The English Longbow: History 302

John Murray

Throughout European history there have been numerous wars of succession, invasions,

conquests, and occupations. From the time of the fall of Rome until the Ottoman invasion of the

15th century, the longest lasting of these is surely the Hundred Years War. Due to a great deal of

dynastic turmoil in France, as well as a Franco-Scot alliance during the Scottish War for

Independence, the English staged an invasion of the continent. This ignited a series of conflicts

that lasted from 1337 to 1453. Ultimately these conflicts did not win Edward III or any of his

successors a seat on the French throne. It did, however, result in a number of battles, such as

Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, these three in particular being decisive English victories. The

Chronicles of Froissart, written in the 1370’s, gives detail to these conflicts, and in each one,

pays a major credit to a weapon which has reached exalted status in English history, the

longbow.

It is important to realize that the longbow itself is not entirely significant out of historical

context. As a piece of engineering, it is relevant to the evolution of man, but it took three battles,

Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, to truly bring the weapon to light as the most efficient killing tool

of its time. As a technological innovation, the bow wasn’t new. Man had been making bows to

hunt with since before he could write. The difference in the longbow came in its simplicity, its

strength, and its employment en-masse . In Asia, the Mongols and Chinese were both building

composite bows with horn, resin, and sinew. In Turkey the Janissaries had already begun

transitioning to firearms by the mid-1400’s. In Western Europe however, the bow was still the

only reliable ranged weapon. During the 100 Years’ War, firearms were notoriously treacherous

and tended to kill the engineers as often as they killed the enemy. In contrast, a good longbow

enabled an archer to put arrows on target at great range with sufficient force to penetrate flesh,

bone, armor, and horses.12 Against an unarmored target a hit was almost guaranteed to be lethal.

Through the course of the paper I hope to outline the technology behind the longbow, its

integration into English armies, the training required to wield it, and its effects in battle which

have made it a legend for centuries.

The principle that gave the compound bow its terrible power in such a small stave was an

exaggerated pressure differential created by making sinew pull an extremely dense horn or bone

stave into a compressed state. This concept was not foreign to the English, but composite bows

use a laminate of several materials to accomplish this. The isle of Britain had a plentiful supply

of a tree with the ideal characteristics for producing this type of power in a single, uninterrupted

bow-stave. An expert bowyer would cut a single branch from a yew tree, and, in cutting it down,

leave a stave of wood that was roughly half heartwood, half sapwood, with the heartwood

making up the interior of the gentle, curving “belly” of the bow. This heartwood was dense and

straight, and resisted compression, giving the bow immense kinetic potential, the thicker the

belly, the heavier the draw and the more power put downrange. The sapwood, on the outer

“spine” of the bow was lighter, springier, and less dense, this is what gave the bow its

astonishing quickness upon the release. Combining these two, the springy sapwood squeezed the

less yielding heartwood belly and contained it on a string of twisted hemp and hair, creating a

barely contained explosion of power.3 What is amazing about this invention is that it was created

without knowledge of mechanical engineering or physics. The longbow was refined through a

long tradition of trial and error, it evolved, more than it was designed.

1 Clifford Rogers Efficacy of the English Longbow: A Reply to Kelly DeVries. War in History 5, no. 2 (1998): 2382 Hardy, Robert. Longbow: A Social and Military History, 36“they penetrated nearly the space of a palm” and following, describes a victim during the Welsh Wars that was pierced through “his thigh, the casing armour on both sides…the part of the saddle known as the alva, and mortally wounded the horse” 363 Hardy, Robert. Longbow: A Social and Military History, 31

The longbow is a weapon of such legend, thanks to its role played in the 100 Years War, that

quite a bit of mythology has sprung up around it, especially concerning its draw weights,

effective range, and efficacy versus armored targets. Bows came in a variety of strengths in sizes,

and although in fiction only men who have trained with the bow for years could even string one

of these bows, many of the bows recovered from historic sites have had surprisingly manageable

draw weights. Although there have been some bows, such as the Flodden Bow4, exhibited

weights as high as 90 pounds, such as the barrels of staves found aboard the wreckage of the

Mary Rose5. Nevertheless, modern recurve bows of fifty to sixty pounds are used for deer

hunting to this day, so the near mythological ninety-pound longbow found at Flodden was

probably not only an exception to the norm, wielded by an uncannily strong archer, but it also

shows that such a herculean weapon was not needed to inflict casualties enemy troops.

It is also important to take note of the age in which the longbow grew into its prime. The

battles of Crecy and Agincourt show examples during the 100 Years War of how a tool that kills

at a distance, but these were not the first innovations in killing that brought a terrifying efficiency

to the fray. In studying medieval warfare, one will often find that battles consisted of footmen,

soldiers without status or the money to afford a horse, locked in melee with other, similarly

equipped footmen. Kings relied on what was called the Fyrd, a drafted light infantry corps, to

make up the bulk of their armies, that is, until the Middle Ages, the golden age of Chevaliers.

Knights were the richest warriors on the battlefield, from noble families, with the money to buy

whatever equipment they needed. In the 14th and 15th century, knights wore plate armor, rode

massive armored horses, called Destriers, into combat, and sported some of the finest steel

4 “The Medieval English Longbow, Robert E. Kaiser, M.A. “Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries”, volume 23, 1980. Web accessed http://margo.student.utwente.nl/sagi/artikel/longbow/longbow.html, 4/26/15The estimated strength of the weapon is between 80 and 90 pounds.”5 ibid

weapons in Europe. They also brought an ethos to the battlefield, chivalry. Knights conducted

various displays of bravery, issuing challenges and fighting duels before battle was joined, acting

as champions of their armies. Once these displays were over, however, the knights still had a role

to play, in what became one of the earliest forms of “Shock Combat”6. However, it must be

understood that although the knight looked splendid, and could inflict terrible casualties, even

the King of England knew that armored horse alone would not destroy the enemy. By the 15th

century, it was also clear that “Cavalry was helpless against well-ordered archers”7 this is shown

by the numbers of troops brought to France in 1337 from England by Edward III, “They were in

number a four thousand men of arms and ten thousand archers, beside Irishmen and Welshmen

that followed the host afoot.”8. With Edward’s ranged troops having double the strength of his

mounted knights, it is clear he knew the importance of the archer for the invasion of France,

especially after his having tested their efficacy at Halidon Hill and Dupplin Moor, during the

Scottish War of Independence. These battles gave Edward the evidence and inspiration that lead

to the use of mass archers on the continent.

As romantic as it seems, the concept of the noble combat of knights on horseback, the

glorious charge, and the quick rout of the enemy, is purely that, romance and glamour. In reality

a battle was hardly so clean. If the initial charge of cavalry failed to break the enemy’s line, the

battle would almost certainly be protracted. An archer’s role in battle was multi-faceted. When

facing the French, the aforementioned cavalry charge was the chief concern. With as many as

five thousand archers guarding the flanks of the English at Agincourt. Archers needed to be able

6 TACTICS, STRATEGY, AND BATTLEFIELD FORMATION DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR: THE ROLE OF THE LONGBOW IN THE “INFANTRY REVOLUTION, John Mortimer, A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies, University of Pennsylvania, p357 Hardy, Robert. Longbow: A Social and Military History, 31-328 The Chronicles of Froissart Froissart, Jean; translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, http://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/basis/froissart-full.asp, web accessed 3/15/15

to inflict heavy casualties, or at least to be able to harass the enemy sufficiently that attacking

their less mobile formations would be considered too risky. In a recent paper from the U.S.

Military Academy by Clifford Rogers, titled Efficacy of the English Longbow: A Reply to Kelly

Devries, it is revealed that there is currently an argument among some scholars regarding the

ability of the weapon to win battles. Some, such as Devries, argue that most of the accounts we

currently possess of the longbow are sensational, trumped up stories by the victors, and that

archers “could not have caused the losses of life attributed to them by historians”9. However,

primary sources such as the Chronicles of Jean Froissart attest, albeit briefly, to the deadliness

of the longbow. At the beginning of the battle, the French deployed Genoese mercenaries to

harass the English front with crossbows, and after several volleys,

“the English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so wholly [together] and so thick, that it seemed snow … and ever still the Englishmen shot whereas they saw thickest press; the sharp arrows ran into the men of arms and into their horses, an many fell, horse and men, among the Genoways, and when they were down, they could not relieve again”

Essentially, Froissart is detailing a spirited and forceful rout of the mercenaries employed by

the French, the Genoese, and afterwards, it can be surmised that the arrows of the English

narrowed the charge of the French cavalry, causing their attack to lose much of its force, as well

as inflicting heavy casualties against horses and unarmored footmen. DeVries and their

contemporaries draw mainly from Froissart, as it is one of the closest texts to the battle of Crecy.

There is however, another chronicler who can attest to the efficacy of the English longbow

against armored horse, Enguerrand de Monstrelet governor of Cambrai and supporter of the

French crown, who wrote his own account of the battle at Agincourt:

“The division under sir Clugnet de Brabant, of eight hundred men-at-arms, who were intended to break through the English archers, were reduced to seven score, who vainly attempted it. True it is, that sir William de Saveuses, who had been also ordered on this

9 Clifford Rogers Efficacy of the English Longbow: A Reply to Kelly DeVries. War in History 5, no. 2 (1998): 238

service, quitted his troop, thinking they would follow him, to attack the English, but he was shot dead from off his horse.”10

From this one can see just how deadly advancing in the open under fire would have been.

Eight hundred men being reduced to one-hundred-forty in a single assault is a massive loss, and

whereas simple footmen would have only worn leather armor or simple ringmail, found or looted

from the foe, these were French men at arms, young knights and their commanding officers.

French nobility was notoriously well armored during the second invasion of the continent, so

much so that they felt confident they could advance straight into the archers’ lines, first on

horseback, then, when the horses armor failed them, on foot in their heavy platemail. After these

conflicts, the French, and other European armies, took these losses as an example, and slowly,

the archer, and eventually the firearm, would move to take precedent over cavalry.

The casualties inflicted on the French at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt sent a ripple through

the French army, and sparked what is known as the “infantry revolution” John Mortimer states

that “Just as “shock combat” resulted in a transformation of medieval warfare, the introduction

of the English longbow and its corresponding tactics would change strategy and tactics”11.

Essentially, this means that the longbowman, along improvements made to spear and pikeman

training, was able to nullify cavalry charges, and improved an army’s defensive capabilities on

an open field. This in turn caused armor to be strengthened, as is shown by the increasing

instances of heavy plate armor used, leading up to and including at Agincourt. As armor

improved further, eventually even the longbow would become obsolete, and by the 15th century,

cannonry was evolving into the choice weapon for most militaries in Europe. Indeed, one could

venture to place all military technology into such a timeline, with shield walls and swordsmen

10 Enguerrand de Monstrele, Chronique de France, The Battle of Agincourt: 141511 Tactics, Strategy, and Battlefield Formation During the Hundred Years War: The Role of the Longbow in the “Infantry Revolution” p21, John Mortimer, 2013

dominating the Viking age, only to be crushed by heavy horse. Then, the longbow sparked the

end of the age of the cavalier, and like other technological innovations, it can be seen as a turning

point, a catalyst that would bring about, eventually, maneuver warfare and attack by indirect fire.

It was the equivalent of artillery of its time, and showed the commanders of its day just how

deadly a hail of fire from an untouchable enemy could be. In conclusion, the longbow was the

defining innovation of military technology, the super-weapon of the English army, every bit as

deadly as its legends state, and a catalyst that would eventually lead mankind into the age of the

firearm.

Bibliography

1. Hardy, Robert. Longbow: A Social and Military History. Bois d’Arc Press, Pub. 19922. The Efficacy of the English Longbow: A Reply to Kelly Devries, Professor Clifford J.

Rogers U.S. Military Academy. http://militaryrevolution.s3.amazonaws.com/Primary%20sources/Longbow.pdfw, Web Accessed 4/1/15. Also Available from original publication: War In History Magazine, 1998, Vol5, No. 2, pp233-42.

3. Tactics, Strategy, and Battlefield Formation During the Hundred Years War: The Role of the Longbow in the “Infantry Revolution”, John Mortimer, A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies, University of Pennsylvania, August 2013.

4. Robert E. Kaiser, M.A. The Medieval English Longbow “Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries”, volume 23, 1980. Web accessed http://margo.student.utwente.nl/sagi/artikel/longbow/longbow.html, 4/26/15

5. Primary Source: Enguerrand de Monstrele, Chronique de France, The Battle of Agincourt: 1415, Web accessed via http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/130/Agincourt.html

6. Primary Source: The Chronicles of Froissart, by Froissart, Jean; translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, http://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/basis/froissart-full.asp, web accessed 3/15/15