a 75# draw (or better). That would be absurd to even contemplate 100 years ago.
I prefer the antiquity of recurve bows and the lesser amounts of maintenance that comes with them. Though, I also think compound bows are beyond dangerous in comparison.
I have found that recurve archers seem to be better about 'checking' their arrows after missed shots. Many compound users I have known think that as long as the arrow is not completely snapped, then it's safe to use. I just show them the Google images of what happens when an arrow with hairline cracks explodes the near instant the quick-release is released.
This issue can happen with high draw weight recurve bows, but I have never seen the damage like what a compound bow can do.
Always check your arrows, folks!
You don't ever bend over and pick something off the ground?
We have.
Then I became a climber where I "activate muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activate muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell"
My pulling strength now is kind of incredible, especially for my weight. Finger strength too. I actually couldn't imagine a better crossover.
Archer skeletons have recognizably curved finger and clavicle bones.
Imagine picking up a 45-kg weight using only a string held by three fingers. The pressure on the fingers is intense. Getting the shoulders and chest into the pull is the trick, and it's not quite as hard as lifting a weight off the floor because of that. But the fingers are doing a lot of work. Mine had turned white after a few shots, even with a thick leather tab to protect them.
We did do volleys, because the public expected it and it was fun to do. But we could not hold for long - the bloke doing the shouting knew that he had only a couple of seconds between "draw" and "loose" or we'd be all over the place.
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...
In discussing why in LOTR Saruman's battle campaign is terrible:
"Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be."
I don't see it as a bad thing really. Can't say about all professions but in mine (software engineering) I've seen many professionals who has decades of experience and still do things poorly, take bad decisions and make outright incorrect statements.
There's nothing wrong with politely asking questions and consistently challenging the logic shared by professionals. Maybe you'll learn something from them, maybe you'll learn that they are incompetent. Either way, some useful information.
History is more similar to, say, databases or cryptography then software engineering in general in that there is base knowledge that is needed in order to have a productive conversation.
Take databases, a little bit of knowledge about some of the different guarantees that different systems have is required in order to have a productive conversation. When that's not there you get "mongodb is web scale" type discussions.
History is the same, actual historians (which don't have to be professional ones) have learned the basic pitfalls, they've learned what the biases of the sources. For this discussion, they know the things that were usually written down and so if there isn't evidence of it, it probably didn't happen (i.e. anything cool that rich people did in war) vs the things that weren't written down so who the heck knows about it (things poor people did).
Wrapping back around, in history, the out of the box ideas that outsides have, the historians have usually already heard them. Sometimes you do get interesting outside work from related fields, like experimental archeology and whatnot, but it's not coming from random people on the internet who obvious are thinking about this for the first time.
Or maybe they would have simply massacred any army so dumb as to try it.
Then you continue to ignore the other elephant - the soldiers and everyone else who won battles also record history avoiding the slavery/food route
And again, "massacre" doesn't mean 100%
https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-...
Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad.
The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops.
In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.
Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.
Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series.
(It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.)
> There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational.
That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.
Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D
And every community had their own...
WH 3 basically solved this issue by making MP battles be capture the points style - genuinely, it freed us from having to make house rules.
Interestingly, mounted archers don't do volleys in those games.
110lbs on a traditional bow? Sheesh.
First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false.
But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.
I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama.
Am I missing something here?
Bows have highly variable “lock time”. There is no trigger and you can’t reasonably get an army to draw at the same rate.
Reload times are fast enough that the fastest archer may be able to be ready to fire again before the last archer has completed their first shot.
In those circumstances, you would simply get orders to start and stop firing.
Why? If I have twenty archers, and tell them to be READY, AimAndFire will result in a volley that is still restricted a couple seconds of variance.
A couple seconds is not consequential in a battle that may be limited by the rise and fall of the sun.
Why wait for a specific command? It sounds like as an archer maybe you could try and hit a few far-off enemies whenever you wanted. There will be a critical period when most of the arrows will be released and be most effective, but the primary limiting factor is the archer's fatigue level. The article makes it clear there's not really a shortage of arrows.
So it's probably more like "people start talking, some arrows start flying, as the enemies get closer more arrows start flying". Which is pretty different from a coordinated volley.
It’s not perfectly reasonable at all. When the enemy is charging, what you want is maximum efficiency, which means a rate of shooting as high as possible, which means everyone shoots as soon as they are ready, which precludes synchronisation.
When the enemy is not charging and just manoeuvring, volleys are counter-productive because you just give them some time to hide behind their shields and move between volleys.
I can imagine maybe one time when such tactics could work, it’s in an ambush. But then it’s not large scale and it is quite difficult to pull it off, because you need to synchronise the archers without giving away their presence. And it’s quite far from the autor’s pet peeve, which was archers fighting like they had guns in big battles.
> upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
You cannot really do that without extensive drills that were not really a thing in pre-modern armies. There are too many variations in individual strength, not really standardised equipment, and different people behaving differently. Even if you take 10 people, you would not get synchronised arrows if you did that.
> Am I missing something here?
Why would they? What advantage would they gain doing so? Particularly when doing it more naturally is more efficient and effective (not going to repeat the story’s argument, but there are several).
Allow me to introduce the longbowmen whose skeletons adapted to being professional longbowmen.[0]
[0]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285885888_Architect...
Arrows are not more effective (e.g. armor penetration) in a volley, and the psychological effect is also less for volleys I would argue: you know a volley is coming, duck and cover, and afterwards it's clear, vs a continuous rain where you never know when an arrow is headed toward you specifically.
In this scenario, how big is this impenetrable (and undoubtedly heavy) shield you are lifting over your head with one arm while charging the enemy?
One example given is a Scutum (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutum) which weighs around 22 lbs- "light enough to be carried with one hand"
Or, you can protect your front while the arrows get dropped on your head. Decisions, decisions...
https://youtube.com/shorts/0AWfhAcFu_k?si=XokulP_9f3aFl2mu
However, if the enemy has an elevated position, that is literally what the romans did.
More importantly, people's silhouette from side-on is far bigger than their silhouette from the top down.
"army of professional archers would undoubtedly be experts in the same technique."
Because I do doubt that a lot. There is no one shooting in the air on a battlefield to distract.
Not. Even. Close.
But I just stated, that both exist and shoot at people with arrows.
(But both do get mixed up, as people involved often go to both events.)
And LARP is not scientific, but reenactment often has historians included. Also as part of research. I did not think that point was somehow unclear.
And there are still native tribes doing hunting and warfare with bows, that were and are studied. And some reenactment freaks are in a way better shape than their ancestors ever were, due to heavy training and better food.
Nobody is shooting in the air with an arrow to distract like you would a snowball. You shoot straight.
It's normally described as a professional is to a good amateur as a good amateur is to a 5 year old toddler.
The difference is truly profound. While I understand you may value your experience you might allow for some lack of direct personal experience.
This one - which was simple enough to find lukan. [You can just click context near the timestamp above you comment to see the comments made before]
It seems like your intuition of weapons and warfare comes from mass media, not historical evidence or practitioners.
Unfortunately, we have no mass media that reflects what a professional archer of yesteryear looked like because that profession died centuries ago and nobody has modified their skeleton to amuse us. However, we can tell from some of their bones they were somewhat lopsided as the arms were conditioned for purpose. For example:
"The men of the Towton population appear to have been engaged in a habitual activity that preferentially loaded the left humerus when compared with the right. This disparity is strongest in the distal humeral shaft. The loading pattern varies such that it creates significant differences between limbs in diaphyseal shape from the mid-distal to midproximal shaft." [0]
Despite what the weekend warriors and LARPers would like to believe, the historical professionals really were anatomically and physically better at the job.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285885888_Architect...
*And we have the bones to prove it!
> arrows at range move slowly enough to be actively blocked and dodged
It's just that this one theoretical advantage isn't enough to make volleys useful in practice, since volleys decrease the total number of arrows you can shoot.
However, it seems a lot more reasonable to suppose that archers were sometimes told to hold until a given strategic moment. In that case, you might see something resembling a volley when, say, an advancing enemy reaches a particular position and the archers begin loosing. But I don't think that's what the post was talking about.
Just waiting until someone says to start shooting isn’t a volley. It’s just holding fire.
But this leads us to the more important question: why wait until that last moment? If the enemy is within your range of fire, shooting at them is better than not shooting at them. You shoot at them all the way until they reach your own infantry, accumulating wounds and breaking up their ranks. Not shooting at them won't make the final arrow you loosen before they charge any more damaging.
Large scale coordination during pre-modern warfare was effectively impossible. The battlefields would often stretch for hundreds of meters or even a few kilometers and it was too chaotic to see anything once in the heat of battle. Generals could issue some local commands, especially if they were at the head of a cavalry charge, but only the officers and bannermen leading a small formation could exert any real control over their soldiers. A general signaling ranged combatants is just unrealistic.
Your second point is spot on. Infantry formations don’t generally charge the way we think of charges - they were rather slow, controlled forward movements with weapons and shields lowered. otherwise the first soldier to trip or take an arrow would take down the entire formation. No one ever really pitches battle with their infantry starting in range of the other army’s archers so there’s never really a clear opportunity for a volley.
Cavalry charges are a bit of a special case because they’re especially vulnerable to archers, but they’re also the group most capable of avoiding volley fire. Cavalry charges don’t run into soldiers, they train for coordinated feints so they can quickly change direction unlike infantry. When attacking cavalry, archers generally want to have random fire to increase the chances of bringing down a single horse, which often causes enough chaos to break the charge.
Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Edit: To quote the OP: "... as hard as it is to prove a negative, I will note that I have never seen a clear instance of volley fire with bows in an original text and so far as I can tell, no other military historians have either. And we have been looking."
> it still seems perfectly reasonable to me
Where's your evidence? "seems perfectly reasonable" leads to belief in witchcraft, the stars orbit the earth, leaches cure disease, the lack of germ theory, etc. That's why we modern humans require evidence.
Be very careful with that assumption. Brett Devereux (author of the blog) himself constantly points out that our historical sources are often very limited because they were written by the nobility who only wrote about their own social class, completely ignoring the majority of people actually involved in a military campaign or civic life. We know a lot more about the generals and cavalry than the foot soldiers, archers, or supply train.
During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics.
I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
But we do have so much written about musket volleys, and those were done by lower status soldiers as well. It is very strange that much was written about musket volleys but not archer volleys.
More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
One thing that I don't enjoy from COUP is he often demolishes ideas that approach strawman territory (is a barely coordinated order to start shooting a volley? or does it have to be something else), but I understand that from his perspective as a teacher, he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
The most obvious reason they practiced volley firing for muskets is the large amount of smoke they produce, once one person shoots the rest can't see where they would fire so you want everyone firing at once so they don't block each other.
So there is no reason to believe the practice evolved from anywhere, they is no world where they didn't volley fire with muskets that produce a lot of smoke since its the obvious thing to do.
After photography for sure, the Zulu used them extensively when beating the British.
Where do you think current students get their misinformation? A lot from TV?
While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all.
So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers!
Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist.
How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
I don't think this follows in practice, particularly since what's missing here is not names of archer captains but descriptions of the mechanics of volley firing (which may have been routine in certain circumstances, or not). Seems like attribution of the outcome to the excellence of the calvalry captains' flank attacks and valor of the Lord's retinue in holding the centre whilst merely noting that a grouping of archers were present without attributing anything to any decisions made by any individual archers at any level is pretty consistent with their low prestige (apart from Agincourt and a possibly apocryphal story about Harold Godwinson, archers don't seem to get much credit at all for being decisive, despite archery being important enough for peasants who wielded blunt instruments and blades in their day job to get compulsory longbow training).
Brett's argument that longbow volley firing would be difficult to time and probably not beneficial (especially compared with musket volleys) is compelling, but the argument that battle narratives don't really describe volleys, except in translations of words that may not have meant volley, isn't really in a context where archers rarely get much credit for anything .
* Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
If you have a feudal society based on personal relationships between the elites, you probably can't raise large bodies of heavy infantry. You don't have the people trained to fight in formation, you don't have the resources to equip them, and you don't have the capacity to organize them. Instead, you have the elites, who are often well trained and equipped. The elites have their personal retainers, who are pretty much the same. There can be some mercenaries if you can afford them. And then there are commoners who have to fight for various reasons but often lack both training and equipment.
Elephants used to be native to North Africa, until the Roman Empire drove the subspecies to extinction. Carthaginians, Romans, and some Macedonian kingdoms used them in war. Persians and other Macedonian kingdoms imported elephants from India. But none of them fielded more than tens of elephants at once, at which scale infantry was capable of countering them. Some contemporary Indian kingdoms found it practical to have hundreds of elephants on the battlefield, which was qualitatively a different situation.
And the reason that those societies favored cavalry is that they won battles.
It'd be very silly to favor something that doesn't work, and any attempts to do so probably wouldn't last long.
What are your political beliefs? Because this argument applies equally well to cavalry as it does to communism. Would you seriously claim that all stupid political beliefs are new?
Unless you take People's Republic of China about them being communist rather than capitalist at face value.
Here "willing" really means, "subjected to competition pressure such that societies that didn't support heavy cavalry units were for the most part militarily bullied into either annexation or standing up their own heavy cavalry support system."
That lasted until the technological realities of war changed (sufficiently-advanced firearms), at which point quite rapidly those societies stopped fielding heavy cavalry, which is another data point that this wasn't some kind of peacock display from nobles.
Mercenary pikemen ended the dominance of heavy cavalry in Europe before firearms became common. But that didn't make heavy cavalry obsolete, and neither did firearms. Cuirassiers had a prominent role in the Napoleonic Wars, and French cuirassiers actually wore their breastplates a few weeks into WW1.
The former supported cavalry because it won battles but the latter did so because it earned them prestige among their peers. It also helped them feel powerful when they rode into battle literally hoisted above the common foot solider, as if they were closer to the gods.
The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials.
edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.
Why not?
It’s not even true for all (or probably even most) of modern times. For instance the upper classes of Britain in WWI suffered much higher casualties than the lower classes.
Pretty soon it will mean "pre-drone".
(Too early to tell just how disruptive drones will be or even what is exactly a drone.)
even in modern wars it is far from true (if your country is getting overrun by enemy being rich is not enough to completely insulate you)
Not really scientific but you can see the exact same outcome in video games. After the initial synchronized volley, it becomes more of a constant barrage as each archer's differing rate of fire causes shots to become desynchronized.
Is it true? I have no idea, but it's hardly magical thinking. It's logical but could still be untrue for other reasons not assessed.
It seems extremely unlikely that a group of individuals would all make the exact same choice simultaneously without a prearranged signal for it. And I think the post itself makes a strong enough case for why that signal wouldn't be made.
If the enemy is out of range you might wait with an arrow knocked but not drawn - but if that is what they were doing the order would be to draw. there is no real point of such an order though - archers are themselves smart enough to estimate their own range (which as the other response pointed out was not the same for every archer), and thus make their own decisions. The only reason to hold fire until everyone was ready was if the combine fire was devistating enough - but there is every reason to think combined fire wouldn't be devistating.
You can of course have the arrow nocked for as long as you desire.
One of the stories about Agincourt (that the author didn't mention and I don't know if it's true) is that the French underestimated the range of the English archers and drew up inside their maximum range, so were getting shot before they were ready for it.
So "everyone shoots when the enemy gets into range" would still not be a volley as each archer judges for themself when the enemy is in range.
Also, not everyone can fire an arrow equally fast. And even if they did, when they're acquiring different targets (lest they all shoot the same person) they can take slightly different amounts of time to choose who to shoot.
Also, speed isn't really the limit for firing in the first place - if someone thinks there aren't any good options just yet, they might wait a second or two before there's a good option, and now they're way out of sync with anyone who saw a good option immediately.
Videogames are just terrible because their physics are wildly unrealistic, and the human factors are removed entirely.
But volleys imply a specific coordinated cadence. If you're just telling your troops to open fire, whether it be with bows or fire arms, that's not a volley.
> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy.
Yeah, pretty much nothing of that is actually reasonable.
First off, pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent. The only command that can be reliably given is "go", and even then, unless you're decently well drilled, that's still as likely to come from following what your neighbors are doing than being able to pay attention to your battlefield commander who might be a half-mile away. And archers are the least trained portion of the pre-modern battlefield!
Second, actually trying to hold everybody for a single coordinated volley seems incredibly counterproductive. The primary purpose of volley fire, as explained in the article, is to mitigate slow reload times. Archers have the opposite problem; they're going to exhaust their ammunition supply in a few minutes. Staggering the start time of the archer attack over, say, 30 seconds is actually a very significant percentage increase in the amount of time the attacking army is going to be harried by the archers.
> And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
Already by this point, that means you don't have a single, solid pulse of arrows, but rather a continuous stream that's going to take--at least--2 or 3 seconds before everyone has loosed their first arrow. And quite probably, your slowest archers are loosing their first arrows after the fastest archers have loosed their second arrow. It doesn't make sense to me to call that a "volley", since it's not going to look anything like what we would think of as a mass volley of arrows.
Given that you're already stretching the definition of "volley" quite hard to match what you think is happening, and given that there is absolutely no sign that anyone ever thought trying to achieve a more cohesive initial volley was worth striving for, I think it does more harm than good to argue that volley fire existed in some form with regards to regular bows.
What are those contexts?
I think you mean strategic level. Tactically, they were able to hold formation, rotate, do all kinds of maneuver. Just look at how many "NCOs" are in a Roman legion. But it was difficult to control the units strategically, e.g. taking several units and moving them across battlefield in an organized fashion.
An infantry charge starts at the last moment. At that point, the infantry formation has been in the effective bow range for a couple of minutes. It would be stupid to exhaust yourself by running a long distance over rough terrain carrying a heavy load before the fighting even starts. And shields tend to be large enough that the additional protection from them outweighs the gains from reaching the enemy faster.
People mostly don't go around listing off things they're not doing and have never done. Therefore, lack of mention that someone's not doing something isn't really evidence they are doing it, or at least is very weak.
What we see on TV is always one completely unprotected army, and one squad of arhcers.
But in the real world if squads of archers exist, then every single army would have a protection against them. The romans had the tortoise formation, I can't believe this was just forgotten for 1000 years.
The way a bow works. I could shoot much more arrows in my own rhytm, then coordinating with everyone in the unit and wasting energy holding the string longer than needed.
So I am pretty sure, there were some sorts of volley fire, when the archers start firing when the enemy gets in range. But once the shooting starts you would loose lots of kill power restricting your archers for very little gain.
I would ask the question the other way around: if you wouldn't learned of it in spectacular movies - why would anyone ever implement it?
With crossbows and musquets, where holding the fire does not cost energy - different story. But maybe try it for yourself: hold a war bow at full strength - you don't want to any longer than needed. So typical you pull and release.
We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...
I've seen bows with a third of that draw weight completely pass through a deer.
Obviously, certain factors have to be met -- distance being the most important and then shot placement.
Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?
* Infantry presses vs out-and-out melee
* Siege weapons as "artillery" during field battles as though it was WW1 levels of firepower
* Cavalry charges as battering rams / tanks
So, maybe you can train yourself to see all of those too. Then you'll enjoy nothing :D
Nah, it's everything. You see every specialist community complaining about it.
Scenes are depicted in English instead of the native language of the setting for the benefit of the audience (and budget), and in modern English it's perfectly okay to use "fire" as a translation for the act of loosing a bow, even if "loose" is more commonly used in archery.
If it were some science fiction setting with a weapon very unlike any real historical weapons then sure, the particular etymology of the English word wouldn’t be very relevant.
If the actors were actually speaking Shakespearean English then sure, it would be wrong for them to say "fire"/"fyr", but if they did that then you wouldn't understand half of what they're saying.
I'm sure there's a few actual examples of this though, for scenes depicting battles in England after 1800 or so that use bows. I would still say it's debatable whether you could consider this truly modern English but it's close enough.
If the French-speaking English commanders at Agincourt told their archer captains to "Laissez-y" instead of "Fire!", what difference does that make?
(For context, King Henry V of Agincourt fame is considered to probably have been the first English monarch who spoke English as a mother tongue, and may have been the first who was remotely proficient in it.)
Stuff like: did opposing infantry lines actually stay in contact for long periods at a time or did they clash for a couple of brief minutes at a time and then mutually retreat a few paces to recover stamina?
I don't have time to find a link now but if you google it you'll see.
(Incidentally, it's also in the movie 300)
If you don't have it, you could try to do the math yourself. Munroe assumes that 1) an arrow intercepts 40 cm² of sunlight, 2) an archer looses 8 to 10 arrows a minute and 3) each arrow spends an average of three seconds in flight. You could adjust those numbers to taste, but I would not expect the conclusion to change.
I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.
https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...