Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

peterleeson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 180 posts

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#161

Post by ashark »

geggam wrote: post #137
jernfrost wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a long discussion about this on Quora. What I could gather from that was there were far more castles in Europe than China. Also Europe has too little plains to be able to support a mongol army very long. They each had something like 5 horses. There isn't enough grass for a large mongol army like that. One the debaters claimed e.g. that European castles were very well supplied for long sieges and would run out…

5 horses is quite a bit of food to feed the army... the more the army eats the more grass you have left for the horses... so when the castle is running out of food you have 1 good well fed horse and 1 good well fed soldier who has to win or he doesnt have enough horses to go home i think that wins

That's fine for the first siege (assuming an extra couple months was all you needed), but now you have to supply up with 4x(number of horsemen) for the next one to be in the same position. Tens of thousands of horses for even a smallish Mongol army. And at least some of them must be trained for war, specifically in the Mongol fashion, not just any ol' training. In short, it's not gonna happen on any reasonable time scale.

Plus you lose whatever advantage the extra horses gave you until you get more—I mean, I'm sure they didn't keep them around just for fun. Greater travel speed by resting them off, extra cargo/loot capacity, whatever their reasons were.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#162

Post by mannykannot »

cmdkeen wrote: post #119
mhd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need some pretty specific muscles for bowmanship, which don't really equate to a bodybuilder's physique. That goes both way, I wouldn't be sure whether Arnie in his best days could draw a 150 lbs bow, and I'm dead certain that Daffyd Longbowman didn't look like a candidate for Mr. Universe. But you still had some pretty healthy specimens, which brings to mind one important factor that's often forgotten: It's not…

The wreck of the Mary Rose has provided numerous well preserved skeletons of well trained longbowmen, and sailors (for comparison) and allowed studies of the effect upon their body. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17309665 - they found a significant difference in the lower arm bones of archers and non-archers.

Very interesting. I see that asymmetry is one of the indicators: "In fact, on one of the skeletons we have looked at, the surface area of the joint between the lower arm and elbow is 48% larger than on the joint on the other arm."

I believe there was a lot of arm-and-hand labor in being a sailor, but without the bias that archery creates.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#163

Post by mannykannot »

thesz wrote: post #82
zhte415 wrote: post #30

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…

You forget that there is no citation of any of medieval sources that support their claims. I cannot believe that rulers decide on something important like war technology without leaving history trails in literature.

Not entirely; see, for example, page 703.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#164

Post by mcv »

A historian friend claims this is bollocks. England was not significantly more stable, and the longbow was not a superweapon on its own. It was part of a system of combat, of combined arms, involving knights fighting on foot and choosing the right terrain.

And when they didn't have the right terrain, those English longbowmen also lost plenty of battles. They had some spectacular victories at Crecy and Agincourt, but they also had their fair share of losses.

Excellent weapon, but no silver bullet.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#165

Post by mcv »

ucaetano wrote: post #81
vkazanov wrote: post #48

Interesting. Although this point of view might be a bit simplified, there's another example of a weapon, which was both relatively cheap to make - and really hard to use unless the whole society was built around the skills required to use it. 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 wi…

It's hard to compare Mongols to Europeans. The composite bows rely on animal-based adhesives, which are great in cold and dry climates, but fall apart in humid and warmer climates. Also, light cavalry armies are useless against castles and fortified cities as the ones found in most of Europe, specially when you don't have huge, flat battlefields that allow light cavalry to circle any target. In other words, Mongol wa…

Castles and cities weren't the problem: the Mongols were also good at siege warfare. Their main obstacle blocking westward expansion was the simple fact that steppe nomads are primarily good at the steppe, and not so good in the forests and mountains of central Europe.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#166

Post by dmckeon »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #101

Anybody going to draw a parallel between this, and modern gun-control efforts? Or is that too contentious to be helpful in illuminating this centuries-old issue.

Here is a contemporaneous control effort:

We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.

Canon 29, 2nd Lateran Council, held 1139, under Pope Innocent II

The council also forbade "jousts and tournaments". Apparently the original text has not survived, so only secondary sources and translations are available, some of which vary.

In any case, the prohibition appears to have been ineffective.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#167

Post by mcv »

trhway wrote: post #150

>Yet the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) lasted longer than a hundred years—plenty of time for England’s enemies to learn that their defeats were heavily influenced, if not caused, by the longbow. Didn't England lose the Hundred Years War? At least looking at the map before and after - it lost everything on the continent, incl. last remnants of Angevin and Normandy lost to France, with France rising up significantly bi…

Yes, England lost. The thing is, field battles don't really win wars; sieges do. At least when the war is about territory.

England did a lot of damage to France, but couldn't really hold on to the territory. And besides, it was really only a handful of field battles they won so spectacularly (not just due to the longbow, but due to a more comprehensive strategy involving longbows together with knights on foot and good defensive terrain).

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#168

Post by mannykannot »

notahacker wrote: post #39
gobbo wrote: post #8

I 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…

The authors do consider these issues (though perhaps not to your satisfaction). They say that the longbow was only really effective en masse, requiring the participation of the yeomanry, and that the duration of the period of English longbow dominance, and the number of against-the-odds English victories in that time, provided both the motivation and opportunity for its opponents to develop the same capability. They argue that the French were well aware of the threat that English archers presented, and frequently avoided battle on that account, preferring to recapture territory after the main English army had moved on. In the quote on page 703, they offer a contemporary account of the French beginning to adopt the longbow, but reversing the policy precisely out of a fear that it would enable insurrection.

From my limited knowledge of medieval society, I think the nobility would have considered archery to be completely beneath their dignity, and an affront to chivalry. Their proper place was on a horse, in armor and wielding a broadsword or lance.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#169

Post by mcv »

ucaetano wrote: post #107
vkazanov wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Huge, flat battlefieds" were a norm everywhere. Medieval battles were ONLY possible on flat surfaces, as the main force of the time - heavy cavalry - requires that. Besides, Mongols completely plundered Rus' and the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, and most of those lands were and are forests/lakes/swamps. For example, they used rivers in winters to travel through the countryside. Also, after conquering China they also ha…

Agincourt wasn't fought in a huge, flat battlefield. Neither was Tours, Hastings, Crecy, Poitiers, Patay, etc. European wars were fought in a very diverse range of battlefields, and most commanders, specially the outnumbered ones, would try as much as possible to use the battlefield in their advantage.

And that was at least as much the key to the English victories as the longbow was: good defensive terrain that was unsuitable for the French cavalry charge. When the French did have room to charge, England lost. The longbow was only a single factor in a much bigger system.

Re: Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?

#170

Post by cwp »

merpnderp wrote: post #154
jernfrost wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually one of the points made in the book Guns, Germs and Steel is that technology and inventions aren't developed because there is a need for them. Rather inventions pop up and disappear all the time through history in different cultures. But what makes the technology stay around is that it ends up getting used. E.g. South America did invent wheels, but since there was no ox or horse to pull the invention had not…

Surely Llamas could have pulled some cargo. This says that an adult llama can pull cart loads of up to 200lbs: http://workingllamas.com/?id=93 That's significantly less than a draft horse, but probably roughly the same as a pony.

Actually, the issue there is terrain. Llamas are very agile and can carry loads to areas that neither horses nor carts can reach. Smaller loads, of course, but still much more than a person can carry.

Even today, horses aren't really a thing in the Andes, compared to say, Patagonia.

Post reply on HN