41–50 of 180 posts
However I've never found a copy online, which is a shame because I remember it has being one of his best.
The 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.
It's funny how the article quietly assumes "Scotland+France+England" = "Europe".
I really can't see this assumption made anywhere in the paper.
tl;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"…
But you still had some pretty healthy specimens, which brings to mind one important factor that's often forgotten: It's not like archers were suddenly useless when they couldn't fire their bows anymore. They were decently well armed and armored, and if you're swarmed by guys with mauls (and possibly deep in mud), your fancy chain & plate doesn't really help you all that much.
It's funny how the article quietly assumes "Scotland+France+England" = "Europe".
Can you provide a concrete example ? I really can't see this assumption made anywhere in the paper.
> England alone, for a 150-year window in late medieval Europe, was politically stable enough to render the longbow its rulers’ optimal technology choice. In contrast, in France and Scotland political instability prevailed, rendering the crossbow the optimal technology choice for rulers in these nations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 political…
Unfortunately, I haven't gone through it in ten years, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have some faulty methodology.
tl;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"…
As a nitpick: No, he would not. You don't achieve anything near build of Arnold or The Rock without steroids (both have admitted to steroid use), nor do you achieve it with more endurance focused training rather than maximising load for a low number of reps. Big and strong, sure, but much more compact.
A boxer would be a more natural comparison.
Mongols! Light cavalry using composite bows was both unbelievably effective and hard to copy for everybody but steppe nomads. All Mongols were hunters, they practically lived with their bows on their horses. So the whole population could do warfare.
While back in the days, in both Eastern and Western Europe, contemporary warfare was rotating around heavy cavalry, and one can't have too many knights. Even if somebody managed to gather an army more or less comparable to Mongol hordes - heavier cavalry would just be meat for lighter riders making circles around them.
Besides, feudal lands never managed to be centralized enough to counter mongols. In medieval Rus' the need to centralize led to the rise of Moscow - and it took quite a while anyway.
I 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.
tl;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…
It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history. For another military technology example, the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.