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Henry O.
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 Posted: Sun 19 Jun, 2016 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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Whether one could reliably draw heavy bows apparently was a real concern. One of Humfrey Barwick's complaints about English archers was that they tended to quickly tire and stop drawing their arrows all the way back. He also claimed that on long campaigns they would become exhausted from lack of good meals and sleeping in the cold. Barnabe Rich writing a couple decades after the Mary Rose sank estimated that a week after being mustered only 10% of English archers would be able to shoot more than 200 paces.
A recurve bow is arguably even more tiring to draw than a straight bow, so it does seem feasible that Qing or English Archer might prefer to use a lighter bow in battle than they can draw at practice.
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Timo Nieminen
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| Posted: Mon 20 Jun, 2016 3:20 pm Post subject: Re: Archers wearing Armor |
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| Mario M. wrote: | | I merely provided the Shelby's statement to cool off those who use Emperors personal boasts of strength as a proper source for draw weight. |
It's best to use surviving bows as a proper source for draw weight. Given that we have surviving Qing bows, and many of them greatly exceed 30kg/66lb in draw weight, Shelby's number isn't very useful (I don't know Shelby's source; no reference is given in the book).
Surviving bows of boastful-of-strength emperors (i.e., Kangxi) exceed 100lb, so he wasn't just all talk.
| Mario M. wrote: | "In comparison, the 500 troops at the small Dezhou garrison acquitted themselves with honor, all of them being able to take a five-strength bow [67 pounds], 203 a six-strength [80 pounds], 137 a seven strength [93 pounds], and 85 a ten-strength bow [133 pounds]."
I love that one, merely 17% of the garrison was even able to draw a 100+lbs bow, and nearly half the garrison could not go above 80lbs, and these guys were bragging. |
Gunnery/musketry tests also produced very poor results. Combat readiness of Qing garrison troops after decades of peace was often very, very poor. Training was neglected. Care of equipment was neglected - armour unwearable, swords rusted in their scabbards. That's the context for this being a relatively good performance.
What fraction of the garrison was actually archers? The Qing army did have infantry archers, but most infantry were spearmen and musketeers (all cavalry were archers).
"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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Mario M.
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| Posted: Mon 20 Jun, 2016 6:03 pm Post subject: Re: Archers wearing Armor |
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| Timo Nieminen wrote: | | Combat readiness of Qing garrison troops after decades of peace was often very, very poor. |
But their chance of actually putting some proper protein in their bellies increased during those peace times.
An average 158ish cm tall 16th/17th/18th century East Asian will have trouble drawing bows above 80lbs no matter the intensity of his training, muscle mass is one of the key components in pulling/lifting weights, and they had little of it.
Nobody is denying powerful bows existed, heck the heaviest longbow found at Mary Rose is put at 190ish lbs, I am merely stating that people should be conservative with their assessments of historical bow poundage in a generic sense.
Pulling a bow once without losing form in front of your commander and a scribe recording it as such is not the same as being required to repeatedly pull that bow dozens of times in battle.
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“The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness...Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion." - Anna Comnena
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Timo Nieminen
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| Posted: Tue 21 Jun, 2016 2:32 am Post subject: Re: Archers wearing Armor |
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| Mario M. wrote: | | An average 158ish cm tall 16th/17th/18th century East Asian will have trouble drawing bows above 80lbs no matter the intensity of his training, muscle mass is one of the key components in pulling/lifting weights, and they had little of it. |
Average height of southern Chinese adult men in the 1st half of the 19th century was about 164cm. Northern Chinese were, on average taller by 2.4cm. UK average for the same time was 166.8, about the same as for northern Chinese adult men. The English Medieval average was higher, about 171cm at the time of the Hundred Years War.
Given that the usual numbers given for typical draw weights for Qing bows are substantially lower than those given for English longbows (about 100-110lb vs 130lb or more), and English archers could manage their bows, I don't see average Chinese heights making 100-110lb impossible.
For Chinese heights, see:
Stephen L. Morgan, Economic growth and the biological standard of living in China, 1880–1930, Economics and Human Biology 2 (2004) 197–218
Joerg Baten et al., Evolution of living standards and human capital in China in the 18–20th centuries: Evidences from real wages, age-heaping, and anthropometrics, Explorations in Economic History Volume 47, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 347–359
"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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Blaz Berlec
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Philip Dyer
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| Posted: Tue 21 Jun, 2016 12:03 pm Post subject: Re: Archers wearing Armor |
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| Mario M. wrote: | | Timo Nieminen wrote: | | Combat readiness of Qing garrison troops after decades of peace was often very, very poor. |
But their chance of actually putting some proper protein in their bellies increased during those peace times.
An average 158ish cm tall 16th/17th/18th century East Asian will have trouble drawing bows above 80lbs no matter the intensity of his training, muscle mass is one of the key components in pulling/lifting weights, and they had little of it.
Nobody is denying powerful bows existed, heck the heaviest longbow found at Mary Rose is put at 190ish lbs, I am merely stating that people should be conservative with their assessments of historical bow poundage in a generic sense.
Pulling a bow once without losing form in front of your commander and a scribe recording it as such is not the same as being required to repeatedly pull that bow dozens of times in battle.
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But knowing which muscle groups to engage, how to position your body, where to get to draw, and control your breathing is allot more important. Same reason why hunting was popular pastime of aristocrats in peacetime and the Kings of England tried to ban sports besides archery in peacetime. It doesn't nearly matter as how much muscle mass your have if your are well practice in using that muscle mass towards a particular activity to where it is instinctive. Same reason why Mark Stretton could probably out shoot the actor that plays Gregor Glegane, even though Gregor has allot more muscle mass in all areas of his body than Mark does. Nothing substitutes practice.
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Timo Nieminen
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| Posted: Tue 21 Jun, 2016 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Blaz Berlec wrote: | | Should we even be looking at average heights when we are discussing medieval soldiers? Wasn't it quite skewed due to large numbers of lower class people that didn't get correct nutrition in childhood? |
Average heights are low due to most people being lower class; the average height is close to the lower class height. If your soldiers are recruited from the lower classes, this the relevant height. For early modern and modern conscript armies, this applies. For volunteer armies, it can also apply - c. 1900, when the British Army minimum height was 5'3", 1/3 of recruits didn't meet that requirement.
Where soldiers come from better-fed social classes, the average height only gives a lower bound. I've seen people use the (quite short) Medieval/Early Modern Japanese average adult male height for samurai - a bad estimate!
For comparing two populations, average heights are somewhat useful. Even though samurai would be taller (on average) than Japanese peasants, and English knights taller than English peasants, if English peasants were taller than Japanese peasants, we can guess that English knights were taller than samurai.
Qing bannermen were "recruited" through being born in bannerman families. State-supported, and I expect better fed than Chinese peasants.
"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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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Sun 26 Jun, 2016 2:38 pm Post subject: Re: Archers wearing Armor |
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| Mario M. wrote: | | Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | Manchu heavy cavalry had both heavy armour and very heavy bows -- one of the heaviest types ever made in large numbers. |
I am of the opinion that the proposed average draw weights for both their and Korean bows are exaggerated in a similar manner that the longbow is often pushed to 170-200 pound range. |
While I agree that the numbers are often exaggerated, contemporary sources are pretty consistent in stating that the Manchu bows were heavier than most other horse archers' bows. Exactly how heavy they were is another matter.
| Quote: | | They were shorter East Asians with low muscle mass(low animal protein intake). |
I wouldn't be too quick to make claims about low muscle mass and low animal protein intake. I live in Southeast Asia myself and routinely come across labourers who are well below 160cm (maybe 5'3?) in height but have really impressive pulling strength. They're also much heavier than they look.
| Quote: | | Stephen Selby states that the surviving Manchu bows are around 30kg/66lbs of draw weight. |
Incidentally, I used to lurk around a traditional archery forum Selby moderates and have had some personal correspondence with him. I think at one point he mentioned that the 66lbs was taken from bows that were still in sufficiently good condition to be strung and drawn. There were also larger and thicker bows that he didn't want to string since they seemed to have dried out too much (judging by their excessive reflex curve in unstrung condition), but he commissioned replicas based on the dimensions of those bows and some came up with pretty impressive weights of up to 100-120lbs. Of course these super-heavy bows might not have been common even among the Manchus, but even if only one-sixths or one-eighths of all Manchu horse archers could draw this kind of weight, that's still going to make a pretty impressive force. Don't forget that the Manchu heavy horse-archers who used these super-heavy bows generally weren't skirmishers -- they were heavy cavalry intended to shoot only a small number of arrows while charging towards the enemy (indeed, sometimes just one or two) before engaging in hand-to-hand combat with swords. So they could afford to draw heavier bows by sacrificing the shooting endurance that more conventional horse (and foot) archers would have needed.
And mind that 66lbs is by no means a low weight for a bow meant to be used on horseback. This kind of weight would have been pretty serviceable for more conventional (and more numerous) "light" horse archers, especially those recruited from among Mongol vassal nations/tribes. These auxilliaries didn't seem to have made that much use of the heavy Manchu arrows that needed a similarly heavy bow to propel them with any kind of force.
| Quote: | | He also describes in his book the infamous presentations done centuries ago that state much higher draw weights, but people are blinded to the fact that those were most probably for strength and form showmanship. |
It's worth noting that practicing the draw with absurdly heavy strength bows (that were not meant for shooting at all) could have been a perfectly legitimate and useful method of training to improve one's endurance in drawing much lighter bows that were actually used in combat and/or garrison duty.
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