Mail Call: Archery claim?

[Josh W]

BF, I think you need the latest edition of Robert Hardy's "Longbow". Good luck with your obstinate Father in Law...

[lorenzo2]

All, the results ofthe RA testing are available in chapter 9 of Williams The Knight and the Blast Furnace. As Chef states they are definitive. !5th cent plate offers excellent, but not total protection against longbow arrows. Williams presents such a mountain of evidence that no other conclusion is technically supportable. I got the book on interlibrary loan and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the actual performance of armour against projectiles.

[Marshal]

Sure, if you accept Richard's very low rate of fire and causualty-producing effect as the norm-- other folks here have stated that the ROF for a decent bowman is 12+ arrows per minute. If each bowman is supplied with only 36 arrows apiece (well within the logistic ability of a pre-mech army to maintain), that can put the caualties-per-minute up to 600 men per minute, or nearly 2000 casualties before their ammo is expended. If you're charging the position with 8000 men (a formidible force by medieval standards), you've done 25% of the attackers, which usually is enough to break the attack as a cohesive blow. If the survivors come into contact with the archers in drips and drabbles, they get ganged up on my crowds of guys with mallets, etc, a'la Agincourt.

I think Richard may have hit the nail on the head.

Other necessary assumptions: All archers firing at once, no flights miss or partially miss the oncoming mass of soldiery, no arrows interfere with each other, and again, every wound inflicted removes a man from the fight.

Also, though it may seem nitpicking, rounding error can significantly affect results. 1800 is closer to 22% than 25...

Though I agree with you both on the overall effect, and the view that this, along with the psychological effect, was probably how the longbow bombardment worked. I'm just not sure it worked to this degree.

[mrks]

chef, bob and others...

thanks for the information. this has been a very interesting read.

[Russ Mitchell]

I remain greatly surprised that the shots-per-minute is considered so low for longbowmen... do you all think this is actually well-estimated?

[Hugo T.]

It seems to be the consensus that an archer was expected to be able to fire one arrow every 5-6 seconds, and thus have a rate of fire between 10-12 arrows a minute.

I'm confused about your comment: do you consider this to be high or low?

Hugo

[Russ Mitchell]

VERY low... I have seen, for firing into a close area rather than precise aiming, almost precisely an arrow per second fired in Hungary... and for those in practice, thirty or forty doesn't seem difficult -- almost every decent horse-archer I've seen can totally empty his quiver inside a minute, even for the larger quivers.

Now, maybe that has to do with the difference in how the archery equipment is rigged... maybe the arrows are simply easier to get at... but 12 per minute.... just seems terribly slow.

[Marshal]

Supposedly the best longbowmen could keep three arrows in the air at the same time. Not sure what this would work out to in per-minute terms but it does sound very fast.

Somewhere I saw a video of a Japanese archer firing just about as fast as Russ says. He just seemed to slap the quiver, then the arrow was on the string and away...