[Neil Gagel]

So I was just rereading the above referenced book, and I came across a rather interesting assertion made by Mr. Newark.

In reference to the battles of Poitiers and Crecy he writes:

"These English victories have long been ascribed to the power of their archers. Over the centuries, the English longbowman has been heroised. Through association with these triumphs, his bow has been regarded as the supreme missile weapon of the Middle Ages. In reality, the so-called English longbow was a very ordinary weapon of no great power, considerably inferior to other contemporary continental bows of a more sophisticated design as well as the much maligned crossbow.

To begin with, the word 'longbow' did not exist in medieval vocabulary, it was simply a bow. What is today identified as a 'longbow' is based in design upon the Victorian sporting bow which received its legendary name from manufacturers who saw it as a good selling point. The typical 14th Century English bow, as far as it can be reconstructed, was a simple, thick, often inefficient wooden weapon. Bow design on the continent was far more sophisticated. Lighter, reflexed, composite bows were available. Superior to all was the crossbow: The most powerful missile weapon in western Europe. Often made with a composite bow of sinew, wood, and horn, it could hurl a bolt 300 yards and further, beyond an average range of 200 yards for the 'longbow'." (page 369)

This seems to me to be a rather bold assertion, considering that every thing I've read seems to contradict that. I seem to recall reading that at the battle at Crecy starting with an exchange between English longbowmen and Genoese Pavise Crossbowmen, in which the Genoese got rather decisively mauled. So, now that I'm confronted with two differing accounts and opinions, I gotta ask which one is correct?

I am hardly an expert on medieval warfare, just a bit of a nerd with an interest - so, what do you all say? Is Mr. Newark right, or is he completely full of it?

[Sean Flynt]

Rate of fire matters. The crossbows dropping those big numbers don't load quickly. Also, though a war bow might look like a stick to some, I suspect that modern bowyers would scoff at the idea that they're unsophisticated. Properly grown, harvested and prepared yew, correct ratio of heartwood to sapwood, overall thickness, taper, degree of recurve at the tips, proper tillering, matching arrows to the power of the bow--not so simple, but because there isn't lots of stuff on the bow, it might look crude to some.

[Eric Hejdström]

Well, he certainly seems to miss the point with rate of fire. Not that the bow was som extraordinary impressive but the archers had probably more training to use them efiiciently than the crowwbow counterpart across the channel. Archery demands more practice than a crossbow but in return the rate of fire is miltiplied serveral times.

You don't really care wheter it's a powerful bow or not when on the recieving end of an arrow barrage...

He also seems to get hung up on the part of power. The fact that tactics employed and number of archers were greater than the crossbowmen on the other side also matters. And ofcourse, as was with the genoese, if you're hired for the job you might not wanna get killed and rather fall back if casualty numbers start to rise.

It's always dangerous to judge the outcome of a battle from old chronicles (nor winners or losers are very accurate regarding the enemy), but to rule out the english bow itself completely as Mr. Newark does it a bit too much I think.

/Eric

[Neil Gagel]

I'm just confused since he's so casually dismissive of the bow's power. I mean the longbows on the Mary Rose had draw weights up to to something like 150 pounds, which is far more powerful than the average sporting bow which he likens them to. Now granted, the Mary Rose came a bit later than the battles at Crecy and Poitiers, but I can't imagine that English bows were that terribly different...

[Lin Robinson]

I have that book and a couple of others written by Mr. Newark. They are interesting reading but not always 100% factual. He uses some sources for his books which are also a bit short on fact. However his books are good reads. I am at the point of finishing his latest book, Highlander - The History of the Legendary Highland Soldier and have enjoyed it very much. However, to illustrate the point I just made, Mr. Newark states that the largest concentration of Scots in the world, outside of Scotland, is in Canada - according to the 2006 census 4,709,859 Canadians say they are of Scottish descent. However, when the US Census Bureau has asked the question of ethnicity to respondents, something on the order of 20 million people have replied that they are of Scottish descent. A small point, and I only use it to illustrate a bit of lax fact checking.

I also think he has it wrong in his discussion of the long bow and is ignoring generally accepted theories as to range and power. Certainly volume of fire is greater with the long bow, a very important factor. I also think that Robert Hardy, probably the best authority on the long bow, would disagree with him too.

[Timo Nieminen]

[Dan McGehee]

Greetings

I always heard you should buy Tim Newark books for the pictures, because you can't trust the text.

A fellow named Sir Ralph Payne Gallwey wrote an interesting book on crossbows at the turn of the last century, remeniscent of Richard Burtons old Book of the Sword. He claims that crossbows progressed form simple wood bows in the ealiest form, to composite, then to steel bows in the late 15th century. Composite crossbows (like the kind used at Crecy) would outshoot regualr short bows but not lonbgows, but later steel crossbows outshoot everything, even early handguns.
Plus remember at Crecy the French pushed the Genoese out in front of their army without their pavises, and without time to dry their strings after a sudden rainstorm. The story is they had to shorten their strings in order to tighten them, thus reducing their effective range, all the while suffering from the longbowmen. Both sides later fielded mounted longbowman in the wars, and in the War of the Roses. Mounted to get into battle and then dismounting to fight, like 18th century dragoons
I've also heard the theory that Edward III had so many longbowmen on his expedition mainly because of their lower cost compared to men at arms, but once the longbow acheived such sucess at Crecy, they became integral to their armies. At Agincourt decades later, they tried longbows again, but they wouldn't penetrate plate armor. Luckily the English had mud on their side. .

[Peter Lyon]

It sounds like Newark overstates his case, by talking up the strengths of crossbows while talking down the successes of the bow. The comparison to Victorian bows is spurious, as their design differs from the medieval bow, notably in having a rigid grip which reduces the energy conversion (stored energy that goes into propelling the projectile, which is what it is all about in the end) to about 40% where the medieval bow flexed through its whole length and achieved efficiencies of 50% to 70%.

The bow has to be seen in perspective too. It is not a war winner on its own, no weapon is. Every English textbook goes on about Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, but French texts talk too about a lot of encounters where the bow was not a battle winner, or the archers were caught unprepared. Each of the big battles credited solely to the bow had major tactical components that swung things in favour of the English: at Crecy the French army didn't organise before charging and multiple waves of attacks were beaten back; at Poitiers the archers played a role, but the battle winner was a flank attack by the cavalry that broke the French reserves and captured the French king; and at Agincourt the French were again impetuous and allowed the English to select ground that chanelled the French attacks into a killing field.

A couple of books that are worth reading:
Longbow by Robert Hardy
The Great Warbow by Matthew Stricland and Robert Hardy - this is a big book but is supposed to be the "last word" on the longbow, and though I have yet to read my copy, I have heard it is well balanced on the role and use of the bow.

[Jean Henri Chandler]

I just did a bunch of research on this for an RPG book. I got some good feedback from Matt Easton of Schola Gladiatoria and Jonathan Waller from Royal Armories among others, and I bought The Great English Warbow and many other books on this subject, as well as reading a lot of online literature . My conclusions were as follows. (not sure if they would agree with me or not)

Longbows
The Longbow had a long range for indirect area fire, something like a mortar. It was not as long ranged as the strongest Turkish or the Mongol recurve composite bows, but it shot a larger, heavier arrow. There is a difference between the ordinary longbow, a formidable weapon and what people are now calling the "English Warbow", which was really powerful (120 lb draw or possibly more, though the efficiency of the extra draw weight seems to fall off much past that point).

The design of the longbow appears to have been native of both Scandinavia and the British Isles, and was also known in Burgundy and some other places on the continent by Medieval times, but the English are the only ones who really made effective military use of it on a large scale.

These bows were basically used to shoot in a high arc at area targets, a few hundred yards, direct range is much shorter, I'm not going to quote specific numbers for fear of an argument (everyone has their theories on longbows) but say 10% of the indirect range? But they were apparently quite effective in indirect shots when used en-masse. It takes about seven years to be 'trained' to shoot one (mainly to build up the right muscles) and the English Kings and Lords went to a lot of effort to spread the culture of archery from Wales throughout England.

Composite Bows and Recurves
Like somebody said upthread these were difficult to make (could take up to six months to dry) and were very vulnerable to rain and even dampness. They are more efficient than longbows (a 90 lb draw recurve may be equivalent to a 110 lb longow) but more difficult to draw. Like the Longbow they have a long indirect range, to be used something like a light mortar, but fairly short effective direct shooting range. These weapons out-range the Longbow but typically shot smaller, lighter arrows. In fact their longest-ranged arrow was a small dart that was shot with the help of a guide. The Mongols also typically carried two bows, a really heavy one for long range and a lighter one for short range. To protect the bow and the arrows most steppe riders kept both in a case called a gorytos. Moisture was a big problem. The Ottomans had the best recurves apparently. Their main advantages over the longbow were range and being more suitable for use on horseback. The feigned retreat and the Parthian shot. But it helped a lot to grow up with these weapons to be good at using them.

Crossbows
From the early Medieval period increasingly strong crossbows appeared in Europe. Required belt-hooks and foot-stirrups to span, roughly equivalent in power to the most powerful hunting crossbows we have today. These are not very good for indirect shots, but have a longer direct range than any bow, maybe twice or three times the direct range, and can be held in readiness indefinitely. They seem to have been effectively more accurate than bows for a longer distance. They may have been a little better at piercing armor in this direct range . But because they aren't used for indirect shots their overall range is shorter than either the longbow or the recurve, they can't shoot over walls or over the heads of friendly troops. Nevertheless, these were respected by the Mongols and the Arabs. They were used effectively in the Crusades, perhaps most famously by Richard Lionheart against Saladin, but that case was hardly unique. The Arabs called them Caws Ferengi 'Frankish bow' and adopted them especially for seige warfare. In surviving records the Mongols specifically reported heavy losses from crossbows in their various violent incursions into Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia.

I think the rate of fire issue is something of a canard, the advantage of the longbow was range and indirect shots. ROF for a longbow is about 8 or 9 shots a minute. With crossbows, they usually worked in a team behind a pavise, with two weapons. One spanning while the other shoots. By this method they managed as much as 6 or 7 shots per minute supposedly. You could quibble on the numbers but I don't think that is the main difference.

The only crossbow I know of which was used for indirect shooting like a bow was the Chu-ke nu (Chinese repeating crossbow) a very light weapon which shot unfletched darts and relied on poison to cause damage. Mainly used for sieges.

Arbalests
These were more powerful crossbows. The term is a modern convenience (means crossbow). The early (14th-15th Century) arbalests had composite prods, possibly due to Eastern influence from the Crusades. These required a windlass or a goat-foot lever to span. They were more powerful than commercial bows available today. The advent of these weapons led to armor being 'proofed' against crossbows (long before they were proofed against pistols).

The next generation of arbalests (15th - 16th Century) were the steel prod crossbows. Knight and the Blast Furnace reports that these weapon required their own proofing category among Italian armor makers. These were very powerful weapons, so powerful they required a reduction gear device called a cranequin to span them, similar to a jack for your car. An effective direct range of possibly as much as 200 meters or more. But they were expensive to make and somewhat dangerous to use, requiring troops from areas who grew up using them. Specialists who used this weapon were expensive to hire.

The hand cranks obviated the need for a foot-stirrup, and the weapons got smaller, making them more suitable for cavalry use. They were said to be more accurate and have better penetration than contemporary arquebuses.

The steel prod arbalests were less vulnerable to rain than the composites, but the string was always vulnerable so they were kept in leather cases. Their smaller size and utility from horseback eventually made them popular for hunting among aristocrats and remained so long after firearms took over, into the 17th and 18th Centuries, so luckily many very nice examples still survive.

Hand-Culverins
These could be effective at very short range (maybe 20 or 30 yards). But again, it seemed to be a weapon (like the Arbalest, the Lonbow, and the Recurve) which you had to have a certain culture to use well. The Hussites of Bohemia used them to very good effect with tabors (wagon forts) to repel lance charges from the nobility of 5 successive crusades. But nobody else seemed to be able to use the tactic effectively.

Arquebuses
Short effective range (around 50 yards) but long maximum range, all direct fire like the crossbow, but lethal out to a longer distance. Made a loud bang. Relatively cheap to manufacture. Perhaps more important, the culture of using them, while not as easy to develop as some modern writers assume, was transferrable. So everyone used them. The Ottomans were the first to make really long barrels, which led to muskets. But they stuck with the match-locks and eventually got left behind.

I should also point out, javelins and rocks remained popular missile weapons throughout the periods when these weapons were used. Rock throwers were used by the Hussites, the Swiss Reislauffer, etc., in many of the major battles of the age.

The Indians also had a steel bow which was apparently effective enough to be adopted by the Mughals, the Ottomans and the Persians, among others, but I haven't been able to find out much about it yet.

Anyway, FWIW (sorry I didn't mean for this to be so long)

J

[Jean Thibodeau]

[Timo Nieminen]

[Allen Foster]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

[Dan Howard]

[Dan Howard]

[David Teague]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Actually the heaviest arbalessts up to 1200 lb draw were spanned with the cranequin, and could spanned fairly quickly.

Though I agree with you the poor performance of the crossbows in French use had to do with mercenaries poorly used. Not too dissimilar to how the Swiss were used at Pavia. The French were heavy-cavalry oriented and had little respect for other types of troops.

J

[Daniel Staberg]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Didn't Charles the Rash bring some English Longbowmen to one or two of his catastrophic battles against the Swiss (who preferred crossbows)?

J