Posts: 226 Location: Hobart, Australia
Thu 05 Apr, 2007 5:10 pm
Why is archery such a problematic topic?
Archery didn't stop any of the foot advances at
Agincourt or even look like stopping any of them. The attack of the first French battle certainly had to endure over 100,000 arrows as it advanced, probably far more. Therefore we must conclude that either the English couldn't consistently hit man-sized targets OR that their armour was superbly resistant, OR (as my research leads me to believe) a bit of both. If longbowmen could consistently hit individual men and they could consistently pierce plate armour then logically the events of Agincourt could not have happened the way they did. The first French battle could not have struck the English line and thrown it back a spear's length because most of them would have been filled with arrows long before then.
I think that given the characteristics of the longbow and accounts of various battles, we can conclude that armour was a larger factor than accuracy. That is not to say that accuracy with a longbow was anything like some of the fanciful things I've read of men deliberately targeting visor slits at 200 yards. I've seen longbows being shot, at times by pretty serious archers, and they're nowhere near as accurate as crossbows and not even in the same ballpark as even the most primitive guns. But if you put 100,000 shots into a packed mass of men, lots of those shots will hit.
Bishop Ruthven who was at Flodden wrote ten days later that the Scots knights fronting the Schiltron were so well armoured that not one was killed by archery, so certainly armour worked. I find the claims in the face of such eyewitness accounts that armour didn't work, to be too ludicrous to entertain. However, if we compare Flodden with the results of battles like Falkirk, Halidon Hill and Nevilles Cross we can see a very big difference. At these battles the Scots schiltrons were slaughtered by archery. Lots of armour =low casualties from archery, little armour = high casualties from archery. It's that simple. What stopped the schiltrons from rolling over the archers regardless? The fact that the archers were also effective light infantry and most importantly that they were backed by men at arms who could function as extremely solid heavy infantry or as mounted shock troops. At Falkirk the English men at arms attacked the schiltrons with significant loss. However, their presence forced the Scots to stand under the subsequent English arrow storm and when the schiltrons were disorganised they were easy pickings for the cavalry. It is this combined arms that was critical to the English successes. The difference in the amount of armour the Scots and the French had meant the difference between one-sided victories where the men-at-arms acted essentially as a threat, a coup de grace and pursuit (assuming good use of combined arms - obviously this wasn't present at Bannockburn) and hard fought slogging matches between masses of dismounted men-at-arms (the basic model for most Wars of the Roses battles).
At Bannockburn the English used amateurish tactics. Their only sniff of success was when a unit of archers moved around the Scots left flank and shot into a Scots schiltron. These archers were ridden over by the relatively small contingent of Scots knights. Unsupported archers couldn't break charges by heavily armoured men and may not have been able to break charges by lightly armoured men, but unless the commander dropped the ball, the archers were never unsupported.
Anyone familiar with Napoleonic warfare will note that English archers played the role that field artillery played in those wars. The archers softened up and disorganised targets for attack but were pretty helpless against infantry or cavalry. Then, as the English had found earlier, the key to success was combined arms, using each arm to its best advantage and in support of the others. Napoleon loved artillery and loved to mass it against single targets, but never in his wildest dreams did he consider it to able to stand alone on the battlefield. In the same way an army of unsupported archers would have been almost useless.
Cheers
Stephen