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D. S. Smith wrote:
Guy Bayes wrote:

It's a good conversation though since anyone getting into archery is going to have to choose between the two at some point.



And there might even be a third choice. I've been watching a lot of videos done by the British guy on performance-archery.tv, and have been really impressed. The guy sure seems to know his stuff. When you see a tricked out recurve with sights and stabilizer, maybe you could sort of have the best of both worlds; a "traditional" bow feel, with accuracy closer to the good compounds. But those Olympic style recurves seem to be firing at very low pull weights, like in the 20-35# range. In fact the highest rate limbs I could find on Hoyt's website for Olympic style bows was 50#. I know 50 is nothing to sneer at in a modern bow, but even hunting recurves regularly go to 70#.


Or you could be buying into the worst... Enough high tech to piss of the traditionalists (I know a few that sneer at even modern glue, but most I've known settle around "bow and arrows need to be wood and you're shooting without aids" which I think is pretty fair) but "primitive" enough to get scorned by "modern" archers. It'd be a lot of bs all around though.

Still, 20-35#'s? That's really low. My five year old shoots a 15#, and I'd feel like I was pulling a rubber band...
I shoot a 60 lb Sammick Sage (modern recurve) right off the shelf with no sights or additions. I also shoot a 100 lb @31" traditional English longbow (hickory Ipe tri-lam). The Sage is definitely flatter shootingbow (at least with arrows at 400 gr or less), but the longbow is more readily accurate. The 62" recurve is very persnickity with regards to form and release, the 76" longbow far less so. I would also point out that the 675 gr Ipe arrows I have made for the longbow are obviously an improvement over the 400 gr poplar arrows I had been shooting originally. It appears to shoot flatter with the heavy arrows and handshock is greatly reduced.
That 100 pounder has got to be a beast, Kevin! I decided that I want to try shooting with sights (instinctive shooting is not for me), so I just bought an Olympic style recurve. 40lb limbs (which believe it or not are on the heavy end of pull weights for olympic style shooting), with a 25" riser and overall height of 66". Being that tall a recurve, it should be a sweet shooter, I get it next week.
100 lbs
The hundred pounder is actually getting easier and easier, when I first stepped up to it from my 81 pounder I was exhausted after shooting it and had sore muscles between my shoulder blades and up the back of my neck for the first week. Now I shoot it a couple hundred times a day and feel fine. Pretty soon ill probably start work on a higher draw weight, but I really don't think I'll ever go above 120-130 lbs. unless I decide to out hunting knights that's probably sufficient (and the one person on earth today who pulls 200 lbs plus damaged his shoulder permanently using heavy bows, I figure you have to growup doing it).
Curious, how did you work your way up to the 100lb bow? Any tricks?
Guy Bayes wrote:
Curious, how did you work your way up to the 100lb bow? Any tricks?


Getting up to 100lb is relatively easy for most able-bodied men. The key is technique - brute force alone will not suffice, and will inevitably lead to serious injury.

Get yourself a bow that can draw to at least 32". Work on getting your draw-length up, first. This will always give you more performance, by increasing the power-stroke of the bow. There is no reason to have any length of arrow protruding from the front of the bow - this is 'dead weight' and contributes nothing to the shot. Some like to have the extra arrow length as a safety measure, but I would suggest that, if you've shot hundreds of arrows and still don't know your draw length you need to go back and work on your technique! :)

There's a huge contingent of people with suggestions for archery-related strength exercises (Google is your friend, here!) but in my experience the traditional method of actually shooting is still the best way to build up muscle and (much more importantly) tendon strength.

Beyond 100lb progress gets much slower. We recommend, wherever possibly, to go up in increments of 5lb draw-weight. The increment between 100 and 105lb is much easier than 120 to 125lb! When you go up in bow weight your technique will inevitably suffer a little and it will take a good few months to get back 'on top' of the new bow. Too many people believe that 'full-draw' equals 'mastery' - that is, once they can haul a bow back to full draw it's time for a heavier bow. Once again, this is a false economy and will typically lead to unnecessary injury.

Personally, I'm less interested in bow-weight and more in bow performance. I recommend setting yourself a target distance you want to achieve - for example: consistently shooting 240 yards with an EWBS Livery Arrow. This will dictate a minimum bow weight (about 120lb with a high performance bow; about 130 with a less-performant bow). Keep shooting to you've rung the absolute most out of your bow; only going up in bow weight when you cannot achieve any more from it. Or, even better, seeking out a better performing bow (better tiller or profile, better wood) of the same weight.

A typical, reasonably strong, man should be able to work up to a 130 - 140lb bow in time (I would say about 5 - 7 years). Beyond that weight biodynamics start to come into play - you really have to be a particular build, shape and strength to progress beyond this point. Just like most other athletic activities not everyone can be top flight - you must have a genetic advantage (which I don't). Most people I know who don't have the correct physique, or who have gone too far too fast, have suffered serious injuries, possibly as a consequence.

Barring medical conditions, the biggest limiting factor in shooting heavy bows is in the mind: people just don't believe they can do it. And that's probably the most difficult limitation to overcome.


Glennan
The English Warbow Society
The short answer....
Guy Bayes wrote:
Curious, how did you work your way up to the 100lb bow? Any tricks?


Practice :) there are no tricks.

I shoot hundreds of times a day.
I'm also 6'2" tall and was a college linebacker, so the step up to higher and higher draws is probably easier for me than it would be for many people. Right now I can shoot 100 lbs over and over without tiring, even in the heat and humidity of Eastern NC summer.
If you have shoulder issues or honestly back or neck issues I'd guess high draws are a bad idea. I felt the strain far more across my upper back than in my arms.
Wow. Glennan and Kevin, great replies. That is just very impressive. In the little bit of reading I've been doing on Olympic style archery, they suggest a new average size adult male start at between 18 and 24 pound draw weights. Of course the goal is probably very different. Where the 100lb longbows are probably going for a distance goal, the Olympic style recurve shooters are going for much shorter range, and incredibly tight accuracy. As I said in my earlier post, 40 pounds is on the very upper end of draw weight they are using in competition, and considered "overbowed" for beginners.

My own personal goal is to have excellent form and results with a 70 pound draw weight. If I can get there comfortably I'll be happy. 80 would be nice but I'm more concerned with really mastering 70.
D. S. Smith wrote:
In the little bit of reading I've been doing on Olympic style archery, they suggest a new average size adult male start at between 18 and 24 pound draw weights. Of course the goal is probably very different. Where the 100lb longbows are probably going for a distance goal, the Olympic style recurve shooters are going for much shorter range, and incredibly tight accuracy.


Target archery, hunting archery, and military archery are different things, and optimum bows for each are different.

IMO, 100lb (and up) warbows are going for high energy for armour penetration, not range. We have plenty of examples where range and accuracy are sacrificed for extra energy, so extra energy is a Good Thing in a warbow, at least when the enemy is likely to be armoured.
Power AND range
I don't believe that the high draw English longbows were not used against armor at range. Nothing I've ever seen leads me to believe the archers waited for armored enemies to get close before commencing to volley. Direct penetration against armor was obviously more likely when arrows were traveling at a relatively flat trajectory and so had more force, but the heavy arrows traveling in high plunging arcs in large numbers would find chinks in the armor of both the mounted knights and their horses quite often. Advancing levies in boiled leather would have been especially vulnerable. The long needle bodkins and 1000-1500 grain total weight arrows would bring man and beast down when dropping from the sky by the thousands.
If your bow gives you range, you'll use that range, at least on unarmoured or lightly armoured targets - which often includes horses, even when the men are armoured. Those who used long-ranged high draw weight bows used them at long range (Koreans expected to shoot at about 160m). They also used them at short range. Both work when you have the option. But we have many examples of short-ranged high draw weight bows - they were prepared to abandon long range (and often some accuracy), but not energy (they traded range for cheaper and more reliable bows).

What are the relative values of long range and high energy? Range is really useful when you are exchanging arrows with enemy archers/crossbowmen/slingers/gunners at long range. Also for shooting at stationary enemy formations, especially when enemy missile-armed soldiers or cavalry force you to keep to a safe distance. Less so when facing a charging enemy. How many arrows can you get off before they reach you? If you're not facing armour, you don't need high energy. The answer is that both are good. That's the point of carrying (and using) flight arrows as well as regular arrows - more range, but less energy.

Going to high draw weights doesn't come for free. It means that you have a smaller pool of archers to draw on for recruits, and their performance will degrade faster in the field when inadequately fed and rested. If you go to, say, 105lb bows instead of 70lb, you get a 50% increase in energy. You do not (typically) get a 50% increase in range. You can even find you get almost no improvement in range. From Soar, "Secrets...", going from 70lb to 105lb gives you about 20 more yards, from 180 to 200, with the weaker bows using the "standard arrow" (whereas in Real Life, you will use lighter arrows for the lower-draw weight bows).

Consider the use of longer draw lengths to increase energy - you sacrifice accuracy, and get even less improvement in range (since the arrow needs to be longer, and therefore heavier). Done by the English, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese. Energy is valuable.

Whether such bows work against armour at long range is not clear. Certainly not as well as at short range, and their anti-armour performance was not that great at short range (just considering the casualty counts in the famous English "longbow victories", or the effectiveness of archery at Flodden). So long-range shooting would depend on hitting where armour is not. At long range, there will be much luck in this. At short range, the archer can aim where armour is not.
Effectiveness against armor? If they stop coming it works
I would question your belief that long range archery wasn't very effective against armored opponents. If they stopped coming at you and had to retire from the field then you were effective.

As for increased draw length being a losing battle in gaining range, I'd also disagree. Yes the arrow gains weight as it is lengthened, but what you're adding is 2-3" of narrow (3/8"-1/2") WOOD not iron. A slightly lighter head and a tapered shaft and the flight arrow can weigh less than the heavy bodkin.

Massed charges against fixed positions of stationary English archers in their prepared positions seem to have been historically a bad idea. A longbowman with 2-3 dozen arrows stuck in the dirt before him will send them all at a charging formation of armored cavalry in the time it takes the heavily laden horses to cover the 300 yard kill zone. Do the math on how many arrows are coming at you if there are 200 archers. Imagine what happens to a close formation in that charge if a horse in the lead rank goes down....

The Mongol archers were absolute terrors from horseback and the Asiatic bow was THE weapon of Attila's horde....

I think you're rather heavily discounting the value and effectiveness of archers in ancient battles.
As said above, just look at the casualty counts in the famous English "longbow victories", or the effectiveness of archery at Flodden. Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt: less than one armoured soldier killed per archer (even if archers killed all the enemy armoured dead). These are the 100YW battles where English archery was considered the most effective. Flodden: basically ineffective. At Flodden, archery wasn't very effective even at short range.

Massed charges against English longbowmen in prepared positions were ineffective. Massed charges against English longbowmen caught without prepared positions were very effective. It doesn't seem to be archery alone that protected them. I think your assumption that an archer can shoot 24-36 arrows at charging cavalry before they arrive is big overestimate. 300 yards is also an overestimate. For range of 240 yards, cavalry closing at 10 yards/second, that's 24 seconds, and 4 arrows. From historical performance in battle, where fewer than 5% of arrows kill or wound, that's less than a 20% chance of wounding or killing anybody. As a longbowman in that situation, you really want that prepared position - stakes and men-at-arms to protect you. If you could stop charges by archery alone, why would it be needed? In practice, it was needed.

Archers were clearly effective enough for commanders to want them in battle. But they weren't supermen, and they weren't capable of going through good armour as if it was butter. The battles mentioned above, and Chinese battles, and Korean battles, and Japanese battles all support the ability of armour to resist arrows. Modern testing of penetration by arrows supports this too. It takes about 70J of energy to pierce 1mm or iron, and about 200J to pierce 2mm (see Williams, The Knight and the Blast Furnace). Considering that breastplates tended to be 2-3mm, and an archer at point blank range might expect to deliver about 150J, or for very, very high draw weights, 200J, how effective can they expect to be? Even mail will require over 100J to defeat. Easy to see why the soldiers wearing such armour often didn't bother with shields. See stuff on penetration at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#...enetration ; the caveats in the last 2 paragraphs of that section matter! Even if archers can't defeat the best armour, they aren't useless. Which, in turn, means that you cannot conclude that archers could defeat the best armour just because they were considered useful on the battlefield.

As for long draw lengths, look at the actual ranges achieved by very long draw length military archers (Manchu and Japanese, with the normal draw being to beside the rear shoulder, which can mean draw lengths of over 36"). Look at what Korean archers (also usually using long draw lengths, perhaps about 32-34") used to achieve longer ranges - short arrows and arrow guides (similar to Turkish practice, but even shorter and lighter arrows). Draw further, and not only does the arrow need to be longer, it needs to be thicker too, to maintain proper stiffness, and loses more energy to drag. You can expect some improvement in range, but the increase in range will be much lower than the increase in energy.

Archers were certainly valuable in battle, but it wasn't because they could shoot through armour at will, and mow down men-at-arms. Plenty of unarmoured, or less armoured enemy on the typical battlefield. Horses are nice large and often unarmoured targets. And you can hope to pierce armour at short range.
You still underestimate
An arrow striking g dead on in the breast plate of a man in VERY high quality plate needs that much energy. Striking his visor? Where his pauladron meets his chest piece? At any of the joints? At almost any portion of his mount?

By prepared positions I meant with spikes set and arrow out if the bags and stuck in the dirt (much faster shooting that way).

As for your statements of rate of fire....you're clearly not an archer. I'm both an archer and a horseman. Horses laden with armor and armored riders won't be covering 300 hundred yards at that rate, certainly not over that entire distance and be effective at the end. As for your assumption about the range...welcome to archery :) you start your charge at 300 yards and the arrows start to fly at high angles....by the time you reach the area where the first flight is landing the third flight is on its way. With a little practice you can actually make two arrows hit the same spot at the same time at around 175 yards (one high angle and one low angle). If you don't think that can be done, come shoot with me. Many of the "tests" of the rate of fire I've seen for longbows have been questionable at best.

You keep saying archers were ineffective at Flodden...in some accounts they were and in others they are claimed to have been less so. Most contemporary accounts seem to hold they were effective. As for your rate of casualties. If each archer killed one armored opponent n each of those battles the entire enemy force of knights would have to have been wiped out. I think my evaluation of effectiveness (they stopped em, right?) makes more sense. No weapon is deemed ineffective based on "it didn't kill them ALL".
Re: You still underestimate
Kevin Smith wrote:
An arrow striking g dead on in the breast plate of a man in VERY high quality plate needs that much energy.


No. See Williams, The Knight and the Blast Furnace, chapter 9.4. VERY high quality plate would need about 300J to be defeated if at the thinner end of breastplates, i.e., about 2mm, while a thicker one (3mm) would need 450-500J, which no longbow archer will deliver.

Kevin Smith wrote:

Striking his visor? Where his pauladron meets his chest piece? At any of the joints? At almost any portion of his mount?


Limb armour will be thinner. Joints will often be stronger, since there will be multiple layers. Visors tended to be quite thick. Kings, would-be kings, and future kings tended to get their facial arrow wounds when their visors were lifted.

Archers encourage one to leave the horses behind. Just one of the ways that archers can contribute to victory without killing.

Kevin Smith wrote:

As for your statements of rate of fire....you're clearly not an archer.


I'm not a fast archer, but I'm willing to believe what Soar writes about achievable rates of fire with high draw weight longbows. (Charging speed numbers are also from Soar.)

Kevin Smith wrote:

You keep saying archers were ineffective at Flodden...in some accounts they were and in others they are claimed to have been less so. Most contemporary accounts seem to hold they were effective.


Which accounts? How many do we have? Tuke (of the official report) wrote that it was ineffective (also the artillery). What accounts say it was effective?

Kevin Smith wrote:

As for your rate of casualties. If each archer killed one armored opponent n each of those battles the entire enemy force of knights would have to have been wiped out. I think my evaluation of effectiveness (they stopped em, right?) makes more sense. No weapon is deemed ineffective based on "it didn't kill them ALL".


You will find that there were more enemy soldiers at those battles than there were English archers; they could have killed one each and left plenty to keep the English men-at-arms busy. Since the French were not wiped out, the archers still had targets, as long as they still had arrows.

Estimate how many arrows were shot at those battles, and compare with enemy dead and wounded. Not all were killed by archers; the men-at-arms fought too, and fought hard. The archers fought hand-to-hand too; they didn't stop the charge at Agincourt - it reached them and they fought hand-to-hand. But you can estimate an upper limit for how likely an arrow was to kill or wound. This is for battles that were "longbow victories".
The only test that uses a fairly decent replica of both bow and armour was done by the Defense Academy at the Royal Armouries testing range. Mark Stretton was the archer and he showed pretty conclusively that, even at 10 meters against poor quality metal, it is very difficult to shoot a heavy warbow through plate armour far enough to incapacitate the wearer.

http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.p...ublication

The data from this test seems consistent with the data from Williams' book. Nobody disputes that the longbow was an effective weapon. The contention is that its effectveness had nothing to do with its ability to punch through armour.
The ability to force those not wearing arrow-resistant armour to avoid (protected) formations of archers (or to kill/wound them if they don't) is worthwhile.

It isn't so relevant to English usage of longbows, since the English had trouble getting enough capable archers, but the survival of bows in Asian armies long after they adopted firearms shows that they have use outside defeating armour. In China, we have parallel use of bows and firearms for over 600 years before modern firearms make archery obsolete. Firearms might even have helped bows maintain a place on the battlefield - if guns are there to take out the most armoured targets, then bows can do what they are best at. This might have contributed to what looks like a drop in draw weights of Qing dynasty military bows.
It's my understanding that 80-100lbs was consider the baseline for horse archery in eighteenth-century Qing China. If that's a decline, it's not much of one. The same period has elite archers competing so fiercely to draw the heaviest bows that one apparently managed 240lbs at a contest in 1728. The emperor issued a proclamation advising folks to take it easy and avoid using drugs intended to increase performance because of the danger. Garrison tests do show many Qing troops unable to successfully employ heavy bows, but I don't know of any earlier records to compare that to. See The Manchu Way by Mark C. Elliott as a reference.

As far as arrow fatalities go, it's not terribly surprising that bows didn't kill too many men-at-arms dressed from head to toe in iron or steel. Nor it is surprising that English shafts failed against Scottish pikemen in plate armor. However, in other battles both in Scotland, England, and the Iberian Peninsula, English archers inflicted great damage to more lightly armed troops. The the common casualties figures for Towton 1461 may well be inflated and numerous perished in hand-to-hand fighting, arrows still likely killed many - probably into the thousands.
Timo Nieminen wrote:
The ability to force those not wearing arrow-resistant armour to avoid (protected) formations of archers (or to kill/wound them if they don't) is worthwhile.

It isn't so relevant to English usage of longbows, since the English had trouble getting enough capable archers, but the survival of bows in Asian armies long after they adopted firearms shows that they have use outside defeating armour. In China, we have parallel use of bows and firearms for over 600 years before modern firearms make archery obsolete. Firearms might even have helped bows maintain a place on the battlefield - if guns are there to take out the most armoured targets, then bows can do what they are best at. This might have contributed to what looks like a drop in draw weights of Qing dynasty military bows.

Didn't English armies at some points have as high as 80% archers?
Kevin Smith wrote:
Didn't English armies at some points have as high as 80% archers?


Or more, at times. But the most archers they seem to have had at any time appears to be under 10,000. (Any reliable figures above this? Over 5,000 is easy to find, but I haven't seen over 10,000.) Plenty of laws forcing archery practice, and banning activities seen as competing with archery practice. Not something you need to do if you have enough archers. In the end, the transition from archery to handguns was very rapid in England.

The Chinese, OTOH, might have at any time 300,000 archers in their armies, or more, perhaps with a Ming peak of 600,000 to 900,000 archers. The couldn't put them all in one battle - how many soldiers they could deploy in any particular campaign was limited by logistics, not by the number of available soldiers. They drew on a much larger population base, about 300 million vs 3 million, so if all else was the same, they might be able to expect to have close to 1,000,000 archers available. The military examination system encouraged archery (the exams were archery-dominated), so a carrot was provided, rather than Tudor-style legal sticks.

Anyway, no shortage of archers for the Chinese, and no need to use musketeers instead of archers because they couldn't get enough archers. They did use musketeers (and pre-musket handgunners before they had muskets), but not strictly as archer-replacements. After the early Qing modernisation of the army, the infantry were mostly spearmen and musketeers (and artillerymen), so many (most?) archers were cavalry.
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