Main Discussion Area > English Warbow
How or why did the English become a bow culture?
Len:
The English army was in many ways ahead of its time compared to the French of that time who still relied on the feudral system(not very proffessional at all ) whereas the English employed contracted soldiers to make up the bulk of their armies. The french actually start to have some success against the English when they started using more proffessionaly raised and trained troops rather then local militias grouped together under the command of the local knight.
As to the steppes people who used the bow it seems to me to have been more of a harrasing or skirmishing tactic rather then the massed artillary style of the English which would probably require more arrows per archer then what the horse archers would have used in a battle.
Rod:
The longbow has been the common type across North Western Europe since the neolithic.
What distinguishes the English use of the longbow is the way in which it was employed to counter numerically superior forces.
Forget all this nonsense about Welsh bows being the precursor of the English warbow, that's just mindless recycling of uninformed opinion from an earler "authority".
War bow draw weights have developed in all warbow cultures to keep pace with defensive developments. The result is that cavalry bows came to be typically in the 90lb to 120lb range and infantry bows to a median of around 120lb to 150lb.
Before dedicated war bow development, a heavy hunting bow would have sufficed in war, but the race to achieve greater range and penetration with heavier arrows leads to escalation in draw weight.
Part of the fame of the English bow derives from the fact that the myth of the longbow has since Tudor times been accepted as an integral part in the development of the myth of Englishness.
Given that this process carried through the growth and fall of Empire, starting life as a political tool when a predominantly Norman ruling minority had the good fortune to have left in place a considerable amount of Anglo Saxon social infrastructure, which gave later Kings an armed social class in serjeanty that functioned coherently on the battlefield.
More coherently, for some time, than those who had the misfortune to attack them, since the key development was the use of massed archery in a defensive position against greater numbers that were often mismanaged with a less coherent chain of command.
Other warbow cultures (China, Korea, Japan, Mamluks, Scythians, Mongols etc) have their own variations on this theme.
Rod.
Allen:
I'm new to the site and just discovered this very interesting thread.
A question that I've wondered about for some time is did the availability of reliable bow string material have any impact on the use of the English long bows in war?
After all, those two sticks are a lot more effective with a string than without. :D
thanks,
Allen
Len:
Rod the term myth implies no basis on fact , don't you mean something more like aura or reputation ?
SimonUK:
Allen
A well known bowyer in the UK , Pip Bickerstaffe has a theory that the upper limit on draw weight was dependent on the strength of the string. He thinks that the upper limit had to be about 100 lbs because a thicker and stronger string wouldn't fit inside the nock of the arrow. A lot of people dispute this and say that the draw weight had to be higher than that, given the dimensions of the bows found on the Mary Rose ship.
I think his theory is still important. These days we have strings made from modern materials and we forget how important the quality of string must have been in the middle ages.
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