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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Thu 19 Sep, 2013 5:59 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Dan Howard wrote:
It takes a certain amount of energy for a particular arrow to penetrate a particular type of armour. It takes significantly more energy for the same arrow to go through the same armour and inflict an injury severe enough to incapacitate the wearer.


I suspect de la Broquière and other period sources in general were talking about meaningful penetration when they wrote that a weapon could pierce a given armor. That's what matters in the military context.
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Dan Howard




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PostPosted: Thu 19 Sep, 2013 7:35 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

What matters in a military context is taking a soldier out of the battle. If your arrow doesn't prevent him from fighting then it has failed.
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Philip Dyer





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PostPosted: Thu 19 Sep, 2013 8:48 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Timo Nieminen wrote:
Dan Howard wrote:
Timo Nieminen wrote:
I think this is more likely to be a case of the arrows penetrating 1 or 2 layers of a 2 or 3 layer armour (or even just sticking in the outer layer, without even penetrating).

There are plenty of accounts where arrows penetrate armour yet the wearer fights on unaffected. Analysing one small aspect of a situation in isolation is counterproductive. Producing a test where an arrow "penetrates" a piece of armour with no contextual supporting data tells us nothing about whether the wearer would have been incapacitated.


References to such accounts? Of course, we have accounts where people were hit in unarmoured spots, and fought on "unaffected", so there should be some. But accounts where lots of arrows penetrated the armour but did little to the wearer would be of interest.

But yes, to be useful, you need to both penetrate the armour and do something effective to the wearer of the armour. We see plate armour as thin as 1mm or so. Not breastplates usually - those tend to be 2-3mm, to stop arrows in pre-firearm days. The former can be penetrated, but penetration will take, say, 100J. The latter can't be penetrated by even the most powerful bows. So of what use are 130-150J bows? At least they will allow significant damage to be done through the lighter portions of the armour.

Yeah, I'm skeptical of his comment to, it sounds like the annoying arrows TV trope. I think in most cases if you have multiple arrows sticking into your body you aren't going dead or out of combat soon.
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Dan Howard




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PostPosted: Thu 19 Sep, 2013 10:09 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Quote:
Yeah, I'm skeptical of his comment to, it sounds like the annoying arrows TV trope. I think in most cases if you have multiple arrows sticking into your body you aren't going dead or out of combat soon.

It entirely depends on where the wound is and the depth of penetration. If you wound a soldier and he fights for the duration of the battle then you have had absolutely no influence on the outcome of the battle. Which do you think a commander would prefer: hitting a soldier in the foot and immediately taking him out of the fight or putting a dozen superficial wounds through his hauberk and he continues to fight?
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Jonathan Fletcher





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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 3:09 am    Post subject: Were heavier arrows more effective against armour?         Reply with quote

As Dan suggested, refer to Prof Anna Crowley's appendix in 'Warbow' by Strickland & Hardy.

Nice experimental research with some mathematical modelling, albeit a small study, but concisely presented.

In a nut shell:
Heavier arrow = slower velocity at release, shorter range, more kinetic energy delivered to the target on impact.

By heavy I mean a reproduction Mary Rose arrow.
By shorter range I mean an ample 240 yards shot from a 150lb yew longbow.

The Mary Rose arrows are all heavy by any modern standards, developed through experience and knowledge of the craft. Also they are pretty standardised 'issue' arrows in short or long draw lengths, not variations of weight, spine or any other variable we might seek to address in modern archery with weaker bows.

I suspect the only important decision the archer faced was which head to draw at armoured or unarmoured targets at a given range.

History records they decided correctly.
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Dan Howard




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 7:33 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Timo Nieminen wrote:
References to such accounts? Of course, we have accounts where people were hit in unarmoured spots, and fought on "unaffected", so there should be some. But accounts where lots of arrows penetrated the armour but did little to the wearer would be of interest..

I cited two of them already; three posts above yours. Here is a third - in this one Joinville was caught without his armour:

"We were all covered with arrows that failed to hit the sergeants. Now it chanced that I found a Saracen's gambeson lined with tow: I turned the open side towards me and made a shield of the gambeson, which did me good service, for I was only wounded by their arrows in five places, and my horse in fifteen."

He couldn't have been too seriously wounded because they were attacked again that night and Joinville led the counter attack:

"I got up, and threw a gambeson over my back, and a steel cap upon my head, and cried to our sergeants, 'By St. Nicholas, they shall not stay here!' My knights came to me, all wounded as they were, and we drove the Saracen sergeants from among the engines, and back towards a great body of mounted Turks who were over against the engines that we had taken."
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 10:25 am    Post subject: Re: Were heavier arrows more effective against armour?         Reply with quote

Jonathan Fletcher wrote:
The Mary Rose arrows are all heavy by any modern standards, developed through experience and knowledge of the craft. Also they are pretty standardised 'issue' arrows in short or long draw lengths, not variations of weight, spine or any other variable we might seek to address in modern archery with weaker bows.

I suspect the only important decision the archer faced was which head to draw at armoured or unarmoured targets at a given range.


You're being awfully generous to the Mary Rose arrows. According to Weapons of Warre, most of the surviving arrows that have been analyzed are made of poplar and would have been around 40-50g when ready for use. That's lighter than all of the arrows tested for The Great Warbow. Roger Ascham considered poplar arrows strictly inferior to ash for the wars, and lamented the common use of poplar. One test cited rather cryptically in Weapons of Warre has a light poplar arrow performing notably worse than a light ash arrow. Based on that test, the most common arrow from the Mary Rose would only would have delivered about 100 J - maybe less - from a 150lb bow. The birch arrows from the Mary Rose come in around 65g and would have delivered around 120 J. I don't know of any direct physical evidence for the heavier arrows tested for The Great Warbow. However, like the authors, I suspect English arrows did get up to 93-113g based textual and visual sources.
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Jonathan Fletcher





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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 11:04 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Sorry, I probably got ahead of myself. I was suggesting the evidence presented in the appendix of 'The Great Warbow' by Strickland & Hardy helped to answer the question "Which arrow best against armour, heavy or light, etc" = Heavy.

In said appendix the suggestion is heavier arrows are slower, shorter ranged but pack a bigger punch. And by heavy I meant relative to more modern target, flight, clout arrows, my apologies. I see though that 2 of the five arrows tested were not far off the range of the Mary Rose arrows at 54 & 58g.

In 'Longbow' Robert Hardy proposed heavy arrows in the 58-73g range for armour piercing and lighter 33-42g arrows for long range work. Despite this, I do not believe we have evidence to suggest there were two different types of arrows used in this way but I will be corrected if anyone has any publication of a study of the Mary Rose arrow shafts that suggest this.

As far as I know, there are no other English examples of Medieval arrows bar the Mary Rose arrows, these from a specific context (i.e. Tudor, pinnacle of Warbow use, etc). Sadly the Westminster Abbey arrow at c.42g in its well seasoned state and without fletchings and binding remains undated: The only other pieces I have seen or know about are in too poor a condition to be useful.

And anyway, 100J quite a bit: Will need to dig around about for those out dated figures from the 50's or 60's about energy required to penetrate armour, which failed to take into account padding and the human body. They might cause a stir.

(P.S. Edited because I had to leave in a hurry before completing this first time round)
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 12:04 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Jonathan Fletcher wrote:
And anyway, 100J quite a bit.


I imagine it was at least more or less sufficient for naval use, anyway. Marine troops tended to wear less armor than French knights. Under the circumstances, light arrows may have been ideal. However, only arrows at or around 100g allow the English bow to reach its full potential. From the perspective of technical optimization, a big bow should shoot heavy arrows. Looking at my notes, the test cited in Weapons of Warre actually yielded only 88.68 J with a 42.5g poplar arrow. That's certainly plenty dangerous, but less than a 110lb Turkish bow could deliver with a 40g arrow. A 56.7g ash arrow managed nearly the same speed as the poplar arrow and thus a more respectable 109.68 J. Given this difference, I bet the poplar arrow tested was too weak for the bow and that deformation or some such reduced performance.

With light arrows and especially light poplar arrows, English bows are woefully inferior to the composite designs favored from Turkey to Korea. While it's possible English bows were simply that bad, this makes European assessments of their archery compared with Turkish archery sheer chauvinism. De la Broquière wrote that European arrows were stronger and European archers shot farther. The latter claim only makes sense if the Turkish archers de la Broquière observed didn't practice arc shooting and European archers did. Over a century later, Smythe wrote that Turkish bows weren't as a good as English ones. That's obviously wrong from our perspective, but with heavy arrows (93-113g) and high draw weights (150-160lbs) English infantry bows at least hit harder than Turkish cavalry bows. We know for sure that Manchu archers used 100+g arrows with their large bows, so it seems likely the English would have as well. If not, the English bow can just claim reliability and perhaps accuracy. But given the composite's faster arrow speed, superior accuracy for the English bow seems unlikely.

Jonathan Fletcher wrote:
In 'Longbow' Robert Hardy proposed heavy arrows in the 58-73g range for armour piercing and lighter 33-42g arrows for long range work. Despite this, I do not believe we have evidence to suggest there were two different types of arrows used in this way but I will be corrected if anyone has any publication of a study of the Mary Rose arrow shafts that suggest this.


Hardy apparently thinks longbow arrows rather heavier now based his remarks in The Great Warbow. The birch versus poplar Mary Rose arrows as recorded in Weapons of Warre do more or less fall into the listed ranges, though. Depending on the heads used, a birch arrows might be 20-35g heavier than a poplar one.


Last edited by Benjamin H. Abbott on Fri 20 Sep, 2013 12:58 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Jonathan Fletcher





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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 12:24 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Benjamin you have me there, I don't know much about the English warbow but I know even less about Eastern archery.

And re-reading about Gancsay's and John Waller's tests against original armour and 2mm iron plate respectively with lighter than medieval longbows and arrows with case hardened heads, etc, I think I'll not risk re-reporting their findings.

And I must get a copy of Weapons of Warre.
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Jojo Zerach





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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 1:10 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Those arrow estimates from "weapons of warre" sound too light to me. Did they actually make reconstructions of the same dimensions and fit them with period correct arrow heads, or just go by the weight of the surviving shafts?
I seem to recall a thread on another forum where they came to the conclusion that reconstructed arrows would have been heavier than that.
The English warbow society also gives a minimum weight of 980 grains (63.5 g) for Mary Rose livery arrows despite listing poplar as a common shaft material.
http://www.theenglishwarbowsociety.com/tudor-livery-arrow_EN.html
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 1:48 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

If I recall correctly they measure them, calculate the volume, and then estimate the total arrow mass based on that plus the mass of bindings, fetching, and arrowheads. At least one author suggest the arrows may have swollen because of the water and thus the originals would weighed less than the estimates indicate. Interpretations indeed vary; Hardy considers the Mary Rose arrows thoroughly deteriorated. The English Warbow Society minimum of 63.5g strikes me as more functional than Weapons of Warre's 35-50g, but that doesn't make it necessarily correct. After all, Ascham wrote that poplar arrows were inferior but used anyway.
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Timo Nieminen




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 2:28 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Dan Howard wrote:
Timo Nieminen wrote:
References to such accounts? Of course, we have accounts where people were hit in unarmoured spots, and fought on "unaffected", so there should be some. But accounts where lots of arrows penetrated the armour but did little to the wearer would be of interest..

I cited two of them already; three posts above yours.


The arrow sticking in armour doesn't mean the arrow penetrated the armour. Especially with layered armours.

Dan Howard wrote:
Here is a third - in this one Joinville was caught without his armour:

"We were all covered with arrows that failed to hit the sergeants. Now it chanced that I found a Saracen's gambeson lined with tow: I turned the open side towards me and made a shield of the gambeson, which did me good service, for I was only wounded by their arrows in five places, and my horse in fifteen."


This one is better. (Although if he's not wearing armour, it's not so relevant. But is he not wearing armour? I don't see this in the text before this part.) These arrows weren't aimed at them; they the ones that missed the two sergeants.

The original text:
Or avint ainsi que je trouvai un gamboison d'estoupes a un Sarrazin: je tournai le fendu devers moi et fis escu deu gamboison, qui m'eul grant mestier; car je ne fui pas bleciés de leur piles qu'en cinc lieus el mes roncins en quinze lieus.

"Blecier" = wound, bruise, hurt, injure. Does not necessarily mean that the skin was penetrated (and thus, any armour).

"In addition to being efficient, all pole arms were quite nice to look at." - Cherney Berg, A hideous history of weapons, Collier 1963.
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Guy Bayes




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 2:54 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

"With light arrows and especially light poplar arrows, English bows are woefully inferior to the composite designs favored from Turkey to Korea. While it's possible English bows were simply that bad, this makes European assessments of their archery compared with Turkish archery sheer chauvinism. . De la Broquière wrote that European arrows were stronger and European archers shot farther. "

There is more to it then that, the effective range of a bow is not just the maximum distance you can hurl an arrow. Turkish composite bows and horsebows in general are a lot lot shorter axle to axle, which makes them much less susceptible to being torqued at time of fire, less forgiving and hence less accurate. I have a horsebow and it is a complete bitch to shoot compared to my longbow. Maybe that is jsut me, but it seems to be a common opinion in the Western traditioanl archery community

Also someone who trains to shoot from horseback is probably going to spend less time practicing extreme long range shooting as that requires a high degree of stillness, even minor motions of the horse would wreck the shot

I do not know about Korean bows, though from what I have seen of modern Japenese Kyūdō it has become so stylized as to not say much about real wartime capabilities

I've also always wondered if the Mary Rose arrows weren't light because they were intended to have some kind of combustible tip, is there evidence for flaming arrows in that time period?
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Jojo Zerach





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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 3:25 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Here is some information on reconstructing a historically accurate, typical Mary Rose arrow.
http://warbowwales.com/#/warbow-arrows/4557916533
The weight came to 1011 grains (65.5 g) using a poplar shaft and a Tudor style arrowhead, so still quite heavy, and more along the lines of what you would expect. (A good reconstruction is obviously better than calculations.)


Last edited by Jojo Zerach on Fri 20 Sep, 2013 3:39 pm; edited 4 times in total
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Dan Howard




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 3:29 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Joinville's horse was wounded fifteen times and continued to fight. What would have happened to the English at Crecy if they used the same arrows?
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Matt Lentzner




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 3:58 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

This is veering a little off the original topic, but I wanted to share.

I think I've finally figured out why the English longbow armies were so effective. The red herring here is the longbow itself. People keep wanting to see something magical there and it just isn't. It's because of tactical innovation.

The clue that tipped me off is the comment (forget all the details of who said it and when) about how 100 archers are useless but if you have 1000 then you've got something. Naively, I was thinking wouldn't 100 archers be about 10% as powerful as 1000? Actually, no. Let me explain.

The thing that a bow can do that makes it unique is that it can direct it's power over range. Captain Obvious, I know. There's this concept in military science of "mass" - meaning you need to concentrate your power to have an effect. This is why heavy infantry fights in close order. Bows can do this even better.

Let's say for the sake of argument that a longbowman can put all of his arrows in a 35m circle at 200m. That's about 1000 square meters. 100 archers firing at that target will put 1 arrow per 10 square meters per volley. Now, 1000 archers will put 1 arrow per square meter per volley. That means ~50% of the people in the formation will get hit with a least one arrow, some more, per volley. Over a period of three minutes a soldier in the target area could expect to get hit 5-10 times. Even if the arrows only caused a casualty on 5% of the hits the soldiers in that target area would be decimated. 5000 archers is even scarier. That's mass.

If that fire was directed into the center of a block of foot soldiers it can pin down the whole unit. Of course the wings could continue to advance, but could be defeated piecemeal by the opposing soldiers. It just destroys the integrity of the unit. Or you can shoot a hole in a schiltron and let your cavalry carve it up.

Of course this doesn't mean the longbow was some kind of super weapon. The English got a lot of help from the French who rode or marched right into their kill zone.

Anyway, the advantage of the longbow was that it was deployed en masse and when there are enough of them it changes the whole tactical effect - the sum is greater than the parts in this case.
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Matt Lentzner




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 4:03 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Guy,

There were several chests found on the Mary Rose full of incendiary arrows - combustible material inside a package with a fuse. Even better than a run-of-the-mill flaming arrow.

Matt
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P. Schontzler




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 4:17 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Matt Lentzner wrote:

Let's say for the sake of argument that a longbowman can put all of his arrows in a 35m circle at 200m. That's about 1000 square meters. 100 archers firing at that target will put 1 arrow per 10 square meters per volley. Now, 1000 archers will put 1 arrow per square meter per volley. That means ~50% of the people in the formation will get hit with a least one arrow, some more, per volley. Over a period of three minutes a soldier in the target area could expect to get hit 5-10 times. Even if the arrows only caused a casualty on 5% of the hits the soldiers in that target area would be decimated. 5000 archers is even scarier. That's mass.


That sounds all nice and good but it is still conjecture. It may even work now if we reenacted in modern day but without referencing source material it is fiction.
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Fri 20 Sep, 2013 4:42 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Guy Bayes wrote:
There is more to it then that, the effective range of a bow is not just the maximum distance you can hurl an arrow. Turkish composite bows and horsebows in general are a lot lot shorter axle to axle, which makes them much less susceptible to being torqued at time of fire, less forgiving and hence less accurate. I have a horsebow and it is a complete bitch to shoot compared to my longbow. Maybe that is jsut me, but it seems to be a common opinion in the Western traditioanl archery community


I've read this various places, but again the generally higher speed of arrows from a composite increase its accurate relative to the English bow. One historical Middle-Eastern archery manual went as far as to claim that if two skilled archers competing using the same bow the one who shot first would win because it would be slightly stiffer and thus shoot faster. Also de la Broquière noted the accuracy of the Turkish archers he encountered.

Quote:
Also someone who trains to shoot from horseback is probably going to spend less time practicing extreme long range shooting as that requires a high degree of stillness, even minor motions of the horse would wreck the shot


Yes, though various horse archers employed long-range arcing shots in battle. Both Turkish and Mongol records show flight arrows going well over the 350-440 yards even the heaviest English-style bow could manage with flights. But those Turkish records that I know about are later than de la Broquière's and Turkish archery as he described it involved fast and accurate shooting at medium to close range.

Jojo Zerach wrote:
Here is some information on reconstructing a historically accurate, typical Mary Rose arrow.
http://warbowwales.com/#/warbow-arrows/4557916533
The weight came to 1011 grains (65.5 g) using a poplar shaft and a Tudor style arrowhead, so still quite heavy, and more along the lines of what you would expect. (A good reconstruction is obviously better than calculations.)


Well, maybe! See this thread for an extended discussion on the subject. I don't believe the linked reconstruction uses shafts as thin as those recorded in Weapons of Warre. As outcaste writes in the linked thread, "If you take the MR average spec for a bobtailed poplar shaft (which is the most common), I think it would be the devils own work to get a 60g+ arrow out of it without a heavy head and or using the heartwood."


Last edited by Benjamin H. Abbott on Fri 20 Sep, 2013 6:30 pm; edited 1 time in total
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