[Ben Coomer]

[Kevin Smith]

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.

[D. S. Smith]

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.

[Kevin Smith]

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).

[Guy Bayes]

Curious, how did you work your way up to the 100lb bow? Any tricks?

[Glennan Carnie]

[Kevin Smith]

[D. S. Smith]

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.

[Timo Nieminen]

[Kevin Smith]

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.

[Timo Nieminen]

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.

[Kevin Smith]

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.

[Timo Nieminen]

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.

[Kevin Smith]

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".

[Timo Nieminen]

[Dan Howard]

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.

[Timo Nieminen]

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.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

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.

[Kevin Smith]

[Timo Nieminen]