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Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
31–40 of 180 posts
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#32tl;dr: The abstract does a wonderful job. It is will worth reading. Longbow was cheap and technically superior, but required training. Crossbow more expensive, required less training. Rulers of England less worried about rebellion, OK to invest in training. Rulers of France/Scotland not so happy because of fear to give potential of overthrow to the people (Scotland not in title, but in article along with France). Per…
The Sharpe author Bernard Cornwell wrote a couple of novels set in / around Agincourt and from memory there are a few extras to throw in - but I love your last sentence's conclusion
1. The extra training was enormous - thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock, not Kevin Costner.
2. The "cheap" idea is misleading - in preparation ofr agincourt a huge amount of the English economny was turned over to making arrows. During Agincourt an estimated 3/4 million arrows were fired. When looking at economics of ranged weapons, don't compare Bows to guns, think RPGs
3. Agincourt changed everything for a generation. Thanks to mud, foolishness, and yes, longbows, France lost an entire generation of aristocracy in one day. The english were being chased out of the country and suddenly ... owned everything.
4. finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster, you are not tied down to a specfific class of army recruits and you dont have to feed Arnie.
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#33I think that the way this paper discusses on the longbow as being the superior weapon may obscure a key fact here. Man for man, a crossbow is a superior weapon; requires less skill to operate, has longer range, much easier to aim, better penetrating power. The main advantage of a longbow is how simple and cheap it is.
Speed of reloading is another advantage the longbow has, but I think this article overstates it. While some crossbows do require using a stirrup or crank to load them, there are others that you can reload against your hips, and shoot from there, to increase your speed considerably, at some cost to accuracy. I know people who have managed to get 6 bullseyes at 20 yards on a crossbow in 30 seconds. Meanwhile, archers would not be firing at the maximum possible rate in battle; ammunition is a limited resource, and with the draw weights of warbows fatigue would set in quickly. Overall, with the archers they had and bows they had at the time, it is likely that the longbows were able to be a little faster than the crossbows, but it's not a night and day thing; and the range, accuracy, and penetrating power on the crossbows were better.
The simplicity became an advantage in a few battles, which came after substantial rainstorms that caused problems with crossbows more complicated mechanisms. But the main advantage was how cheap and fast to produce they were; you could easily arm a large populace quite quickly. In order to take advantage of the longbow, you had to do that; you needed a very large number of archers to effectively take advantage of longbows, while you needed fewer archers to be effective with crossbows. But because it was cheap and simple, it was feasible to do that.
I think that cost and simplicity of the longbows were their biggest advantage; speed perhaps a secondary factor, but the sheer numbers were likely to be more important.
There is, of course, an interesting parallel here with some trends in modern military spending. The Joint Strike Fighter is a technological marvel; one of the most advanced pieces of military equipment ever. However, they are staggeringly expensive, and not actually the best dogfighters in the sky. You wonder how much more effective spending that money on more and simpler weaponry might have been.
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#34The intro still assumes that the battles won by the English in the Hundred Years War were due the longbow (alone), which AFAIK is quite debatable (at least outside of England, where Agincourt is a bit of a national myth, even more than e.g. the Black Legend). And never mind instability, the French also weren't as geographically isolated as the English and thus it was easier to hire mercenaries. Genoese crossbowman be…
France won the Hundred Years War.
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#35I think that the way this paper discusses on the longbow as being the superior weapon may obscure a key fact here. Man for man, a crossbow is a superior weapon; requires less skill to operate, has longer range, much easier to aim, better penetrating power. The main advantage of a longbow is how simple and cheap it is. Speed of reloading is another advantage the longbow has, but I think this article overstates it. Whi…
It's my understanding that a longbow has a greater range than a cross, especially one in the 1300s.
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#36I fail to see their references to support the claim that france or scotland was more politically unstable. Also how about the rest of european powers, I am not certain there is support that england was the only politically stable entity is europe during the middle ages.
Pages 699-702 address this in detail: “The land (France) was divided into loose and shifting territories that owed little or no allegiance to any central authority, ruled across large swathes by noblemen who were little more than warlords” and "Flanders, too, had great autonomy from the French monarch and strong ties to Germany and England (Sumption 1990, p. 35). In 1384 Flanders united with Burgundy to create a prin…
I think Scotland was split into a lot more than just three warring parts - there were battles between clans up to the 17th century!
[NB This probably explains why we have such an incredible number of castles here in Scotland.]
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#37I think that the way this paper discusses on the longbow as being the superior weapon may obscure a key fact here. Man for man, a crossbow is a superior weapon; requires less skill to operate, has longer range, much easier to aim, better penetrating power. The main advantage of a longbow is how simple and cheap it is. Speed of reloading is another advantage the longbow has, but I think this article overstates it. Whi…
You are directly contradicting a researched paper that explicitly contradicts everything you just said. Why do you think you're right?
Read page mid-page 691-693.
I'm also not sure what the point is of you talking about today's modern crossbows which are unsurprisingly easier to reload.
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#38It's funny how the article quietly assumes "Scotland+France+England" = "Europe".
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#39I see a possible problem with this theory: in few words, according to the authors the French and Scots did not adopt the longbow for fear of rebellion. Still the nobles participated to the very battles that saw them being defeated by the English and their longbow. If the longbow was cheap and relatively easy to adopt, a noble aspiring to the crown would have been able to develop the technology independently from the…
There's another major problem: preventing peasants from being a threat whilst still yielding some benefit from the longbow could easily have been achieved by restricting archery training to nobles and selected privileged guards, who had more time and inclination towards military training than the peasantry anyway. This would have resulted in less firepower than the English mass armies, but far more than the crossbows they used instead (indeed, since the principal advantage of the longbow over the crossbow was rate of fire, it would have been even more important to take advantage of in an army with a relative shortage of archers)
Alternate hypothesis: the French lacked the experience of the English/Welsh in making longbows and training people to use them, so struggled to see any evidence of superiority when experimenting with longbows over the crossbow technology they were more familiar with. A local maximum.
And the posited relationship between (in)stability and training regimes for the wider population looks more plausible flipped on its head: the less stable English kings paid less attention to the promotion of archery than Edward III not because they hoped laxity in training would result in any peasant armies raised against them being worse shots, but simply because they had more important things to worry about than archers.
Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
#40tl;dr: The abstract does a wonderful job. It is will worth reading. Longbow was cheap and technically superior, but required training. Crossbow more expensive, required less training. Rulers of England less worried about rebellion, OK to invest in training. Rulers of France/Scotland not so happy because of fear to give potential of overthrow to the people (Scotland not in title, but in article along with France). Per…
The Sharpe author Bernard Cornwell wrote a couple of novels set in / around Agincourt and from memory there are a few extras to throw in - but I love your last sentence's conclusion 1. The extra training was enormous - thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock, not Kevin Costner. 2. The "cheap"…
> finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster
But the army you raise is less effective; quantity vs quality.
A country which did not want or could not afford to train longbow men may have had a deeper flaw: its model. Perhaps the real reason England could beat France had been a long time in the making: a strong economy, and politically society that afforded it a more equipped better trained army.
I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.