Sorry, Strongbow, I'm just not interested enough to go read it.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, and have only passingly watched this argument over the years. After having heard all the opinions weighed in, regardless of how powerful medieval bows may have been there just hasn't been presented many cites of cases showing how effective they were against armoured men. In fact, there are notable exceptions where armoured men were killed by projectiles that struck where there armour was removed.
Griffin de Stockport wrote: I've been shooting personally for about 1 1/2 years now and I can put about 7 in the colours over 30 seconds on a good day. I can only imagine what it would be like to have been a period English archer who's trained for 10 or more years before ending up on a battlefield... 20+ arrows a minute on a heavier bow wouldn't be that hard to do in my opinion.
GdS
I think that's probably not a realistic number. In the new book you mentioned ("The Great Warbow"), they have an experienced heavy bow shooter, Simon Stanley. He routinely shoots 150-175 lb bows, and has shot up to 190 lbs(!). The tremendous stresses you place on your body shooting such a bow just don't allow the incredible rapid-shooting technics used by the best SCA shooters. His feeling was that shooting 10+ a minute was possible, but that he was more comfortable with 6 a minute with the heavier bows. Guessing that medieval archers were a bit more experienced that he, 12 a minute seems reasonable, but certainly not 20+. Just my opinion, of course.
That very may well be the book that the KAM is reading here. I haven't had a chance to go through it at all yet, other than a few quick glances at it one night. He was quite excited about it and all the newer tests they've been doing on period archery. I'm still curious how a real "battle condition" warrior would be though, with the extra adrenaline (sp) coursing through their body adding to their power. I know that when I'm pulling a bow at my limit, there's no way I'll hold the draw for more than 5 seconds. I fully admit to having no experience with heavier bows, so I'll defer to the experts on this one but my gut says its higher (10 to 12) rather than lower for a rate of fire. Either way, put a few thousand archers out there and let them fire 10 a minute... that's still a rain of death for anything not covered by plate - so in otherwords, most of the army.
Steve -SoFC- wrote:Sorry, Strongbow, I'm just not interested enough to go read it.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, and have only passingly watched this argument over the years. After having heard all the opinions weighed in, regardless of how powerful medieval bows may have been there just hasn't been presented many cites of cases showing how effective they were against armoured men. In fact, there are notable exceptions where armoured men were killed by projectiles that struck where there armour was removed.
Steve
You are probably right Steve. Even the tests in the book show that iron armour of 2 mm thick, properly padded takes about 150 joules to penetrate. That's probably about right for torso armour, and the head would be protected better. It seems unlikely many arrows would hit with that kind of energy. However, limbs would be thinner armour, and then there are the gaps... They estimate that steel armour would take about twice as much energy, making it virtually invulnerable to arrows, provided coverage is nearly complete.
They further acknowledge that virtually no scientific tests of sufficient quality have been done with mail.
However, the new research indicating the significantly higher poundage of the warbow than previously thought is certainly enough to give pause.
But as it has been pointed out before in this thread, the archers must have been at least in part effective or they would not have been kept around for as long at they were. If we assume men of quality were for the most part invulernable except by luck (good or bad), then the effects must have been in other areas--the killing of mounts, men at arms, camp followers, and with the force listed above, probably caused more than one knight to think twice before getting too close.
OK, cool. Keep in mind that that is for a 3.8 ounce arrow. A true "quarter-pounder" would go a little slower (probably in the neighborhood of 51 m/s) and light arrows a lot faster. However, lighter arrows are less efficient at absorbing all the energy from a big bow, and hold their energy less well. As a rough guide, the lighter arrows (1 oz) lost about 28% of their energy at a range of 200 yards, while the heavier arrows (3 oz+) lost less than 20%. The lighter arrows flew further, but the big arrows hit hardewr at all the ranges they can reach. The light arrows flew to about 350 yards, and the heavy arrows about 250. Talk about reaching out and touching someone!
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