[Jean Henri Chandler]

I do not make this assertion myself, but it was asserted rather insistently by somebody else in another thread. I'd interested to explore this subject. Lets start with why is it a myth, and according to whom?

[Dan Howard]

Yew longbows have been used all over Europe since the Mesolithic period (the best early example is Oetzi). Most of the longbowmen that the English used in their armies have always been English. It wasn't a weapon or culture that was adopted from the Welsh. The Welsh certainly used the weapon but the English (and Scots and Irish) had been using it for just as long.

[Pieter B.]

Clifford J. Rogers briefly deals with the history of the longbow in a paper called: The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Citing some of the key paragraphs:

[Jean Henri Chandler]

But do we have any reason to suspect that long bow use was rare or unknown in Wales or that longbow archers from Wales weren't used as mercenaries?

[Jonathan Dean]

[Dan Howard]

Longbows have always been six feet long. The Oetzi bow is over five thousand years old and is 183cm in length - and Oetzi Man was only 160cm (5'2") tall. There is nothing apart from some dodgy illustrations to suggest that military longbows were ever any shorter. There was no appreciable development of the weapon. The only things that evolved were the tactics that the English used to deploy it and the social engineering required to produce enough archers for those tactics to be effective.

[Jonathan Dean]

[Anthony Clipsom]

I await Jonathon's detailed argument but I did some research on this a couple of years ago and found there is no actual evidence that the Welsh used a "long" bow at all. A distinctive and powerful bow, yes, but long is not a described characteristic.

I look forward to what Jonathon has found and set it alongside what I dug up.

[Pieter B.]

[Dashiell Harrison]

[Anthony Clipsom]

[Clifford Rogers]

As Anthony said, the presumption that the longbow was of Welsh origin seems mainly to have been based on Gerald's description of its power.... which is indicative of a longbow, but then, Gerald was a definite tale-teller, and it is possible for an unusually stiff short bow to penetrate mail at short range. The main evidence indicating that the Welsh actually used short bows rather than long bows (much less longbows) is twofold. First, the famous, albeit cartoonish, illustrations from the Littere Wallie, which show powerful but short bows. (http://warfare.gq/13/Chapter_House-Liber_A.htm) Second, the bows and the arrowheads (with relatively narrow sockets) found in Ireland in Anglo-Norman contexts. Welsh footsoldiers were the main type of infantry used by the Anglo-Norman marchers in their initial conquest of parts of Ireland. One might add that there is close to zero evidence, and no good evidence, for long bows (more than about 5') anywhere in Britain (or Western Europe) between around 1000 and 1300. The old Germanic (and earlier) tradition of long bows from around 700 to 1000 seems only to have been retained in the Viking/Scandinvian context (e.g. the Balinderry bow). A possible exception for 700 to 1000 is the Wassenar bow, dated 800-950 and estimated original length 180-190cm. Found in Holland, given those dates it might or might not be of Viking origin.

[Clifford Rogers]

[Pieter B.]

Hi Mr. Rogers

Great seeing you here and I would like to say I also very much enjoyed reading 'Gunpowder Artillery in Europe, 1326–1500: Innovation and Impact' and very much look forward to seeing 'Bigger, Stronger, Faster. The Evolution of Cannon Design, 1326-1453'

I hadn't considered the small powder charges when looking at earlier short barreled bombards but now I realize they might well have been an optimal design for 'powder economy' in the early days followed by longer barreled designs as the supply increased.

I wonder if you could recommend any work that deals with this same evolution in handgun design (1400-1453) and earlier pot-de-fer usage. Those little 'coehorn mortar' type guns don't seem to get a lot of attention despite similar designs being in use in east Asia for centuries.

[Jonathan Dean]

Alright, I've made some time to post this.

The idea that there was a distinct evolution from a "short" bow that was used in the Early Middle Ages through to the end of the 13th century is an old one. I admit that I haven't read much from before the late 19th century on the subject, but I do know that Viollet-le-Duc proposed a five foot bow which was used by the Normans that eventually evolved into a six foot bow used by the English (and, if I'm reading him right, the archers of Brabant) at the end of the 13th century. Later, he writes of bows that were 1.9-2 meters long in the later 15th century, and he sees it all as a progress.

Most of this was based on artwork. A lot of the most important archaeological finds hadn't been made yet, so he was working with what he had. The Tympanum at Vezelay had a number of realistically proportioned figures, one of which was an archer, and Viollet-le-Duc cross referenced this with the Bayeux Tapestry, which features archers with similarly proportioned bows in the main section. Later artwork, as Professor Rogers has found, does indeed feature bows that are proportionally larger than earlier bows, and this transition happens throughout the 14th and 15th centuries.

Where my knowledge of the discussion really picks up is with Oman's famous 1885 dissertation, where he rationalised that, since the Anglo-Norman kings preferred crossbowmen over archers, the Clearly Superior in All Ways Longbow hadn't yet been developed. As Anthony says, Oman did suggest that Gerald of Wales' description of the power of Welsh longbows might point to Wales as a possible origin but, at the same time, he notes that it was the northern, not western, areas of England that appeared to have the archery tradition early on. He then goes on to suggest that the longbow was first adopted as a "national" weapon under Henry III in 1252 but that it was only Edward I who, through his long history fighting the Welsh, brought the use of the longbow to a "scientific" level, like William the Conqueror. Here it's interesting to note that Oman believed the longbow to be in existence by 1252 and that it was the experience of fighting against capable archers that led to its massed adoption, rather than the experience of fighting against the Welsh leading Edward I to adopt the longbow wholesale.

Forty years later, Oman slightly modified his arguments by adding evidence from the First and Second Barons Wars, where significant numbers of archers were raised from the Weald and, at least in 1216, did considerable damage to knights in a guerilla campaign that even contemporary chroniclers had to acknowledge. I personally get the feeling that Oman was reluctant to accept a "French" (via the Normans) or a "Welsh" longbow because he preferred the longbow to be an English national weapon.

Hereford B. George, in his 1895 book Battles of English History, also had a brief discussion on the longbow that must have been well known at the time, as Delbruck refers to it in the third volume of his History of the Art of War. His position is not much different from Oman's, and is likely based on it, affirming that the Normans used shortbows and that, although the evidence is slim, Wales is a possible place of origin for the longbow.

J.E. Morris' The Welsh Wars of Edward I is, in my opinion, where the view that the English replaced their "weak short bow, which was then held of no account" with the "powerful longbow" that they adopted from the Welsh came into popular being. He names Edward I as the populariser, and points to the allied Welsh as the seed from which Edward I grew his corps of longbowmen, but does stress (pp. 99) that the longbow was not a new weapon in the 1270s and had already been adopted by some English prior to Edward I. Up until this point authors had hedged their bets as to where the longbow came from, but Morris is unequivocal: even if the English adopted it before Edward I's reign, they adopted it from the Welsh.

After Morris, the idea that the longbow was specifically Welsh and was either generically adopted from them or was specifically adopted by Edward I predominates, as can be seen in The discussions in J.F. Verbruggen's The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages and Oakeshott's Archaeology of Weapons. It's a view that can even been recently, as in Brian Todd Carey's Warfare in the Medieval World.

From the 1970s, though, Morris' narrative was challenged. Robert Hardy's Longbow argued that the longbow had always remained in use in England and that, even if it hadn't, the Scandinavians and the Normans would have reintroduced it. Hardy, in addition to the archaeological evidence from Scandinavia and Scandinavian controlled parts of Ireland, used a few instances of artwork (including the lower margins of the Bayeux Tapestry) to back up his arguments. Bradbury, in The Medieval Archer also argued that there was no evidence that the English lacked the longbow or that they adopted it from the Welsh.

However, Bradbury also challenges the view that Edward I's use of archers was exceptional or new. In this he was picking up and expanding on a point raised by Michael Prestwich in Wars, Politics and Finance under Edward I, but Bradbury used a combination of legal and administrative documents from Henry II on to demonstrate a continued use of archers and of civilian practice from the second half of the 12th to the end of the 13th centuries. If they don't feature much in 13th century chronicles, Bradbury argues, that has more to do with a general lack of reference to the equipment of the infantry in chronicles of that period, except where they were specialised. Moreover, he agrees with Prestwich that Edward I's use of archers was not particularly new or innovative, although he is less overtly critical about the quality of the archers under Edward I.

Then, in 2005, Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy published The Great Warbow, with Strickland writing most of the academic content. As with Hardy's earlier work and Bradbury's book, Strickland reiterates that the longbow existed in England before Edward I and that it was not adopted by the Welsh. He is somewhat more in favour of Edward I having introduced some tactical changes, but proposes the Scottish Wars rather than the Welsh Wars as the origin of these. He also uses archaeological evidence to support the notion of an eternal longbow and spends time critically discussing medieval artwork and stylistic choices with regards to bows.

So, from the 1970s down to 2005 we have the main works on archery a) dismissing the notion of a shortbow existing, b) arguing that the English practiced archery and didn't need to adopt it from the Welsh and c) that Edward I didn't really change anything insofar as battlefield tactics go. Some scholars, such as Michael Prestwich, go so far as to portray the archers under Edward I as being poorly equipped and of poor quality, as Edward I did not provide for replacement bows or arrows as he did crossbows and bolts, or as Edward III would do later, as well as the high desertion rates and the possibility that the archers had to resort to stones at Falkirk.

There are a few flies in the ointment so far as longbows vs shortbows goes. Numerous fragments of bows, including one complete bow and what is likely the halves of two more, were found at Waterford, Ireland, and the complete bow can be positively identified as coming from an Anglo-Norman context. As a very short arrow (allowing for a draw of approximately 22 inches) with a bodkin head was also found in an Anglo-Norman context and numerous other arrowheads with a similar design have been found, these bows are unarguably military bows. A similar, but unfinished and probably discarded, style of bow was uncovered at Burg Elmendorf and is likely, in my opinion, to be a military bow, while a third bow from Pineuilh, France, may be a hunting weapon but is still made along the same style.

Additionally, some reassessment of the English legal texts have shortened the length of bows from the late 13th and early 14th centuries. As I've written elsewhere, there's very good evidence to suggest that the "ell" used by Edward I was the same as the yard (3 feet or 36 inches), which means that the bow used to kill Simon de Skeffington, described as being one and a half ells, was 137cm long rather than 171cm long, as has been long assumed. Similarly, the bow of two ells used to kill Robert de Esnyngton would be 183cm long instead of 228cm long, while the "Turkish" bow used in the same murdered would have been 137cm long as well.

Two authors have been instrumental in bringing the Waterford bows into more mainstream scholarship (although they were not as obscure before this as fans of the longbow would prefer) and in reassessing the length of the ell under Edward I. The first, Professor Clifford J. Rogers, has already been mentioned and has appeared in this thread. He's been a proponent of there being an increase in draw length since the early 1990s, and has often been at odds with scholars such as Kelly DeVries over the effectiveness of military archery. The second, Richard Wadge, has put out a few excellent books on medieval archery and warfare, but Who Were the Bowmen of Crecy is the work most relevant to the discussion here.

Both authors have slightly different approaches. Rogers uses artwork, the legal records, two French hunting books and the Waterford bows to inform his discussion about the mechanics of archery and the advantage in energy that would be gained by increasing the drawn length even from 28" to 30", which would impart significantly more energy. Wadge also examines similar evidence, although limits himself to the period before 1346, and also spends more time looking at the socket diameters of arrowheads, which are a much better guide to the relative power of the bows than artwork.

In neither case, however, do the authors suggest that the Welsh had "long" bows, while the English had "short" bows and adopted the Welsh bows. Both authors are actually quite clear that there appears to be no evidence of any difference in the bows, based on archaeological evidence. Arrowheads in England and Wales both appear to have the same range of socket diameters during the 13th century, and the full adoption of "proper" longbows must have taken place in the 14th century based on the written evidence.

Moving away from the historiography surrounding the longbow and whether or not it was "Welsh", I want to briefly elaborate what I said the other day with regards to bows and draw lengths.

As I posted earlier, we have the lengths of a significant number of Scandinavia from the Iron Age to the end of the Early Middle Ages. Generally speaking, the most powerful of these were comparatively short compared with the Mary Rose bows, all being less than 180cm long and most being closer to 170cm. This is the overall length, however, and slightly over 10cm is lost to self nocks in each bow, so the working length of each bow is shortened by that much. Generally speaking, unbacked self bows, especially those that lack a rectangular cross section, need to be at least 2.2 times as long between the nocks as the draw length. As a result, any bow less than 168cm between the nocks is unlikely to be drawn to 30", at least on a regular basis.

The fact that so few of these powerful historic bows are 168cm or more between the nocks is probably not a coincidence. At just a fraction over 5'7", approximately the average height for Europeans across a broad range of pre-modern eras, drawing to 28" gets me to my ear, and 30" has me drawing uncomfortably far past it. P.H. Blythes' discussion on the mechanics of bows in Hardy's Longbow indicates that from an energy storage point of a view, any bow over 180cm needs to have a draw length exceeding 28" in order to get any advantage from the extra length. If you can't comfortably draw past 28", why bother making an extra long bow? And, if it's going to be for war, why make it particularly long?

There's some supporting evidence for this attitude, I think, in two sources. The first is Gaston Phébus' Livre de Chasse, which describes an "English" bow that is 20 "handfuls" between the nocks, which are interestingly enough each one inch long, with an arrow that is 8 "handfuls" long between the nock and the barbs of the arrowhead. I've checked with three separate people, as well as myself, whose heights range between 5'5" and 6', and a "handful" almost always comes out as 3.5". In one case the handful came out at 3.25", not far of Clifford J. Rogers' own hands, so the bow is likely to be between 67" and 72" overall, with a NTN length of 65-70", and a draw length of between 26" and 28". Although this is a hunting bow, not a military bow, it gives us some insight into what people could comfortably draw.

The second example comes from Edward IV's requirement that all Englishmen in Ireland should have bows of their own height (plus a fist?) between the nocks and arrows that were "three quarters of the standard". The standard being a yard, at least from the context of a later 15th century merchant book, the arrows were intended to draw 27" and the bows were probably intended to be between 165cm and 175cm, or possibly 172-180cm, between the nocks. The arrow length, however, is more important than the bow length, because it again gives some indication of what civilians habitually drew.

What I think happened is that, during the 14th century, horn nocks were introduced, allowing for slightly longer draw lengths (28-29" instead of 27-28") and eventually the bows were themselves lengthened to take advantage of the full 30" draw length. Overall lengths of bows in the 14th century, even the 22 "small" poigne bow of Henri de Ferrières (I assume a poigne of 3-3.25"), are shorter than 97% of the Mary Rose bows, so I think that this is a reasonable assumption, although the increased lengths might also have been to ensure a longer life/less chance of failure in the mass produced livery bows that Edward III started to put out. The increased length of the bows and the increased draw length combined to provide more stored energy and more energy imparted to the arrow, which I think may be as much the key to the general superiority of English archers as the draw weights of the bows.

[Clifford Rogers]

[Pieter B.]

[Clifford Rogers]

This is going far afield of the OP; suggest you start a new thread to discuss these questions.

[Dashiell Harrison]

[Jonathan Dean]