What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting.
For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
In particular, the concept of 'drill' gets a lot of attention:
"Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.... The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine."
IMHO that's the key point against the "no volley" idea. Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own. You act in formation and repeat what you've been drilled.
A company of archers is probably the same. They'd be working in unison following the direction of their captain. Not for shock value. But to manage fatigue, arrow supply, and ensure that they're firing with a full draw.
You can act together in formation without being in total lockstep for every motion. Did all the infantrymen swing their swords at the same time? Of course not. It doesn't make any sense for one archer to "wait" for their neighbor before firing. And as the article points out, firing in unison would increase fatigue, not reduce it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it also makes it easier for the enemy to respond. If arrows are only coming in concentrated volleys, then it might be easier for the enemy to make a coordinated advance where they just periodically crouch behind their shields as a volley comes, and then make relatively unhindered advances during the lull.
A diffuse but more-or-less constant stream of arrows arriving at random is presumably more distracting and harder to deal with, and therefore a greater hindrance to enemy infantry.
It does make sense. You don't want archers to burn energy & ammo by firing too rapidly or before the enemy is in range.
I agree that sitting there for minutes holding the bow taut is dumb. But something like a Attention, Nock, Ready, Draw, Loose cycle isn't that. Maybe you hold it a half second and it's slightly more fatiguing but I don't really see it.
If it is you just combine draw and loose. It will make the spread between arrows slightly larger but it's still a volley.
> Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own. You act in formation and repeat what you've been drilled.
No, drilling was a response to the use of gunpowder weapons.
> Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own.
There's a passage from Julius Caesar where he describes how, set on from behind, the rear line of his army turned around so that they could fight in that direction instead of just getting slaughtered. It is noted mostly for the total lack of any suggestion that Caesar bears any responsibility for the brilliant maneuver.
But before you get to that point, you should observe that this was in fact a brilliant and spontaneous battlefield maneuver, not something that anyone had ever been trained to do.
Roman armies trained and drilled extensively. And Roman armies had lower and mid level commanders, that could make decisions and direct troops within certain limitations. Everything wasn’t direct movement orders from Caesar to every individual soldier. A centurion could have made that call, not something spontaneous at the individual level. I'm not sure what battle you are talking about, although I would guess maybe the siege of Alesia, but without knowing, I can't comment on the specifics.
> To take another example, Caesar’s army at Bibracte (58BC) famously manages the feat of winning when attacked in both the front and the rear by about-facing its third line and attacking in both directions at once. Notably Caesar does not say that he did this, merely that the Romans did, which is a strong indication that turning the rear ranks of the army to face backwards was a decision made by more junior officers (probably centurions).
That said, of course I disagree with GP's claim that classical and medieval armies didn't drill. They certainly did drill. Bret has a whole blog post on the topic. [1] Quote from that post:
> Josephus [...] offers the most famous endorsement of Roman drills: “Nor would one be mistaken to say that their drills are bloodless battles, and their battles bloody drills” (BJ 3.5.1).
The quote from Josephus, extended:
> [The Romans] have never any truce from warlike exercises; nor do they stay till times of war admonish them to use them; for their military exercises differ not at all from the real use of their arms, but every soldier is every day exercised, and that with great diligence, as if it were in time of war, which is the reason why they bear the fatigue of battles so easily; for neither can any disorder remove them from their usual regularity, nor can fear affright them out of it, nor can labour tire them: which firmness of conduct makes them always to overcome those that have not the same firmness; nor would he be mistaken that should call those their exercises unbloody battles, and their battles bloody exercises.
That reminds me that Plutarch's Life of Eumenes §11 has a fun story about how Eumenes kept his men (and horses) in shape despite a close siege; it's hardly evidence for regular exercises but it's an amusing example of an irregular exercise! [3]
> I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection.
It very much depends on the historical context. Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. If they broke rank or ran away from battle, everyone including their parents, siblings, neighbors, and potential lovers would hear about it back home (and never let them live it down). Most conscripts at that time fought alongside their fellow villagers and farmers, not random professional soldiers. They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
> They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
Historical times were brutal. If they were defending their home, losing the battle would result in their home being pillaged and their family enslaved or raped. That would be a great motivator to not run
> losing the battle would result in their home being pillaged and their family enslaved or raped.
Only true in certain times and places, mostly sacking besieged towns cities where it was done in order to pressure the defenders of the next siege to surrender with terms rather than fight to the end.
Not all historical societies had slavery. It declined hugely in medieval Europe - the Normans abolished it in England, for example (people forget this because of the revival of slavery in early modern times, and of course its continuation in other cultures) not long after they conquered the country.
> Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue.
Most peasants during the Middle ages did not fight at all, except in revolts and uprisings, usually with terrible outcomes.
If they were taken along for the (military campaign) ride by their feudal lord, it is most likely they would have avoided the battlefield altogether, providing auxiliary services, e.g. setting up camp, feeding the horses, cooking, tending to their liege, etc.
Conscription was not really a thing until the mid-Renaissance (roughly), and the vast majority of battles in the Middle ages was fought by nobility, ranging from lower class to dukes and lords.
Archers were themselves generally peasants or freemen. You’re talking about a huge stretch of time and a wide range of cultures so absolutes are less true than trends.
Conscription and use as it applied to semi professional soldiers like archers was very much a thing because they were quite useful. By semi-professional I mean their training was encouraged rather than subsidized by the governments outside of wartime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Arms_of_1252
“Whereas the people of our realm, rich and poor alike, were accustomed formerly in their games to practise archery – whence by God's help, it is well known that high honour and profit came to our realm, and no small advantage to ourselves in our warlike enterprises... that every man in the same country, if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make use, in his games, of bows and arrows... and so learn and practise archery.”
Henry the 3rd’s decree about practicing archery drills regularly across the peasant population really worked out well for the English during the 100 Years War- they were able to field high numbers of dangerous and skilled ranged warriors and allowed for the massive victories like Crécy and (of course) Agincourt.
Yes but we should be careful with the word “drill” as I’m not sure how much formal and coordinated training occurred vs just being told to go to the archery range before or after work every day. A quick search didn’t tell me the details.
Not that I think you’re claiming this, but the Assize of Arms 1252 certainly didn’t mean archers were training in volley fire.
Surprisingly close to a standing army, when looked at from a certain angle. Only that it's not taxes going to the central authority and then getting paid to warriors, but warriors getting assigned an area to tax, and keep their cut as compensation for their military readiness.
(of course when looked at from just a slightly different angle, it's also indistinguishable from a protection racket)
Terry Jones' documentary of medieval times made the point that the nobility was pretty similar to an organized crime family. Of course, he wasn't aiming at scholarly accuracy but trying to give viewers the flavor.
It is not an incorrect comparison, superficially it is hard to tell the difference between organized crime and the legitimate government, they both provide the same "services", protection for a portion of the profits.
There is a sort of equivalency in a corporation and a government, I would even say a corporation is a government, it is the ruling apparatus for a group of people. Organized crime is a corporation that is trying to operate outside the law of it's parent operation.
I like to joke that the reason the government is so hard on organized crime is that they don't like the competition.
But really organized crime should be suppressed because it is a brutal warlord style government.
Armies had a lot of more or less professional infantrymen, be they in the retinue of a lord or knight (and they could be peasants even if a peasant would generally have no reason to go to war, and the lords would have few motivations/legal means to constrain serfs to go), mercenaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company), or common-law prisoners (a bit as the Russians did in Ukraine).
Free families would often have to send someone to war if the local lord called.
In the medieval era in Europe few were generally professional, in the sense that it was their full time job even in peacetime. Like you said the Kings retinue would be one of the few exceptions. Since the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire there just wasn’t the concentration of resources in Europe for maintaining standing armies. Most were effectively a reserve force, somewhat akin to the. National Guard in the US hat could be “called up” in the event of a war.
Military mercenary companies were absolutely a thing (probably as early as 10th century, although they were also definitely a thing during the Roman empire), but they were very different from your typical peasant.
Conscription and Mercenary companies became more prevalent as the scale of warfare increased, and the early gunfire which necessitated coordinated volley fire.
> What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops.
He talks specifically in other posts about the problems with "discipline" as a term (it groups too many different things as though they were the same), and he talks specifically about "cohesion" (which is the thing I think you're getting at) in this post at several points.
As an untrained soldier myself, I can attest that I would freak out if I saw a whole bunch of arrows flying in my general direction, and probably change my course entirely.
Not sure if you’d ever see a whole bunch of arrows. In a space the size of a battlefield, with 1 arrow per 10s per archer, you’d need a lot of them to have several in flight in your general direction at once.
>the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows
Case in point the Spartan army led by Leonidas. One of the soldiers apparently really said that if the Persians will rain fire arrows on them, they will fight in the shade.
The author has a VERY dim view of Sparta, and of the people who worship Sparta and of the quality of information the legend of Sparta is based upon (second hand roman information, from Romans, at a time where Sparta had become a sort of theme park for bored senators).
Just talking about the last stand of Leonidas and the 300 (+7000 thebans etc). Of course, a society driven purely by millitaristic macho men will implode. I have read about this a bit before (Not from this author)
>> I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover.
Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.
If you're not yet aware of it (unlikely as it made it 'big' in the overall internet), I believe the video from Tod's Workshop with actual experimentation is a must see:
>Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible
and that is where volley may be helpful - simultaneous hit to multiple horses and soldiers may break the pace and may cause stumbling and local pile-ups. Slow down of advance -> more exposure time to the follow up arrows.
It takes a special (in a bad way) kind of commander to send more arrows after their cavalry and infantry engaged. I'm sure there are records of it having happened, but you have to assume you're taking just as many casualties as the enemy due to friendly fire.
I assume the accuracy of the average arrow and non-professional soldier might dissuade one to get anywhere near the fire range. Enough will fail to launch properly, slip or be dysfunctional that there's no way you'd want them shot from right behind you.
Eh, plenty of people run into the line of fire even today. People don’t think straight when under a lot of stress.
Also, the only safe place to be in War is far from it; so by definition soldiers need to be trained to ignore a lot of threats to their wellbeing in order to do their job.
There are some examples in the American War of Independence (or maybe War of 1812), where militias would lie down to reload and break the discipline of the overall force.
Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.
The statistics about the draw weight of war bows being 100 to 170 lb (45-77 kg) is striking to me. Imagine getting to the gym, picking up a single 45 kg dumbbell (the lowest end!), and setting out to rep as many single-arm rows as you can before failure. Of course you wouldn't hold that dumbbell at full contraction; that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.
I used to have a 100-lb bow (for re-enactment), and the comparison is apt, but slightly off:
Imagine picking up a 45-kg weight using only a string held by three fingers. The pressure on the fingers is intense. Getting the shoulders and chest into the pull is the trick, and it's not quite as hard as lifting a weight off the floor because of that. But the fingers are doing a lot of work. Mine had turned white after a few shots, even with a thick leather tab to protect them.
We did do volleys, because the public expected it and it was fun to do. But we could not hold for long - the bloke doing the shouting knew that he had only a couple of seconds between "draw" and "loose" or we'd be all over the place.
Drawing a bow activates muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activates muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell.
What makes it various bow styles exceptionally difficult is the draw style -- horsebow drawing by a single thumb is especially difficult; war bow has a strange draw style I've never attempted due to shoulder issues, recurve isn't difficult as you get three fingers, and compound archery is simply cheating.
Most of these draws aren't a draw and immediate release, but a draw and hold to aim. That's where archery becomes physically exhaustive. There was some recent YTer who showed off by drawing a 100#+ bow but couldn't hit worth shit. Hitting your target takes patience and practice.
As noted in another child, draw weights are typically measured at 30", but your draw may only be 29" or may be 31", etc. You'd want a bow that fits your draw length as close as possible, though.
Can confirm Compound archery is cheating - especially with modern releases and sights.
A couple months of training and many folks can consistently hit a soup can at 50 yards with a 75# draw (or better). That would be absurd to even contemplate 100 years ago.
I never was a fan of compound bows. I remember when I was participating in archery as a hobby. The instructor told us that in competition archery, if one uses a recurve bow, then winners are determined by who hits the bullseye (or closest) the most. In compound bow competitions, losers are determined by who hit the bullseye the least. It's a tongue in cheek way of emphasizing the ridiculous accuracy of compound bows.
I prefer the antiquity of recurve bows and the lesser amounts of maintenance that comes with them. Though, I also think compound bows are beyond dangerous in comparison.
I have found that recurve archers seem to be better about 'checking' their arrows after missed shots. Many compound users I have known think that as long as the arrow is not completely snapped, then it's safe to use. I just show them the Google images of what happens when an arrow with hairline cracks explodes the near instant the quick-release is released.
This issue can happen with high draw weight recurve bows, but I have never seen the damage like what a compound bow can do.
>Drawing a bow activates muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activates muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell.
You don't ever bend over and pick something off the ground?
YouTube suggested an old NileRed video to me today. He bought 100 lbs of titanium shot for a project. It came in a bag in a metal can.
The first two times he lifted the bag he said this isn’t that heavy, maybe he got defrauded, so he got a scale and checked. But by the time he tried to lift it off the scale he was struggling, and getting it back into the metal can was serious work.
Stamina separates the pro from the amateur, but fatigue comes for all of us.
That is the weight at maximum draw. It is more like pulling back a rubber band that gets progressively harder until you hit your max. It isn't like lifting a weight which is a steady force. Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up. A bow doesn't have inertia. You can pull it back as quick as you like, which makes it easier for a given max "weight" of pull.
(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)
>Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up.
Force is force, whether it is due to elasticity or gravity. The difference is that the drawing force increases progressively, whereas the weight of an object is (for these purposes) constant (as stated).
How modern? Not modern enough for writers and directors of photography to have gotten the wrong idea, right? This trope got in early and has never gone away.
After the 18th century, virtually nobody would have used a war bow. Other than recreationists, everyone's archery experience would be of target and hunting bows. Both have much lower draws.
When I owned one, it had a 65lb draw with an 80% letoff. So it took maybe 10/15lbs to hold it at full draw. But my bow could still reliably throw arrows out to around 300m, basically double the range of an english longbow. Nobody ever aims a modern bow for max range. Doing so is incredibly dangerous. World record distance shots have broken 1000m.
I guess that’s true. And when you’re hunting a deer it’s better to not loose an arrow than to shoot it badly, so taking a beat to refine your aim would make sense.
I had a teacher that was a bow hunter. I believe he claimed it was the only arrangement fair to the deer. They had a sporting chance. I can’t imagine he fired more than a couple arrows in any hunting trip. Very different from shoot or die.
I don't think it's appropriate to call that "sporting chance" - for the deer this is not a sport, it's a very serious life or death situation, where they'd very much rather not be.
That does not leave us any conversation to have that is appropriate to HN though.
They consider it a sport, the sport requires physical discipline, and that discipline is a propos of the topic.
If you want to get into the cruelty of hunting, we will first have to decide if raising feedlot animals is less cruel than hunting, and you will absolutely lose that argument. But we aren't here to discuss any of that. We are talking about the stopping power of arrows and arrows don't care what mammal they are aimed at.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F Scott Fitzgerald, probably stolen from Zelda Fitzgerald.
Yes-ish. But "sporting chance" may be a way for the hunter to say that wants his recreational pastime to be difficult enough to be interesting to him. Or that he is repelled by the idea of using really modern drone & firearms technology, and slaughter-at-scale.
The article's point about the lethality of arrows.. I feel like every Youtube test I've seen on the subject shows that Arrows can pierce even full plate pretty reasonably easily, though this is not scientific at all ofc.
Check out Tod's Workshop youtube channel. It's only entertainment, but he has a far more realistic overall testing of arrows' armour-piercing capability.
A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.
Never eliminated though!
But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
> [I]n the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal.
That's likely talking about a shot at close quarters (from the strongest kind of pre-modern bows in the world), the chausses the arrow went through would have been mail not plate, and horses are much less resilient than humans.
Of course longbows could and did kill - they wouldn't have been used in war otherwise! But they did not routinely kill through plate armour at range.
Not sure what you mean by "strongest", but you might want to make a comparison with mongol composite bows.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
> Not sure what you mean by "strongest", but you might want to make a comparison with mongol composite bows.
I believe it's generally accepted that the longbows we're talking about delivered arrows with more force than Mongol composite bows.
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
Horses are notoriously fragile. The quote does not say that the horse died instantly, merely that it died.
No, they're not. One could argue that some of the recent breeds, designed for a particular aesthetic rather than practicality, are, but that's not really within this subject.
> horses are big and react poorly to being wounded: a solid arrow hit on a horse is very likely to disable both horse and rider. And while light or archer cavalry might limit exposure to mass arrow fire by attacking in looser formation, as we’ve discussed, European heavy horse generally engages in very tight lines of armored men and horses in order to maximize the fear and power of their impact. Unsurprisingly then, we see from antiquity forward, efforts to armor or protect horses, called ‘barding’: defenses of thick textile, scale, lamellar, and even plate are known in various periods, though of course the more armor placed on the horse, the larger and stronger it needs to be and the slower it moves. Nevertheless, the size and shape of a horse makes it harder to armor than a human and you simply cannot achieve a level of protection for a horse that is going to match a heavy infantryman on the ground, especially if the latter has a large shield.
> rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
This is the standard simplified narrative of what happened at Agincourt - English archers wiping out French noble heavy cavalry - although it also seems like that was an exception.
They were charging up hill in the mud. Noone really died from arrows, except maybe some of the horses. But a lot of their horses fell and then the knights ran back through their own infantry, though apparently that wasn't that big a deal in the battle.
The battlefield killing was done by light infantry wading in with daggers and hatchets apparently during a foot slog up the muddy hill which left the french heavy infantry exhausted. Another wave of killing afaik was when the captured prisoners were all executed since the english position seemed like it might be overrun by some follow up fighting.
(keep in mind the battle took hours and there was a lot more going on then just heavy horse riding up against arrows once or twice)
First, that archers can actually be more effective against mounted troops than foot: the mounted troops ride close together, horses are hard to fully armor, and one horse getting hit in the leg can cause a lot of chaos.
Second, at Agincourt, the French knights _walked_ through the arrow-fire quite successfully, but the effort (physical, mental, cumulative effect of small wounds) tired them enough that the English soldiers could beat them hand-to-hand. And that this ability to inflict small damage before the main fighting is why archers were valuable.
Angles matter. There’s a famous rout that happened in France where an English army overstayed its welcome and was trying to make its way back to England when the locals decided it would be better to never have to deal with them again by finishing it now. I thought it was William of Orange but I cannot find anything to corroborate that.
They pinned his army down with a fresher army meaning to destroy them. The English infantry and cavalry were vastly outnumbered due to attrition, but what he did have were longbows. And somehow they beat a superior army while losing a fraction as many men.
The historical military analysis I saw was that with the front lines so thin, the archers essentially didn’t have to fire long arching volleys. The flatter angle of the arrow trajectory and shorter flight distance increased the penetration force, and they just absolutely destroyed every charge against them, confusing the attacking army. Arrows should not be dropping this many men. WTF.
You must be referring to the Battle of Agincourt, as Henry V was heading back to Calais after laying a too-prolonged siege of Harfleur, during the 100 Years War.
If it's Agincourt, then Bret talks about it quite a bit in the article. Essentially, it was the best case scenario for bows and even then both the French infantry and cavalry were able to advance and get to the English lines. However, both were weakened enough that they were defeated by the English forces waiting for them.
In a YouTube test I have seen (Todd's Workshop) their plate armor didn't really care about a 100kg draw weight longbow. Though if I remember correctly they said it's possible it would have done a bit of damage back then depending on material quality.
I don't think 'plate' was a standard kind of quality either, so while the top quality plate might be effectively impervious to arrows except for an unlikely lucky splintering shot into a weak point or gap, there were probably lots of thinner, less coverage providing plate armours where the probability of defeat was still very low, but not completely zero.
> that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.
I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
On the other hand as someone noted: you don't bring up a dumbbell by a thin string with 3 fingers.
I think when trained and without holding like in the movies you could go a bit longer than you'd expect with dumbbels but goddamn your fingers must hurt after.
This is highly contextual based on time and place. While most people would have had access to fewer calories compared to the modern day, the average person wasn’t starving to death under normal circumstances. We’re talking a population that engaged in regular manual labour, so sufficient nutrition was necessary. I’d also guess the societies starving their populace were unlikely to call them up to war unless they were really desperate.
Agreed. I'm an amateur archer and I asked my archery instructor the highest poundage recurve bow he's ever seen someone fire, and he says that one time someone came to the range with a 100 pound draw bow, but he's only seen that once in 10 years.
Compound bows of course you can go higher because of mechanical advantage, but either way I don't think that people realize how difficult it is to draw a 100 pound bow. Typical professional recurve bow users would rarely want to exceed 50 pounds as I understand it.
There’s also a bit of a different optimization goal in modern archery - the goal is to put as many arrows precisely on a target. More draw weight helps up to a certain extent, but ranges are pre-set and limited and once your draw weight is high enough to comfortably propel the arrow that far, more weight will not improve things. Aiming gets harder at a higher weight. You could shoot a heavier arrow, but the benefits are somewhat limited - it punches a bigger hole which helps a bit, but you’re not trying to kill the target - so the added penetration is not interesting.
In a war setting, higher draw weights increase both distance and penetration, which are desirable.
The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
> actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
I don't see it as a bad thing really. Can't say about all professions but in mine (software engineering) I've seen many professionals who has decades of experience and still do things poorly, take bad decisions and make outright incorrect statements.
There's nothing wrong with politely asking questions and consistently challenging the logic shared by professionals. Maybe you'll learn something from them, maybe you'll learn that they are incompetent. Either way, some useful information.
it happens on practically every topic. this was technologically not possible 100 years ago and it’ll be fascinating to watch play out. stfu and listen is a legit skill in 2025
In discussing why in LOTR Saruman's battle campaign is terrible:
"Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be."
Peter H Wilson had an interesting point in his 30 years war book that it's not just the appearance of firearms (musketeers in Spanish terzios fired in their own time), you also had to have a philosophical change to allow seeing a human as a cog in a larger machine; it's fundamentally an Early Modern concept rather than a renaissance one. And so you first see volley fire among the Italian condottieri and the Low Countries' militias, where you were simultaneously seeing the start of mercantile economies based on transactions between individuals.
What this article doesn't account for is the proposition that many, many historic armies did war bow volley fire, and we've never heard about it because they all got wiped out because it's such a bad idea.
I would expect victors to write down how amazingly stupid their opponents were and why that gives them god given right to now lord over them and their subjects...
Not really, first, being wiped out doesn't mean literally everyone dying, but also it doesn't prevent the winning side from recording the victory and its cause
Perhaps oral traditions survive from soldiers sold into slavery from lost battles. Like somehow, the folly of volley fire made it into the name of some food dish.
Or maybe they would have simply massacred any army so dumb as to try it.
I don't understand the need to come up with some fancy niche (slavery, oral, food name) when you have the more common approach: as is usual, part of the army ran away, and it included people of all ranks, from soldiers to generals, and they recorded it in all the same ways all the other events for recorded in the same sources (including training guides)
Then you continue to ignore the other elephant - the soldiers and everyone else who won battles also record history avoiding the slavery/food route
After that discussion of draw weight, I can now see why English longbowmen are notable in the the archeological record due their noticeable spinal deformities.
So basically, what he's saying is that the depictions in Hägar the Horrible of fighters charging on with arrow-studded shields aren't all that unrealistic. File under unexpected.
When I was playing Medieval: Total War (both I and II), the bows and crossbows were very effective against an enemy attacking me. Now I wonder if the game modeled the arrow barrage realistically, or to align it with our movie-based perception of medieval archers.
There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.
Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead.
Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.
> Total War is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design.
Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series.
(It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.)
> There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational.
That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.
From Rome 2 multiplayer, I remember spearmen absolutely not even with swords :P My server played with swords limit, because then everyone would pick only them!
Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D
Yeah idk about Rome 2, never played that one. It sounds like the game is unbalanced if an all-swordsman army is best and nobody has come up with a counter. Then again I doubt any of those games are very well balanced for pvp battles.
Their essay on composite infantry types is interesting as a Crusader Kings II player, because the game has tons of historically accurate mixed units you can recruit that combine archers and heavy infantry/pikes, but virtually all of those units suck because the combat mechanics still enforce a rock-paper-scissors dynamic.
Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad.
The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops.
In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.
Btw, the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for MTW2 is amazing. It turns the game into a more historically accurate and overall better version of Rome TW... but archers still do volleys, which even if they wanted to avoid, is probably part of the game engine.
Interestingly, mounted archers don't do volleys in those games.
The bow has a slow rate of fire, you can't hold a longbow in firing position for long (150+lbs of force required hold the drawn back bow), and you are only accurate from 300-800 feet (add 15% if in a high tower). That means charging calvary will reach your archers in 10-15 seconds and moderately paced walking infantry unit will be on top of your archers within 20-30 seconds of entering range. That leaves time for a few arrows. The bunched up, tight formations formed a reasonable defense - your outer troops would take the hits from the archers for the 20 seconds it took to get to the archers.
We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...
It seems to me that at Agincourt the archers place obstacles in front of their position--sharpened stakes. That would have provided some protection against a cavalry
Agincourt was interesting because mud (a combination of rain and fresh plowed fields) reduced infantry and cavalry mobility. The opening cavalry charge made the muddy battlefield worse, and the combination of mud and stakes on the ground injured the horses. The French were heavily armored, causing men-at-arms to sink up to their knees in mud. English longbowmen were able fire arrows into the french men-at-arms who were literally stuck in the mud until they ran out of arrows. The decisive moment was when English archers ran out of arrows and attacked the exhausted French with the hatchets and mallets they used to make and drive the stakes into their defensive positions.
Why would anybody ride a horse directly towards archers? If an arrow can make the horse fall or buck, the guy riding it with any sort of heavy armor is probably coming down hard.
To be fair, an arrow released from a bow with a draw weight of over 150 pounds could easily launch an arrow that could pass through multiple people at close range -- depending on how light their armor was.
I've seen bows with a third of that draw weight completely pass through a deer.
Obviously, certain factors have to be met -- distance being the most important and then shot placement.
in the spirit that you only need one reason to be right, not five: the strongest argument against volley "fire" is indeed that holding a bow is exhausting and so a commander wouldn't tell their archers to "hold" before releasing.
I've read the whole thing and I'm not convinced at all.
First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false.
But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.
I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama.
> First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it
Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Edit: To quote the OP: "... as hard as it is to prove a negative, I will note that I have never seen a clear instance of volley fire with bows in an original text and so far as I can tell, no other military historians have either. And we have been looking."
> it still seems perfectly reasonable to me
Where's your evidence? "seems perfectly reasonable" leads to belief in witchcraft, the stars orbit the earth, leaches cure disease, the lack of germ theory, etc. That's why we modern humans require evidence.
> Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Be very careful with that assumption. Brett Devereux (author of the blog) himself constantly points out that our historical sources are often very limited because they were written by the nobility who only wrote about their own social class, completely ignoring the majority of people actually involved in a military campaign or civic life. We know a lot more about the generals and cavalry than the foot soldiers, archers, or supply train.
I think that argument cuts the other way on this one. If there were some higher-rank person, presumably a noble, ordering a volley, as depicted in TV shows, and as happened with firearms, there would be a bias towards mentioning that person doing that, to demonstrate his command, rather than towards omitting him!
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics.
I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
> I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
But we do have so much written about musket volleys, and those were done by lower status soldiers as well. It is very strange that much was written about musket volleys but not archer volleys.
The printing press fundamentally changed everything so our sources get much more socially inclusive starting with the arquebus onwards (but not so much the hand cannon, which predates the press). This cuts across all subfields of history because society no longer depended on expensive scribes to preserve sources and publish new material.
More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
Indeed, it would make sense that musket volleys evolved from archer volleys than being spontaneously invented as a tactic for a weapon that was competing with the bow.
When was the last recorded javelin volley? I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows.
One thing that I don't enjoy from COUP is he often demolishes ideas that approach strawman territory (is a barely coordinated order to start shooting a volley? or does it have to be something else), but I understand that from his perspective as a teacher, he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
> I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows.
The most obvious reason they practiced volley firing for muskets is the large amount of smoke they produce, once one person shoots the rest can't see where they would fire so you want everyone firing at once so they don't block each other.
So there is no reason to believe the practice evolved from anywhere, they is no world where they didn't volley fire with muskets that produce a lot of smoke since its the obvious thing to do.
Well, you aren't really aiming with early firearms. You are just shooting in the general direction of the enemy. So I don't think smoke really explains it.
Javelins continued to be used around the Mediterranean until the gunpowder era, so there's no reason volley tactics could not have been transmitted directly.
> I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all.
So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers!
Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist.
How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
> What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
I don't think this follows in practice, particularly since what's missing here is not names of archer captains but descriptions of the mechanics of volley firing (which may have been routine in certain circumstances, or not). Seems like attribution of the outcome to the excellence of the calvalry captains' flank attacks and valor of the Lord's retinue in holding the centre whilst merely noting that a grouping of archers were present without attributing anything to any decisions made by any individual archers at any level is pretty consistent with their low prestige (apart from Agincourt and a possibly apocryphal story about Harold Godwinson, archers don't seem to get much credit at all for being decisive, despite archery being important enough for peasants who wielded blunt instruments and blades in their day job to get compulsory longbow training).
Brett's argument that longbow volley firing would be difficult to time and probably not beneficial (especially compared with musket volleys) is compelling, but the argument that battle narratives don't really describe volleys, except in translations of words that may not have meant volley, isn't really in a context where archers rarely get much credit for anything .
That has causation backwards: nobles weren’t cavalry because cavalry won battles*, but because cavalry was so expensive that only nobles and well funded centralized states with professional armies could afford them. You not only had to train the rider from a relatively young age but feed and support all the horses they’d need - armies rode in with at least three horses per rider on campaign to keep the horses from exhaustion (not including all the ones they’d train on). Supporting cavalry easily cost 5-10 times as much as supporting an equal number of infantry.
* Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
Cavalry won battles in societies that favored cavalry. If your society was built around elite warriors, your army probably relied on cavalry, because those elite warriors wanted to be individually as effective as possible. But if the state was responsible for raising the army and there was a middle class with sufficient combat skills available, infantry (such as Roman legions or mercenary pikemen) was often more cost-effective.
War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
Armies are combined arms, with few exceptions (Mongolian horde, perhaps), they didn't have just a single unit type. But armored heavy cavalry (with stirrups) wasn't some kind of weird sociological hang-up of European nations, it was a very effective unit type to have in your mix, such that societies were "willing" to spend significant resources in supporting the existence of that unit.
Here "willing" really means, "subjected to competition pressure such that societies that didn't support heavy cavalry units were for the most part militarily bullied into either annexation or standing up their own heavy cavalry support system."
That lasted until the technological realities of war changed (sufficiently-advanced firearms), at which point quite rapidly those societies stopped fielding heavy cavalry, which is another data point that this wasn't some kind of peacock display from nobles.
Having a unit type in your toolkit is one thing, and expecting it to play a decisive role in battle is another. For example, Alexander's heavy infantry was supposed to anchor the enemy in place as cavalry won the battle, while Roman heavy infantry the primary fighting force.
Mercenary pikemen ended the dominance of heavy cavalry in Europe before firearms became common. But that didn't make heavy cavalry obsolete, and neither did firearms. Cuirassiers had a prominent role in the Napoleonic Wars, and French cuirassiers actually wore their breastplates a few weeks into WW1.
>It'd be very silly to favor something that doesn't work, and any attempts to do so probably wouldn't last long.
What are your political beliefs? Because this argument applies equally well to cavalry as it does to communism. Would you seriously claim that all stupid political beliefs are new?
This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully lived and mostly fought in elephant habitats. Likewise, cultures on or close to the steppe had much more of a cavalry focus because cavalry was so much more effective there. When the Romans went east, they didn’t stick to their heavy infantry, they developed cataphracts. And their eventual conquerors, the Turks, replaced most of their traditional cavalry with infantry as they expanded westward into Europe.
It's less about cultural preferences and more about fighting with what you have.
If you have a feudal society based on personal relationships between the elites, you probably can't raise large bodies of heavy infantry. You don't have the people trained to fight in formation, you don't have the resources to equip them, and you don't have the capacity to organize them. Instead, you have the elites, who are often well trained and equipped. The elites have their personal retainers, who are pretty much the same. There can be some mercenaries if you can afford them. And then there are commoners who have to fight for various reasons but often lack both training and equipment.
Elephants used to be native to North Africa, until the Roman Empire drove the subspecies to extinction. Carthaginians, Romans, and some Macedonian kingdoms used them in war. Persians and other Macedonian kingdoms imported elephants from India. But none of them fielded more than tens of elephants at once, at which scale infantry was capable of countering them. Some contemporary Indian kingdoms found it practical to have hundreds of elephants on the battlefield, which was qualitatively a different situation.
You fight with what you have but then sometimes you lose to someone who has a better army than you do and disappear from history. So in the long run you end up fighting with what actually works in your terrain. And I think it's very interesting that horses, who are only really indigenous to the steppe, ended up proliferating over the entire earth in a way that elephants did not. Hundreds of elephants on the battlefield sounds great if you can feed them though!
Who is “you” in this case? Is you the Roman state or is you a random noble trying to curry favor and glory?
The former supported cavalry because it won battles but the latter did so because it earned them prestige among their peers. It also helped them feel powerful when they rode into battle literally hoisted above the common foot solider, as if they were closer to the gods.
There's a notable technological divergence between the Roman and the noble - stirrups that make cavalry charges possible. Roman cavalry were usually lightly armed and armored and had a very different function on the battlefield.
Also as I recently learned from Lindybaige video, war horses themselves were “one shot weapon” - you would train one to do a “cavalry charge” and would not be able to repeat it with the same horse. So in essence, even more expensive!
Well, in the Bhagavad Gita and in Ramesses' inscriptions, chariot archers did win battles, were the heroes, and were the nobles. There's some speculation that changes in weaponry making this approach obsolete were the main cause of the Bronze Age Collapse. (Devereaux is writing about more recent wars, but archer volleys from chariots seem even less likely.)
Yea but you'd need some sort of argument why class intersects with how archers are characterized when they are. At best I think you might say "we don't know".
The nobility were involved in military campaigns. The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. When we talk about our historical sources being limited, it's because they focused on things like battles and military strategy, precisely because it is interesting to the wealthy people who support historians.
The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials.
edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.
> The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing.
It’s not even true for all (or probably even most) of modern times. For instance the upper classes of Britain in WWI suffered much higher casualties than the lower classes.
I don't think WWI can be firmly called "modern times" with regards to warfare. It was a notable event in the transition to modern, but the cavalry charges against machine guns and such are reason enough to exclude it.
The modern period of history is widely considered to have begun in or around the 15th century. A common epochal event is the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Any definition which lumps drones and airplanes together with swords and muskets is not useful, in my opinion. The last ~100 years are totally different from what came before.
The volley could just be an emergent result borne from the fact that if an attacking army was outside the maximum range of archers, and then charged, all archers would have an enemy within a reasonable range nearly simultaneously. If every archer let loose when there was an enemy in range, the end result would be an initial large volley.
Not really scientific but you can see the exact same outcome in video games. After the initial synchronized volley, it becomes more of a constant barrage as each archer's differing rate of fire causes shots to become desynchronized.
Is it true? I have no idea, but it's hardly magical thinking. It's logical but could still be untrue for other reasons not assessed.
Maximum range varies per archer. Each bow is different, and each archer is different. This isn't modern mass-produced armaments (though they did mass-produce bows, each one was still made from a different piece of wood with its own quirks), and maximum range also depends on the archer's draw length (how long their arms are) and strength.
One of the stories about Agincourt (that the author didn't mention and I don't know if it's true) is that the French underestimated the range of the English archers and drew up inside their maximum range, so were getting shot before they were ready for it.
So "everyone shoots when the enemy gets into range" would still not be a volley as each archer judges for themself when the enemy is in range.
Videogames are unrealistic. There's no such thing as a discrete "maximum range" for archery, because the closer the target the harder the arrow will hit, and there's a point where the arrow will simply fail to do any damage when it hits.
Also, not everyone can fire an arrow equally fast. And even if they did, when they're acquiring different targets (lest they all shoot the same person) they can take slightly different amounts of time to choose who to shoot.
Also, speed isn't really the limit for firing in the first place - if someone thinks there aren't any good options just yet, they might wait a second or two before there's a good option, and now they're way out of sync with anyone who saw a good option immediately.
Videogames are just terrible because their physics are wildly unrealistic, and the human factors are removed entirely.
archers wouldn't do the because unlike a gun you cannot hold it loaded for long. So your order would be draw and fire. You can of course hold abow drawn for maybe a minute - but why do that when you can fire 6 arrows in that time which might hit.
If the enemy is out of range you might wait with an arrow knocked but not drawn - but if that is what they were doing the order would be to draw. there is no real point of such an order though - archers are themselves smart enough to estimate their own range (which as the other response pointed out was not the same for every archer), and thus make their own decisions. The only reason to hold fire until everyone was ready was if the combine fire was devistating enough - but there is every reason to think combined fire wouldn't be devistating.
It's only logical with video game reasoning imo. In actual life each archer would have a different bow, varying physical strength, ability at the extreme end of their range, visual acuity, practice assessing where the extreme end of their range even is, etc etc.
It seems extremely unlikely that a group of individuals would all make the exact same choice simultaneously without a prearranged signal for it. And I think the post itself makes a strong enough case for why that signal wouldn't be made.
> But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.
It’s not perfectly reasonable at all. When the enemy is charging, what you want is maximum efficiency, which means a rate of shooting as high as possible, which means everyone shoots as soon as they are ready, which precludes synchronisation.
When the enemy is not charging and just manoeuvring, volleys are counter-productive because you just give them some time to hide behind their shields and move between volleys.
I can imagine maybe one time when such tactics could work, it’s in an ambush. But then it’s not large scale and it is quite difficult to pull it off, because you need to synchronise the archers without giving away their presence. And it’s quite far from the autor’s pet peeve, which was archers fighting like they had guns in big battles.
> upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
You cannot really do that without extensive drills that were not really a thing in pre-modern armies. There are too many variations in individual strength, not really standardised equipment, and different people behaving differently. Even if you take 10 people, you would not get synchronised arrows if you did that.
> Am I missing something here?
Why would they? What advantage would they gain doing so? Particularly when doing it more naturally is more efficient and effective (not going to repeat the story’s argument, but there are several).
That is entirely different. The drills in question are necessary to have a group of people act in a coordinated way. That requires collective training and discipline, not merely individual training. Your example is of people who trained extensively, sure, but this was not collective manoeuvres that are required for something like firing volleys. It’s also discussed in the story.
Do you think these professional soldiers trained enough to modify the structure of their bones yet not in a highly coordinated manner with each other? Have you heard of military drills?
They aren't military drills; they're legally required to practice for two hours every Sunday (IIRC), which is a world apart from coordinated formations. Notably, you can practice just fine alone, while coordination drills notably require multiple people.
I don't see what's so beneficial about a volley. Concentrating the arrows allows the opposing force to ready their shields which renders the volley less effective, and advance in between volleys. It's better to rain arrows continuously which prevents the opposing force from defending in any capacity without stopping their advance entirely.
Arrows are not more effective (e.g. armor penetration) in a volley, and the psychological effect is also less for volleys I would argue: you know a volley is coming, duck and cover, and afterwards it's clear, vs a continuous rain where you never know when an arrow is headed toward you specifically.
The one thing that theoretically would be advantageous about a volley is that it's impossible for a target to block/dodge all of them. FTA (though focusing on how useful shields and armor are):
> arrows at range move slowly enough to be actively blocked and dodged
It's just that this one theoretical advantage isn't enough to make volleys useful in practice, since volleys decrease the total number of arrows you can shoot.
Anybody who has ever been in a serious snowball fight knows the power of the two snowball technique, a high lob to distract followed by a quick fastball (to the face/torso). An army of professional archers would undoubtedly be experts in the same technique.
A unit of archers has a very limited supply of arrows, enough to shoot for a few minutes before they have to resupply. They also cannot precise aim a lobbed shot because their weapons do not have the appropriate sight nor a rifled barrel to maintain accuracy or energy with a high lob. Arrows fired in an excessively high arc are wasted.
It seems like your intuition of weapons and warfare comes from mass media, not historical evidence or practitioners.
We have skeletal evidence of professional archers. It takes years of dedicated practice since adolescence in order to modify the bone structure like that. That additional bone strength means these professionals were likely able to use draw strengths no modern enthusiast could even touch. It also follows that if they were part of a standing army, they also undoubtedly practiced skills together and used a variety of equipment, like short bows and longbows.
Unfortunately, we have no mass media that reflects what a professional archer of yesteryear looked like because that profession died centuries ago and nobody has modified their skeleton to amuse us. However, we can tell from some of their bones they were somewhat lopsided as the arms were conditioned for purpose. For example:
"The men of the Towton population appear to have been engaged in a habitual activity that preferentially loaded the left humerus when compared with the right. This disparity is strongest in the distal humeral shaft. The loading pattern varies such that it creates significant differences between limbs in diaphyseal shape from the mid-distal to midproximal shaft." [0]
Despite what the weekend warriors and LARPers would like to believe, the historical professionals really were anatomically and physically better at the job.
What does draw strength have to do with not having an computed sight for hitting a moving target with a top-down shot, or the lack if rifling to keep an arrow from tumbling when gravity slows it down at the top of the required ballistic curve? Or the scarcity of ammunition? These are issues if technology, not of training or exercise.
Who needs sights or rifling? Just like any professional athlete, thousands and thousands of practice shots (eg, 10,000 hours) to develop muscle memory is all it takes to become proficient.*
Maybe go to a LARP or reanectment event and participate (arrows with rubber endings) to compare if there are differences with your close range snowball fight.
"army of professional archers would undoubtedly be experts in the same technique."
Because I do doubt that a lot. There is no one shooting in the air on a battlefield to distract.
To answer below:
My fellow Sunday Leaguers also study and re-enact Champions League football. It's a lot of fun but I'm not foolish enough to think I belong on the pitch in a real competition. I didn't train my whole life to be an expert footballer and most researchers didn't train their whole life to drive an arrow through a man in battle.
[You can click the timestamp to reply directly to any comment]
And there are still native tribes doing hunting and warfare with bows, that were and are studied. And some reenactment freaks are in a way better shape than their ancestors ever were, due to heavy training and better food.
Nobody is shooting in the air with an arrow to distract like you would a snowball. You shoot straight.
Hm. Are you aware that reenactment and research often go hand in hand? And if those people won't know, who actually try it out - then sureley you would know better. But how?
Dangerous arrows tend to come from the same general direction. If the archer is close enough to shoot straight, arrows coming from above have so little energy that they are mostly harmless. If the archer had shot them with enough energy to penetrate armor, they would land behind you.
I think the blog post is arguing against a volley that happens all in one instant, requiring all the archers to synchronize perfectly. This seems pretty easy to argue against because while movies do it because it's dramatic and cool, it's harder to justify in actual combat situations (and the post goes into great detail on the pros and cons).
However, it seems a lot more reasonable to suppose that archers were sometimes told to hold until a given strategic moment. In that case, you might see something resembling a volley when, say, an advancing enemy reaches a particular position and the archers begin loosing. But I don't think that's what the post was talking about.
> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields
Why wait for a specific command? It sounds like as an archer maybe you could try and hit a few far-off enemies whenever you wanted. There will be a critical period when most of the arrows will be released and be most effective, but the primary limiting factor is the archer's fatigue level. The article makes it clear there's not really a shortage of arrows.
So it's probably more like "people start talking, some arrows start flying, as the enemies get closer more arrows start flying". Which is pretty different from a coordinated volley.
The way a bow works. I could shoot much more arrows in my own rhytm, then coordinating with everyone in the unit and wasting energy holding the string longer than needed.
So I am pretty sure, there were some sorts of volley fire, when the archers start firing when the enemy gets in range. But once the shooting starts you would loose lots of kill power restricting your archers for very little gain.
I would ask the question the other way around: if you wouldn't learned of it in spectacular movies - why would anyone ever implement it?
With crossbows and musquets, where holding the fire does not cost energy - different story. But maybe try it for yourself: hold a war bow at full strength - you don't want to any longer than needed. So typical you pull and release.
There's no evidence of it in contexts where we would expect something like this to be mentioned. So the absence is a strong indication that it didn't happen.
> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy.
Yeah, pretty much nothing of that is actually reasonable.
First off, pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent. The only command that can be reliably given is "go", and even then, unless you're decently well drilled, that's still as likely to come from following what your neighbors are doing than being able to pay attention to your battlefield commander who might be a half-mile away. And archers are the least trained portion of the pre-modern battlefield!
Second, actually trying to hold everybody for a single coordinated volley seems incredibly counterproductive. The primary purpose of volley fire, as explained in the article, is to mitigate slow reload times. Archers have the opposite problem; they're going to exhaust their ammunition supply in a few minutes. Staggering the start time of the archer attack over, say, 30 seconds is actually a very significant percentage increase in the amount of time the attacking army is going to be harried by the archers.
> And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
Already by this point, that means you don't have a single, solid pulse of arrows, but rather a continuous stream that's going to take--at least--2 or 3 seconds before everyone has loosed their first arrow. And quite probably, your slowest archers are loosing their first arrows after the fastest archers have loosed their second arrow. It doesn't make sense to me to call that a "volley", since it's not going to look anything like what we would think of as a mass volley of arrows.
Given that you're already stretching the definition of "volley" quite hard to match what you think is happening, and given that there is absolutely no sign that anyone ever thought trying to achieve a more cohesive initial volley was worth striving for, I think it does more harm than good to argue that volley fire existed in some form with regards to regular bows.
> pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent
I think you mean strategic level. Tactically, they were able to hold formation, rotate, do all kinds of maneuver. Just look at how many "NCOs" are in a Roman legion. But it was difficult to control the units strategically, e.g. taking several units and moving them across battlefield in an organized fashion.
I think the most obvious context is visual art. There are thousands of depictions of medieval battles. Would really nobody think of depicting a volley of arrows in any of them? That would be a pretty spectacular sight with supposedly devastating effect.
I don't think the article is arguing there would not be a starting point to archer fire. One would expect commanders to make some decision about when their forces would engage, and even without explicit command most soldiers would probably recognize the same point as being ideal to start firing. It might not be as sharp as a line of muskets, but odds are everyone would have shot an arrow before anyone got off their second.
But volleys imply a specific coordinated cadence. If you're just telling your troops to open fire, whether it be with bows or fire arms, that's not a volley.
The general making a visible signal is a bad idea. Most generals even today don't have a cool bird's-eye view of the battlefield; they simply won't notice the moment, let alone be able to communicate their decision instantly. Okay, let's replace the general with the sergeant leading the archers.
But this leads us to the more important question: why wait until that last moment? If the enemy is within your range of fire, shooting at them is better than not shooting at them. You shoot at them all the way until they reach your own infantry, accumulating wounds and breaking up their ranks. Not shooting at them won't make the final arrow you loosen before they charge any more damaging.
Large scale coordination during pre-modern warfare was effectively impossible. The battlefields would often stretch for hundreds of meters or even a few kilometers and it was too chaotic to see anything once in the heat of battle. Generals could issue some local commands, especially if they were at the head of a cavalry charge, but only the officers and bannermen leading a small formation could exert any real control over their soldiers. A general signaling ranged combatants is just unrealistic.
Your second point is spot on. Infantry formations don’t generally charge the way we think of charges - they were rather slow, controlled forward movements with weapons and shields lowered. otherwise the first soldier to trip or take an arrow would take down the entire formation. No one ever really pitches battle with their infantry starting in range of the other army’s archers so there’s never really a clear opportunity for a volley.
Cavalry charges are a bit of a special case because they’re especially vulnerable to archers, but they’re also the group most capable of avoiding volley fire. Cavalry charges don’t run into soldiers, they train for coordinated feints so they can quickly change direction unlike infantry. When attacking cavalry, archers generally want to have random fire to increase the chances of bringing down a single horse, which often causes enough chaos to break the charge.
You wouldn't hold the bow drawn. The archers would nock their arrows and at the command would draw and loose the arrow. That would result in them all shooting at roughly the same time. Just a second or so delayed from the command.
Agreed; it's completely impractical for someone to "hold" a proper non-modern war bow at full draw. Every single instance I've seen of reenactment archery using an authentic bow has the archer smoothly nock, draw and release in one motion. There is no "aiming" like we see in modern competition archery - this occurs during the draw. Not to say these weren't accurate, some video I've watched of reenactment archery looks positively lethal out to about 30 metres or more.
I would think it would work to drill on draw speed (where the faster archers paced the slower ones). So you'd be able to tighten up the release window quite a bit vs doing nothing.
In a cavalry charge, the shield protects as much (or as little) as otherwise. The horse is doing the actual work, while the rider can use the shield normally.
An infantry charge starts at the last moment. At that point, the infantry formation has been in the effective bow range for a couple of minutes. It would be stupid to exhaust yourself by running a long distance over rough terrain carrying a heavy load before the fighting even starts. And shields tend to be large enough that the additional protection from them outweighs the gains from reaching the enemy faster.
You're literally arguing with a professional military historian specializing in the time period where bows were heavily used. Consider re-examining your preconceived notions of "common sense" from this perspective.
Another point: bows and arrows don't have a consistent load time or range across users. Different archers have different timing and effective ranges with the same bow and arrow. How do you pick a volley range? Or do you trust your men to know about how far they can shoot, based on their practice?
I think the main argument against volley fire was that it's just impractical. An archer wrote a comment in another thread here on HN saying that they would do volley fire for an audience because it was expected, but the leader had only seconds to wait while they all drew back before they had to shout for them to loose. An archer just doesn't have the strength to hold the bow drawn and wait for a command like that. It's a waste of energy and resources.
What we see on TV is always one completely unprotected army, and one squad of arhcers.
But in the real world if squads of archers exist, then every single army would have a protection against them. The romans had the tortoise formation, I can't believe this was just forgotten for 1000 years.
Organized volleys would give the advancing infantry convenient time slots to hunker down behind their shields and reduce the effectiveness of arrows even further. A less dense but continuous stochastical distribution would be objectively more deadly, except perhaps against a force going for arrow evasion.
I remember from a Lindybeige video that war bows have too much draw weight, so you can’t hold it drawn like in the movies. You have to almost instantly shoot it. You want war bows to be as powerful as possible.
you could hold a bow for maybe a minute - if you had extensive training. However there is no reason for anyone to train like that (they they didn't / couldn't). Someone strong can hold 200 lbs for a minute - but not longer. Or in that same minute you could launch 6 arrows - which is why they did the 6 arrows.
No one can sustain a hold of war bow weights for 60 seconds. That's 100#+ over three fingers and I'm not sure what the quality of tabs were like back then.
Generality: If (1) X is not done in the modern real world, and (2) your only experience with X is seeing dramatic Hollywood depictions of it, then "common sense" does not apply.
I don't think that the onus should be on historians to prove that something didn't happen. Rather, the onus should be on people to prove that something did happen. It's fine to have arguments about how it's plausible (or not) that something occurred when we don't have direct evidence. But at the end of the day, I think it's better to not draw conclusions without actual evidence.
What is the point of this post? Devereux is a literal expert in the field who has studied this for decades. You're...someone on the internet? What are you posting for? This is rank anti-intellectualism.
I love this comment. It’s just so peak Hacker News. You read the work of a professional, you have no clue about the field at all, and yet with full confidence you start writing a massive comment about how the professional is wrong based on you having watched some tv shows and your gut feeling.
Investigate your pre-conceptions. Watch some actual tribal warfare. Realize that ALL FILM IS UTTERLY FAKE and ruled mostly by the rule of cool. "the general makes a visible signal" How? Turns out you can't actually do that on the battlefield for the most part.
I'm pretty sure nobody in the historical record mentioned how their armies have never once used blackcurrant jam to destroy a rampaging army from Venus. Does that make such an event more or less likely for you?
People mostly don't go around listing off things they're not doing and have never done. Therefore, lack of mention that someone's not doing something isn't really evidence they are doing it, or at least is very weak.
Tbh, reading all this makes my head spin a little but I def love how deep some folks get into the nitty gritty of old school tactics - you think there's actually any lost technique out there we'll never fully figure out?
I think lost techniques are the rule rather than the exception. There are loads of fundamental questions about how premodern combat took place that will probably never be decided. You can get a feel for lots of them by reading this very blog.
Stuff like: did opposing infantry lines actually stay in contact for long periods at a time or did they clash for a couple of brief minutes at a time and then mutually retreat a few paces to recover stamina?
Question: What does this author think happened instead of the volley? Does he expect that archers just started randomly firing when they felt like doing so? Of course not. They waited for the order to start firing. So the first shots would, imho, constitute a "volley" in that everyone would be launching in the same few seconds. Subsequent shots would then become less coordinated, but that first wave would be a true volley. Then orders would come to stop/move/start, resulting in other coordinated volleys.
The author has an entire series of posts on how pre-modern generalship did and didn't work, including a post on issuing commands. The tl;dr is that there cannot have been a generalized order to fire on cue because pre-modern armies didn't have that kind of command resolution and speed. Best case you have a few guys who start firing because they're told to and the rest follow suit when they notice that it's started, more likely there's an established doctrine for when firing should happen and archers use their judgement for whether to start.
I don't think a command to start firing is that complicated. A simple flag wave suffices especially for <100 archers that's standing still. There are more complicated commands that a centurion had been able to do.
There is something strange about the way this article was written. Besides that it could have been 25% of its final length, it repeats itself quite a bit.
I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.
If you happen to have Randal Munroe's what if? [1] on your bookshelf, look up the chapter titled "Sparta". It should convince you that the story of arrows blocking the sun is probably not true.
If you don't have it, you could try to do the math yourself. Munroe assumes that 1) an arrow intercepts 40 cm² of sunlight, 2) an archer looses 8 to 10 arrows a minute and 3) each arrow spends an average of three seconds in flight. You could adjust those numbers to taste, but I would not expect the conclusion to change.
I disagree with the point about the word "fire". How can you criticize the English word used if historically they weren't even speaking English?
Scenes are depicted in English instead of the native language of the setting for the benefit of the audience (and budget), and in modern English it's perfectly okay to use "fire" as a translation for the act of loosing a bow, even if "loose" is more commonly used in archery.
But English-speaking places have bows and arrows. (Even a particularly famous historical one!). So it’s reasonable to expect a translation into English to use the English word for sending an arrow from a bow.
If it were some science fiction setting with a weapon very unlike any real historical weapons then sure, the particular etymology of the English word wouldn’t be very relevant.
There were no English-speaking places that used bows extensively. The closest would've been Early Modern English, which is still drastically different to Modern English.
If the actors were actually speaking Shakespearean English then sure, it would be wrong for them to say "fire"/"fyr", but if they did that then you wouldn't understand half of what they're saying.
I'm sure there's a few actual examples of this though, for scenes depicting battles in England after 1800 or so that use bows. I would still say it's debatable whether you could consider this truly modern English but it's close enough.
Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.
What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting.
For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
Bret (the author) does discuss the discipline of conscripted troops in another post, here:
https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-...
In particular, the concept of 'drill' gets a lot of attention:
"Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.... The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine."
IMHO that's the key point against the "no volley" idea. Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own. You act in formation and repeat what you've been drilled.
A company of archers is probably the same. They'd be working in unison following the direction of their captain. Not for shock value. But to manage fatigue, arrow supply, and ensure that they're firing with a full draw.
You can act together in formation without being in total lockstep for every motion. Did all the infantrymen swing their swords at the same time? Of course not. It doesn't make any sense for one archer to "wait" for their neighbor before firing. And as the article points out, firing in unison would increase fatigue, not reduce it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it also makes it easier for the enemy to respond. If arrows are only coming in concentrated volleys, then it might be easier for the enemy to make a coordinated advance where they just periodically crouch behind their shields as a volley comes, and then make relatively unhindered advances during the lull.
A diffuse but more-or-less constant stream of arrows arriving at random is presumably more distracting and harder to deal with, and therefore a greater hindrance to enemy infantry.
It would also require you to fire at the rate of the slowest person, or have the slower archers skip firing at all for certain volleys.
It does make sense. You don't want archers to burn energy & ammo by firing too rapidly or before the enemy is in range.
I agree that sitting there for minutes holding the bow taut is dumb. But something like a Attention, Nock, Ready, Draw, Loose cycle isn't that. Maybe you hold it a half second and it's slightly more fatiguing but I don't really see it.
If it is you just combine draw and loose. It will make the spread between arrows slightly larger but it's still a volley.
"No volley" does not imply "no drills". It just implies that they weren't drilled on that one specific tactic.
> Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own. You act in formation and repeat what you've been drilled.
No, drilling was a response to the use of gunpowder weapons.
> Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own.
There's a passage from Julius Caesar where he describes how, set on from behind, the rear line of his army turned around so that they could fight in that direction instead of just getting slaughtered. It is noted mostly for the total lack of any suggestion that Caesar bears any responsibility for the brilliant maneuver.
But before you get to that point, you should observe that this was in fact a brilliant and spontaneous battlefield maneuver, not something that anyone had ever been trained to do.
Roman armies trained and drilled extensively. And Roman armies had lower and mid level commanders, that could make decisions and direct troops within certain limitations. Everything wasn’t direct movement orders from Caesar to every individual soldier. A centurion could have made that call, not something spontaneous at the individual level. I'm not sure what battle you are talking about, although I would guess maybe the siege of Alesia, but without knowing, I can't comment on the specifics.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150901204127/http://www.roman-...
https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...
> To take another example, Caesar’s army at Bibracte (58BC) famously manages the feat of winning when attacked in both the front and the rear by about-facing its third line and attacking in both directions at once. Notably Caesar does not say that he did this, merely that the Romans did, which is a strong indication that turning the rear ranks of the army to face backwards was a decision made by more junior officers (probably centurions).
That said, of course I disagree with GP's claim that classical and medieval armies didn't drill. They certainly did drill. Bret has a whole blog post on the topic. [1] Quote from that post:
> Josephus [...] offers the most famous endorsement of Roman drills: “Nor would one be mistaken to say that their drills are bloodless battles, and their battles bloody drills” (BJ 3.5.1).
The quote from Josephus, extended:
> [The Romans] have never any truce from warlike exercises; nor do they stay till times of war admonish them to use them; for their military exercises differ not at all from the real use of their arms, but every soldier is every day exercised, and that with great diligence, as if it were in time of war, which is the reason why they bear the fatigue of battles so easily; for neither can any disorder remove them from their usual regularity, nor can fear affright them out of it, nor can labour tire them: which firmness of conduct makes them always to overcome those that have not the same firmness; nor would he be mistaken that should call those their exercises unbloody battles, and their battles bloody exercises.
That reminds me that Plutarch's Life of Eumenes §11 has a fun story about how Eumenes kept his men (and horses) in shape despite a close siege; it's hardly evidence for regular exercises but it's an amusing example of an irregular exercise! [3]
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-...
[2] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/war-3.html
[3] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/...
> I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection.
It very much depends on the historical context. Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. If they broke rank or ran away from battle, everyone including their parents, siblings, neighbors, and potential lovers would hear about it back home (and never let them live it down). Most conscripts at that time fought alongside their fellow villagers and farmers, not random professional soldiers. They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
> They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
Historical times were brutal. If they were defending their home, losing the battle would result in their home being pillaged and their family enslaved or raped. That would be a great motivator to not run
> losing the battle would result in their home being pillaged and their family enslaved or raped.
Only true in certain times and places, mostly sacking besieged towns cities where it was done in order to pressure the defenders of the next siege to surrender with terms rather than fight to the end.
Not all historical societies had slavery. It declined hugely in medieval Europe - the Normans abolished it in England, for example (people forget this because of the revival of slavery in early modern times, and of course its continuation in other cultures) not long after they conquered the country.
> Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue.
Most peasants during the Middle ages did not fight at all, except in revolts and uprisings, usually with terrible outcomes.
If they were taken along for the (military campaign) ride by their feudal lord, it is most likely they would have avoided the battlefield altogether, providing auxiliary services, e.g. setting up camp, feeding the horses, cooking, tending to their liege, etc.
Conscription was not really a thing until the mid-Renaissance (roughly), and the vast majority of battles in the Middle ages was fought by nobility, ranging from lower class to dukes and lords.
Archers were themselves generally peasants or freemen. You’re talking about a huge stretch of time and a wide range of cultures so absolutes are less true than trends.
Conscription and use as it applied to semi professional soldiers like archers was very much a thing because they were quite useful. By semi-professional I mean their training was encouraged rather than subsidized by the governments outside of wartime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Arms_of_1252 “Whereas the people of our realm, rich and poor alike, were accustomed formerly in their games to practise archery – whence by God's help, it is well known that high honour and profit came to our realm, and no small advantage to ourselves in our warlike enterprises... that every man in the same country, if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make use, in his games, of bows and arrows... and so learn and practise archery.”
_Very_ loosely related, but I'm reading The White Company by Conan Doyle to my kid, which pretty much describes this exactly.
Henry the 3rd’s decree about practicing archery drills regularly across the peasant population really worked out well for the English during the 100 Years War- they were able to field high numbers of dangerous and skilled ranged warriors and allowed for the massive victories like Crécy and (of course) Agincourt.
Yes but we should be careful with the word “drill” as I’m not sure how much formal and coordinated training occurred vs just being told to go to the archery range before or after work every day. A quick search didn’t tell me the details.
Not that I think you’re claiming this, but the Assize of Arms 1252 certainly didn’t mean archers were training in volley fire.
Surprisingly close to a standing army, when looked at from a certain angle. Only that it's not taxes going to the central authority and then getting paid to warriors, but warriors getting assigned an area to tax, and keep their cut as compensation for their military readiness.
(of course when looked at from just a slightly different angle, it's also indistinguishable from a protection racket)
Terry Jones' documentary of medieval times made the point that the nobility was pretty similar to an organized crime family. Of course, he wasn't aiming at scholarly accuracy but trying to give viewers the flavor.
It is not an incorrect comparison, superficially it is hard to tell the difference between organized crime and the legitimate government, they both provide the same "services", protection for a portion of the profits.
There is a sort of equivalency in a corporation and a government, I would even say a corporation is a government, it is the ruling apparatus for a group of people. Organized crime is a corporation that is trying to operate outside the law of it's parent operation.
I like to joke that the reason the government is so hard on organized crime is that they don't like the competition.
But really organized crime should be suppressed because it is a brutal warlord style government.
For war as a different type of racket, there is of course the book the decorated general Smedley Butler wrote [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket].
Armies had a lot of more or less professional infantrymen, be they in the retinue of a lord or knight (and they could be peasants even if a peasant would generally have no reason to go to war, and the lords would have few motivations/legal means to constrain serfs to go), mercenaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company), or common-law prisoners (a bit as the Russians did in Ukraine).
Free families would often have to send someone to war if the local lord called.
In the medieval era in Europe few were generally professional, in the sense that it was their full time job even in peacetime. Like you said the Kings retinue would be one of the few exceptions. Since the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire there just wasn’t the concentration of resources in Europe for maintaining standing armies. Most were effectively a reserve force, somewhat akin to the. National Guard in the US hat could be “called up” in the event of a war.
Military mercenary companies were absolutely a thing (probably as early as 10th century, although they were also definitely a thing during the Roman empire), but they were very different from your typical peasant.
Conscription and Mercenary companies became more prevalent as the scale of warfare increased, and the early gunfire which necessitated coordinated volley fire.
> What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops.
He talks specifically in other posts about the problems with "discipline" as a term (it groups too many different things as though they were the same), and he talks specifically about "cohesion" (which is the thing I think you're getting at) in this post at several points.
As an untrained soldier myself, I can attest that I would freak out if I saw a whole bunch of arrows flying in my general direction, and probably change my course entirely.
Not sure if you’d ever see a whole bunch of arrows. In a space the size of a battlefield, with 1 arrow per 10s per archer, you’d need a lot of them to have several in flight in your general direction at once.
Some might call this intelligence.
Many actions that are individually intelligent can be collectively disastrous.
It is brave to hold against what one might call intelligence if doing so conforms to the zeitgeist and stupid when it runs counter to it.
Bret, the author of ACOUP, goes in to a lot more detail here:
https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warr...
War is a racket. Smedley Butlers word have aged like fine wine.
Generally true. Unfortunately, "don't cooperate with racketeers" is not always a viable strategy.
>the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows
Case in point the Spartan army led by Leonidas. One of the soldiers apparently really said that if the Persians will rain fire arrows on them, they will fight in the shade.
The author has a VERY dim view of Sparta, and of the people who worship Sparta and of the quality of information the legend of Sparta is based upon (second hand roman information, from Romans, at a time where Sparta had become a sort of theme park for bored senators).
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r...
Just talking about the last stand of Leonidas and the 300 (+7000 thebans etc). Of course, a society driven purely by millitaristic macho men will implode. I have read about this a bit before (Not from this author)
I do wonder how all these Alt-right Alpha bros, who are into the Spartans, feel about the Spartan predilection for pederasty.
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>> I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover.
Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.
This was a nice write and it would be nice to hear about the advantages of the long bow.
From the same author:
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-s...
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...
If you're not yet aware of it (unlikely as it made it 'big' in the overall internet), I believe the video from Tod's Workshop with actual experimentation is a must see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE
There is a sequel and many other related videos, but this one is the source for a very famous clip (at 20:50 - https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE?si=oISZqXvdv8ymoCDi&t=1239)
We know quite well what drafted peasants would do facing combat. Sinking to their knees in endless "Father ours"..
That's not what they did.
>Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible
and that is where volley may be helpful - simultaneous hit to multiple horses and soldiers may break the pace and may cause stumbling and local pile-ups. Slow down of advance -> more exposure time to the follow up arrows.
It takes a special (in a bad way) kind of commander to send more arrows after their cavalry and infantry engaged. I'm sure there are records of it having happened, but you have to assume you're taking just as many casualties as the enemy due to friendly fire.
I assume the accuracy of the average arrow and non-professional soldier might dissuade one to get anywhere near the fire range. Enough will fail to launch properly, slip or be dysfunctional that there's no way you'd want them shot from right behind you.
Eh, plenty of people run into the line of fire even today. People don’t think straight when under a lot of stress.
Also, the only safe place to be in War is far from it; so by definition soldiers need to be trained to ignore a lot of threats to their wellbeing in order to do their job.
There are some examples in the American War of Independence (or maybe War of 1812), where militias would lie down to reload and break the discipline of the overall force.
Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.
It's unlikely they were muzzle loading lying down. They could maybe kneel at times, but the barrel had to be vertical for reloading.
The statistics about the draw weight of war bows being 100 to 170 lb (45-77 kg) is striking to me. Imagine getting to the gym, picking up a single 45 kg dumbbell (the lowest end!), and setting out to rep as many single-arm rows as you can before failure. Of course you wouldn't hold that dumbbell at full contraction; that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.
I used to have a 100-lb bow (for re-enactment), and the comparison is apt, but slightly off:
Imagine picking up a 45-kg weight using only a string held by three fingers. The pressure on the fingers is intense. Getting the shoulders and chest into the pull is the trick, and it's not quite as hard as lifting a weight off the floor because of that. But the fingers are doing a lot of work. Mine had turned white after a few shots, even with a thick leather tab to protect them.
We did do volleys, because the public expected it and it was fun to do. But we could not hold for long - the bloke doing the shouting knew that he had only a couple of seconds between "draw" and "loose" or we'd be all over the place.
Drawing a bow activates muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activates muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell.
If you're interested in archery-focused exercises - https://www.morrelltargets.com/blogs/archery-blog/9-strength...
What makes it various bow styles exceptionally difficult is the draw style -- horsebow drawing by a single thumb is especially difficult; war bow has a strange draw style I've never attempted due to shoulder issues, recurve isn't difficult as you get three fingers, and compound archery is simply cheating.
Most of these draws aren't a draw and immediate release, but a draw and hold to aim. That's where archery becomes physically exhaustive. There was some recent YTer who showed off by drawing a 100#+ bow but couldn't hit worth shit. Hitting your target takes patience and practice.
As noted in another child, draw weights are typically measured at 30", but your draw may only be 29" or may be 31", etc. You'd want a bow that fits your draw length as close as possible, though.
Can confirm Compound archery is cheating - especially with modern releases and sights.
A couple months of training and many folks can consistently hit a soup can at 50 yards with a 75# draw (or better). That would be absurd to even contemplate 100 years ago.
I never was a fan of compound bows. I remember when I was participating in archery as a hobby. The instructor told us that in competition archery, if one uses a recurve bow, then winners are determined by who hits the bullseye (or closest) the most. In compound bow competitions, losers are determined by who hit the bullseye the least. It's a tongue in cheek way of emphasizing the ridiculous accuracy of compound bows.
I prefer the antiquity of recurve bows and the lesser amounts of maintenance that comes with them. Though, I also think compound bows are beyond dangerous in comparison.
I have found that recurve archers seem to be better about 'checking' their arrows after missed shots. Many compound users I have known think that as long as the arrow is not completely snapped, then it's safe to use. I just show them the Google images of what happens when an arrow with hairline cracks explodes the near instant the quick-release is released.
This issue can happen with high draw weight recurve bows, but I have never seen the damage like what a compound bow can do.
Always check your arrows, folks!
Soup can? That's a bit boring; why not make that, say, an apple, oh and also balance it on the head of the archer's child? Much better!
Of course William Tell was a crossbowman so could hold his bow at full draw for as long as he liked.
>Drawing a bow activates muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activates muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell.
You don't ever bend over and pick something off the ground?
YouTube suggested an old NileRed video to me today. He bought 100 lbs of titanium shot for a project. It came in a bag in a metal can.
The first two times he lifted the bag he said this isn’t that heavy, maybe he got defrauded, so he got a scale and checked. But by the time he tried to lift it off the scale he was struggling, and getting it back into the metal can was serious work.
Stamina separates the pro from the amateur, but fatigue comes for all of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99pZKMVQ9P0
FYI, tungsten obviousy, not titanium.
Oh! Yes. Remarkably dense is definitely not titanium.
That is the weight at maximum draw. It is more like pulling back a rubber band that gets progressively harder until you hit your max. It isn't like lifting a weight which is a steady force. Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up. A bow doesn't have inertia. You can pull it back as quick as you like, which makes it easier for a given max "weight" of pull.
(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)
Strength-training routines can exploit these characteristics, through the use of bands and chains.
Bands progressively increase resistance as they're stretched.
Chains load or de-load resistance as they're raised or lowered to the ground.
(How much of this was known and utilised during mediaeval warfare training and drilling is unclear, but I suspect the answer is "little".)
>Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up.
Force is force, whether it is due to elasticity or gravity. The difference is that the drawing force increases progressively, whereas the weight of an object is (for these purposes) constant (as stated).
How modern? Not modern enough for writers and directors of photography to have gotten the wrong idea, right? This trope got in early and has never gone away.
Compound bows were invented after the mid 1900s. 1966 says wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_bow
After the 18th century, virtually nobody would have used a war bow. Other than recreationists, everyone's archery experience would be of target and hunting bows. Both have much lower draws.
When I owned one, it had a 65lb draw with an 80% letoff. So it took maybe 10/15lbs to hold it at full draw. But my bow could still reliably throw arrows out to around 300m, basically double the range of an english longbow. Nobody ever aims a modern bow for max range. Doing so is incredibly dangerous. World record distance shots have broken 1000m.
I guess that’s true. And when you’re hunting a deer it’s better to not loose an arrow than to shoot it badly, so taking a beat to refine your aim would make sense.
I had a teacher that was a bow hunter. I believe he claimed it was the only arrangement fair to the deer. They had a sporting chance. I can’t imagine he fired more than a couple arrows in any hunting trip. Very different from shoot or die.
I don't think it's appropriate to call that "sporting chance" - for the deer this is not a sport, it's a very serious life or death situation, where they'd very much rather not be.
That does not leave us any conversation to have that is appropriate to HN though.
They consider it a sport, the sport requires physical discipline, and that discipline is a propos of the topic.
If you want to get into the cruelty of hunting, we will first have to decide if raising feedlot animals is less cruel than hunting, and you will absolutely lose that argument. But we aren't here to discuss any of that. We are talking about the stopping power of arrows and arrows don't care what mammal they are aimed at.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F Scott Fitzgerald, probably stolen from Zelda Fitzgerald.
Yes-ish. But "sporting chance" may be a way for the hunter to say that wants his recreational pastime to be difficult enough to be interesting to him. Or that he is repelled by the idea of using really modern drone & firearms technology, and slaughter-at-scale.
The article's point about the lethality of arrows.. I feel like every Youtube test I've seen on the subject shows that Arrows can pierce even full plate pretty reasonably easily, though this is not scientific at all ofc.
Check out Tod's Workshop youtube channel. It's only entertainment, but he has a far more realistic overall testing of arrows' armour-piercing capability.
A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.
Never eliminated though!
But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#History
> [I]n the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal.
I wouldn't want to be shot by one, regardless.
That's likely talking about a shot at close quarters (from the strongest kind of pre-modern bows in the world), the chausses the arrow went through would have been mail not plate, and horses are much less resilient than humans.
Of course longbows could and did kill - they wouldn't have been used in war otherwise! But they did not routinely kill through plate armour at range.
Not sure what you mean by "strongest", but you might want to make a comparison with mongol composite bows.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
> Not sure what you mean by "strongest", but you might want to make a comparison with mongol composite bows.
I believe it's generally accepted that the longbows we're talking about delivered arrows with more force than Mongol composite bows.
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
Horses are notoriously fragile. The quote does not say that the horse died instantly, merely that it died.
Humans tend to shoot horses that are uneconomical. But that doesn't mean they are more fragile than humans.
Why do you believe that?
No, they're not. One could argue that some of the recent breeds, designed for a particular aesthetic rather than practicality, are, but that's not really within this subject.
Perhaps because they read the article:
> horses are big and react poorly to being wounded: a solid arrow hit on a horse is very likely to disable both horse and rider. And while light or archer cavalry might limit exposure to mass arrow fire by attacking in looser formation, as we’ve discussed, European heavy horse generally engages in very tight lines of armored men and horses in order to maximize the fear and power of their impact. Unsurprisingly then, we see from antiquity forward, efforts to armor or protect horses, called ‘barding’: defenses of thick textile, scale, lamellar, and even plate are known in various periods, though of course the more armor placed on the horse, the larger and stronger it needs to be and the slower it moves. Nevertheless, the size and shape of a horse makes it harder to armor than a human and you simply cannot achieve a level of protection for a horse that is going to match a heavy infantryman on the ground, especially if the latter has a large shield.
> rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
This is the standard simplified narrative of what happened at Agincourt - English archers wiping out French noble heavy cavalry - although it also seems like that was an exception.
They were charging up hill in the mud. Noone really died from arrows, except maybe some of the horses. But a lot of their horses fell and then the knights ran back through their own infantry, though apparently that wasn't that big a deal in the battle.
The battlefield killing was done by light infantry wading in with daggers and hatchets apparently during a foot slog up the muddy hill which left the french heavy infantry exhausted. Another wave of killing afaik was when the captured prisoners were all executed since the english position seemed like it might be overrun by some follow up fighting.
(keep in mind the battle took hours and there was a lot more going on then just heavy horse riding up against arrows once or twice)
Wiki page is worth a read actually
That's covered in the blog post:
First, that archers can actually be more effective against mounted troops than foot: the mounted troops ride close together, horses are hard to fully armor, and one horse getting hit in the leg can cause a lot of chaos.
Second, at Agincourt, the French knights _walked_ through the arrow-fire quite successfully, but the effort (physical, mental, cumulative effect of small wounds) tired them enough that the English soldiers could beat them hand-to-hand. And that this ability to inflict small damage before the main fighting is why archers were valuable.
He has an entire article on the subject[1]. Basically when you take into account distance and angles penetration is much harder.
1. https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...
Angles matter. There’s a famous rout that happened in France where an English army overstayed its welcome and was trying to make its way back to England when the locals decided it would be better to never have to deal with them again by finishing it now. I thought it was William of Orange but I cannot find anything to corroborate that.
They pinned his army down with a fresher army meaning to destroy them. The English infantry and cavalry were vastly outnumbered due to attrition, but what he did have were longbows. And somehow they beat a superior army while losing a fraction as many men.
The historical military analysis I saw was that with the front lines so thin, the archers essentially didn’t have to fire long arching volleys. The flatter angle of the arrow trajectory and shorter flight distance increased the penetration force, and they just absolutely destroyed every charge against them, confusing the attacking army. Arrows should not be dropping this many men. WTF.
You must be referring to the Battle of Agincourt, as Henry V was heading back to Calais after laying a too-prolonged siege of Harfleur, during the 100 Years War.
Agincourt sounds right. Thanks.
If it's Agincourt, then Bret talks about it quite a bit in the article. Essentially, it was the best case scenario for bows and even then both the French infantry and cavalry were able to advance and get to the English lines. However, both were weakened enough that they were defeated by the English forces waiting for them.
In a YouTube test I have seen (Todd's Workshop) their plate armor didn't really care about a 100kg draw weight longbow. Though if I remember correctly they said it's possible it would have done a bit of damage back then depending on material quality.
>their plate armor didn't really care about a 100kg draw weight longbow.
And at pretty close range. Plate armour very effective at stopping arrows and blades, otherwise they wouldn't have worn it.
Not plate, unless at very close range and at a very favorable angle. Mail, sure.
I don't think 'plate' was a standard kind of quality either, so while the top quality plate might be effectively impervious to arrows except for an unlikely lucky splintering shot into a weak point or gap, there were probably lots of thinner, less coverage providing plate armours where the probability of defeat was still very low, but not completely zero.
Chain mail is usually effective against arrows I believe?
Better than nothing, but not very effective. Plate armor was the most effective, but not perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiyOIZ4Vm_I
You saw them shooting at bad temu imitation plate armor.
> that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.
I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
Plus a dumbbell is the same weight the whole time while the bow is only the draw weight at full draw.
On the other hand as someone noted: you don't bring up a dumbbell by a thin string with 3 fingers. I think when trained and without holding like in the movies you could go a bit longer than you'd expect with dumbbels but goddamn your fingers must hurt after.
Why would it ever be impossible/unbelievable? The whole point is it was commonplace for this type of person.
It's just surprising that the number's that large.
Yeah but spend your whole life malnourished and march 20 miles THEN do the reps (as peasant archers probably had to do).
This is highly contextual based on time and place. While most people would have had access to fewer calories compared to the modern day, the average person wasn’t starving to death under normal circumstances. We’re talking a population that engaged in regular manual labour, so sufficient nutrition was necessary. I’d also guess the societies starving their populace were unlikely to call them up to war unless they were really desperate.
I think only trained professional archers could use a 170lb pull bow at all.
My understanding is that English longbowmen trained from their teens on the weapon and you can see on the skeletons how it warped their bodies.
Yes but they weren’t starving them for their whole lives.
Agreed. I'm an amateur archer and I asked my archery instructor the highest poundage recurve bow he's ever seen someone fire, and he says that one time someone came to the range with a 100 pound draw bow, but he's only seen that once in 10 years.
Compound bows of course you can go higher because of mechanical advantage, but either way I don't think that people realize how difficult it is to draw a 100 pound bow. Typical professional recurve bow users would rarely want to exceed 50 pounds as I understand it.
There’s also a bit of a different optimization goal in modern archery - the goal is to put as many arrows precisely on a target. More draw weight helps up to a certain extent, but ranges are pre-set and limited and once your draw weight is high enough to comfortably propel the arrow that far, more weight will not improve things. Aiming gets harder at a higher weight. You could shoot a heavier arrow, but the benefits are somewhat limited - it punches a bigger hole which helps a bit, but you’re not trying to kill the target - so the added penetration is not interesting.
In a war setting, higher draw weights increase both distance and penetration, which are desirable.
The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
> actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
I don't see it as a bad thing really. Can't say about all professions but in mine (software engineering) I've seen many professionals who has decades of experience and still do things poorly, take bad decisions and make outright incorrect statements.
There's nothing wrong with politely asking questions and consistently challenging the logic shared by professionals. Maybe you'll learn something from them, maybe you'll learn that they are incompetent. Either way, some useful information.
it happens on practically every topic. this was technologically not possible 100 years ago and it’ll be fascinating to watch play out. stfu and listen is a legit skill in 2025
100 years ago the term "armchair general" was already 25 years old.
And 200 years ago cringy dinner table conversations about complex and subtle topics was already an established literary trope.
The same author discusses something similar here:
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...
In discussing why in LOTR Saruman's battle campaign is terrible:
"Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be."
Peter H Wilson had an interesting point in his 30 years war book that it's not just the appearance of firearms (musketeers in Spanish terzios fired in their own time), you also had to have a philosophical change to allow seeing a human as a cog in a larger machine; it's fundamentally an Early Modern concept rather than a renaissance one. And so you first see volley fire among the Italian condottieri and the Low Countries' militias, where you were simultaneously seeing the start of mercantile economies based on transactions between individuals.
What this article doesn't account for is the proposition that many, many historic armies did war bow volley fire, and we've never heard about it because they all got wiped out because it's such a bad idea.
I would expect victors to write down how amazingly stupid their opponents were and why that gives them god given right to now lord over them and their subjects...
you may expect that, but my assumption would be that in most cases condescension and pettiness would fail to trump disinterest and dismissal
I'd almost expect that to be so remarkable as to merit writing it down.
Not really, first, being wiped out doesn't mean literally everyone dying, but also it doesn't prevent the winning side from recording the victory and its cause
Perhaps oral traditions survive from soldiers sold into slavery from lost battles. Like somehow, the folly of volley fire made it into the name of some food dish.
Or maybe they would have simply massacred any army so dumb as to try it.
I don't understand the need to come up with some fancy niche (slavery, oral, food name) when you have the more common approach: as is usual, part of the army ran away, and it included people of all ranks, from soldiers to generals, and they recorded it in all the same ways all the other events for recorded in the same sources (including training guides)
Then you continue to ignore the other elephant - the soldiers and everyone else who won battles also record history avoiding the slavery/food route
And again, "massacre" doesn't mean 100%
A response which could be given just as easily to any claim of the form “X never occurred in human history.”
Occam's Razor.
to me Occam's Razor is a fairly unsound thinking strategy, particularly in scenarios like this
After that discussion of draw weight, I can now see why English longbowmen are notable in the the archeological record due their noticeable spinal deformities.
110lbs on a traditional bow? Sheesh.
So basically, what he's saying is that the depictions in Hägar the Horrible of fighters charging on with arrow-studded shields aren't all that unrealistic. File under unexpected.
When I was playing Medieval: Total War (both I and II), the bows and crossbows were very effective against an enemy attacking me. Now I wonder if the game modeled the arrow barrage realistically, or to align it with our movie-based perception of medieval archers.
There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.
Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead.
Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.
> Total War is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design.
Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series.
(It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.)
> There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational.
That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.
You can use archers to kill cavalry or the other way around. It's just that you don't want any kind of melee-capable enemy reaching your archers.
From Rome 2 multiplayer, I remember spearmen absolutely not even with swords :P My server played with swords limit, because then everyone would pick only them!
Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D
Yeah idk about Rome 2, never played that one. It sounds like the game is unbalanced if an all-swordsman army is best and nobody has come up with a counter. Then again I doubt any of those games are very well balanced for pvp battles.
We had like, 10 pages of rules.
And every community had their own...
WH 3 basically solved this issue by making MP battles be capture the points style - genuinely, it freed us from having to make house rules.
There's a variety of essays on Total War and various infantry types, how well the tactics are modeled, etc.: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.b...
Their essay on composite infantry types is interesting as a Crusader Kings II player, because the game has tons of historically accurate mixed units you can recruit that combine archers and heavy infantry/pikes, but virtually all of those units suck because the combat mechanics still enforce a rock-paper-scissors dynamic.
https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-...
Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad.
The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops.
In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.
Btw, the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for MTW2 is amazing. It turns the game into a more historically accurate and overall better version of Rome TW... but archers still do volleys, which even if they wanted to avoid, is probably part of the game engine.
Interestingly, mounted archers don't do volleys in those games.
i remember a history channel show using the total war games in order to determine the best type of bow. I'm not sure how accurate it was
The bow has a slow rate of fire, you can't hold a longbow in firing position for long (150+lbs of force required hold the drawn back bow), and you are only accurate from 300-800 feet (add 15% if in a high tower). That means charging calvary will reach your archers in 10-15 seconds and moderately paced walking infantry unit will be on top of your archers within 20-30 seconds of entering range. That leaves time for a few arrows. The bunched up, tight formations formed a reasonable defense - your outer troops would take the hits from the archers for the 20 seconds it took to get to the archers.
We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...
It seems to me that at Agincourt the archers place obstacles in front of their position--sharpened stakes. That would have provided some protection against a cavalry
Agincourt was interesting because mud (a combination of rain and fresh plowed fields) reduced infantry and cavalry mobility. The opening cavalry charge made the muddy battlefield worse, and the combination of mud and stakes on the ground injured the horses. The French were heavily armored, causing men-at-arms to sink up to their knees in mud. English longbowmen were able fire arrows into the french men-at-arms who were literally stuck in the mud until they ran out of arrows. The decisive moment was when English archers ran out of arrows and attacked the exhausted French with the hatchets and mallets they used to make and drive the stakes into their defensive positions.
Why would anybody ride a horse directly towards archers? If an arrow can make the horse fall or buck, the guy riding it with any sort of heavy armor is probably coming down hard.
To be fair, an arrow released from a bow with a draw weight of over 150 pounds could easily launch an arrow that could pass through multiple people at close range -- depending on how light their armor was.
I've seen bows with a third of that draw weight completely pass through a deer.
Obviously, certain factors have to be met -- distance being the most important and then shot placement.
in the spirit that you only need one reason to be right, not five: the strongest argument against volley "fire" is indeed that holding a bow is exhausting and so a commander wouldn't tell their archers to "hold" before releasing.
It seems like the archery gets disproportionately more “hollywood doesn’t understand how it works” coverage than other things.
Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?
Well there's also:
* Infantry presses vs out-and-out melee
* Siege weapons as "artillery" during field battles as though it was WW1 levels of firepower
* Cavalry charges as battering rams / tanks
So, maybe you can train yourself to see all of those too. Then you'll enjoy nothing :D
>Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?
Nah, it's everything. You see every specialist community complaining about it.
I've read the whole thing and I'm not convinced at all.
First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false.
But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.
I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama.
Am I missing something here?
> First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it
Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Edit: To quote the OP: "... as hard as it is to prove a negative, I will note that I have never seen a clear instance of volley fire with bows in an original text and so far as I can tell, no other military historians have either. And we have been looking."
> it still seems perfectly reasonable to me
Where's your evidence? "seems perfectly reasonable" leads to belief in witchcraft, the stars orbit the earth, leaches cure disease, the lack of germ theory, etc. That's why we modern humans require evidence.
> Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Be very careful with that assumption. Brett Devereux (author of the blog) himself constantly points out that our historical sources are often very limited because they were written by the nobility who only wrote about their own social class, completely ignoring the majority of people actually involved in a military campaign or civic life. We know a lot more about the generals and cavalry than the foot soldiers, archers, or supply train.
I think that argument cuts the other way on this one. If there were some higher-rank person, presumably a noble, ordering a volley, as depicted in TV shows, and as happened with firearms, there would be a bias towards mentioning that person doing that, to demonstrate his command, rather than towards omitting him!
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics.
I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
> I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
But we do have so much written about musket volleys, and those were done by lower status soldiers as well. It is very strange that much was written about musket volleys but not archer volleys.
The printing press fundamentally changed everything so our sources get much more socially inclusive starting with the arquebus onwards (but not so much the hand cannon, which predates the press). This cuts across all subfields of history because society no longer depended on expensive scribes to preserve sources and publish new material.
More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
Indeed, it would make sense that musket volleys evolved from archer volleys than being spontaneously invented as a tactic for a weapon that was competing with the bow.
Musket volleys are much closer to javelin volleys than archer volleys though.
Exactly, and we do have records of javelin volleys (Roman pila) but not of archer volleys … to me that is telling in its own right.
When was the last recorded javelin volley? I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows.
One thing that I don't enjoy from COUP is he often demolishes ideas that approach strawman territory (is a barely coordinated order to start shooting a volley? or does it have to be something else), but I understand that from his perspective as a teacher, he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
> I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows.
The most obvious reason they practiced volley firing for muskets is the large amount of smoke they produce, once one person shoots the rest can't see where they would fire so you want everyone firing at once so they don't block each other.
So there is no reason to believe the practice evolved from anywhere, they is no world where they didn't volley fire with muskets that produce a lot of smoke since its the obvious thing to do.
Well, you aren't really aiming with early firearms. You are just shooting in the general direction of the enemy. So I don't think smoke really explains it.
Volley fire wasn't employed for the earliest uses of the arquebus.
Javelins continued to be used around the Mediterranean until the gunpowder era, so there's no reason volley tactics could not have been transmitted directly.
Really? That's interesting, I can't recall ever coming across that myself. I have some research to do.
>When was the last recorded javelin volley?
After photography for sure, the Zulu used them extensively when beating the British.
Fair point. I hadn't considered them within the context here. I suppose a call out to New world natives' atlatls as well is necessary.
> he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
Where do you think current students get their misinformation? A lot from TV?
> I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all.
So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers!
Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist.
How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
> What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
I don't think this follows in practice, particularly since what's missing here is not names of archer captains but descriptions of the mechanics of volley firing (which may have been routine in certain circumstances, or not). Seems like attribution of the outcome to the excellence of the calvalry captains' flank attacks and valor of the Lord's retinue in holding the centre whilst merely noting that a grouping of archers were present without attributing anything to any decisions made by any individual archers at any level is pretty consistent with their low prestige (apart from Agincourt and a possibly apocryphal story about Harold Godwinson, archers don't seem to get much credit at all for being decisive, despite archery being important enough for peasants who wielded blunt instruments and blades in their day job to get compulsory longbow training).
Brett's argument that longbow volley firing would be difficult to time and probably not beneficial (especially compared with musket volleys) is compelling, but the argument that battle narratives don't really describe volleys, except in translations of words that may not have meant volley, isn't really in a context where archers rarely get much credit for anything .
Xenophon mentions archers and slingers in the Anabasis.
If archers were effecive thy would win battels and b the hero and in turn the nobels.
That has causation backwards: nobles weren’t cavalry because cavalry won battles*, but because cavalry was so expensive that only nobles and well funded centralized states with professional armies could afford them. You not only had to train the rider from a relatively young age but feed and support all the horses they’d need - armies rode in with at least three horses per rider on campaign to keep the horses from exhaustion (not including all the ones they’d train on). Supporting cavalry easily cost 5-10 times as much as supporting an equal number of infantry.
* Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
You only went to that effort to support cavalry because it won battles.
Cavalry won battles in societies that favored cavalry. If your society was built around elite warriors, your army probably relied on cavalry, because those elite warriors wanted to be individually as effective as possible. But if the state was responsible for raising the army and there was a middle class with sufficient combat skills available, infantry (such as Roman legions or mercenary pikemen) was often more cost-effective.
War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
Armies are combined arms, with few exceptions (Mongolian horde, perhaps), they didn't have just a single unit type. But armored heavy cavalry (with stirrups) wasn't some kind of weird sociological hang-up of European nations, it was a very effective unit type to have in your mix, such that societies were "willing" to spend significant resources in supporting the existence of that unit.
Here "willing" really means, "subjected to competition pressure such that societies that didn't support heavy cavalry units were for the most part militarily bullied into either annexation or standing up their own heavy cavalry support system."
That lasted until the technological realities of war changed (sufficiently-advanced firearms), at which point quite rapidly those societies stopped fielding heavy cavalry, which is another data point that this wasn't some kind of peacock display from nobles.
Having a unit type in your toolkit is one thing, and expecting it to play a decisive role in battle is another. For example, Alexander's heavy infantry was supposed to anchor the enemy in place as cavalry won the battle, while Roman heavy infantry the primary fighting force.
Mercenary pikemen ended the dominance of heavy cavalry in Europe before firearms became common. But that didn't make heavy cavalry obsolete, and neither did firearms. Cuirassiers had a prominent role in the Napoleonic Wars, and French cuirassiers actually wore their breastplates a few weeks into WW1.
> Cavalry won battles in societies that favored cavalry.
And the reason that those societies favored cavalry is that they won battles.
It'd be very silly to favor something that doesn't work, and any attempts to do so probably wouldn't last long.
>It'd be very silly to favor something that doesn't work, and any attempts to do so probably wouldn't last long.
What are your political beliefs? Because this argument applies equally well to cavalry as it does to communism. Would you seriously claim that all stupid political beliefs are new?
Communism has worked pretty well for the leaders of those states. For the people, not so much.
I just want to note that communism has quite poor record of surviving.
Unless you take People's Republic of China about them being communist rather than capitalist at face value.
This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully lived and mostly fought in elephant habitats. Likewise, cultures on or close to the steppe had much more of a cavalry focus because cavalry was so much more effective there. When the Romans went east, they didn’t stick to their heavy infantry, they developed cataphracts. And their eventual conquerors, the Turks, replaced most of their traditional cavalry with infantry as they expanded westward into Europe.
It's less about cultural preferences and more about fighting with what you have.
If you have a feudal society based on personal relationships between the elites, you probably can't raise large bodies of heavy infantry. You don't have the people trained to fight in formation, you don't have the resources to equip them, and you don't have the capacity to organize them. Instead, you have the elites, who are often well trained and equipped. The elites have their personal retainers, who are pretty much the same. There can be some mercenaries if you can afford them. And then there are commoners who have to fight for various reasons but often lack both training and equipment.
Elephants used to be native to North Africa, until the Roman Empire drove the subspecies to extinction. Carthaginians, Romans, and some Macedonian kingdoms used them in war. Persians and other Macedonian kingdoms imported elephants from India. But none of them fielded more than tens of elephants at once, at which scale infantry was capable of countering them. Some contemporary Indian kingdoms found it practical to have hundreds of elephants on the battlefield, which was qualitatively a different situation.
You fight with what you have but then sometimes you lose to someone who has a better army than you do and disappear from history. So in the long run you end up fighting with what actually works in your terrain. And I think it's very interesting that horses, who are only really indigenous to the steppe, ended up proliferating over the entire earth in a way that elephants did not. Hundreds of elephants on the battlefield sounds great if you can feed them though!
Who is “you” in this case? Is you the Roman state or is you a random noble trying to curry favor and glory?
The former supported cavalry because it won battles but the latter did so because it earned them prestige among their peers. It also helped them feel powerful when they rode into battle literally hoisted above the common foot solider, as if they were closer to the gods.
There's a notable technological divergence between the Roman and the noble - stirrups that make cavalry charges possible. Roman cavalry were usually lightly armed and armored and had a very different function on the battlefield.
Also as I recently learned from Lindybaige video, war horses themselves were “one shot weapon” - you would train one to do a “cavalry charge” and would not be able to repeat it with the same horse. So in essence, even more expensive!
Well, in the Bhagavad Gita and in Ramesses' inscriptions, chariot archers did win battles, were the heroes, and were the nobles. There's some speculation that changes in weaponry making this approach obsolete were the main cause of the Bronze Age Collapse. (Devereaux is writing about more recent wars, but archer volleys from chariots seem even less likely.)
We do have written records of how to fight battles: Maurice’s Strategikon, for example. You think he may have mentioned it somewhere.
Yea but you'd need some sort of argument why class intersects with how archers are characterized when they are. At best I think you might say "we don't know".
The nobility were involved in military campaigns. The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. When we talk about our historical sources being limited, it's because they focused on things like battles and military strategy, precisely because it is interesting to the wealthy people who support historians.
The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials.
edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.
> edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own.
Why not?
> The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing
even in modern wars it is far from true (if your country is getting overrun by enemy being rich is not enough to completely insulate you)
> The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing.
It’s not even true for all (or probably even most) of modern times. For instance the upper classes of Britain in WWI suffered much higher casualties than the lower classes.
I don't think WWI can be firmly called "modern times" with regards to warfare. It was a notable event in the transition to modern, but the cavalry charges against machine guns and such are reason enough to exclude it.
The modern period of history is widely considered to have begun in or around the 15th century. A common epochal event is the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Any definition which lumps drones and airplanes together with swords and muskets is not useful, in my opinion. The last ~100 years are totally different from what came before.
The volley could just be an emergent result borne from the fact that if an attacking army was outside the maximum range of archers, and then charged, all archers would have an enemy within a reasonable range nearly simultaneously. If every archer let loose when there was an enemy in range, the end result would be an initial large volley.
Not really scientific but you can see the exact same outcome in video games. After the initial synchronized volley, it becomes more of a constant barrage as each archer's differing rate of fire causes shots to become desynchronized.
Is it true? I have no idea, but it's hardly magical thinking. It's logical but could still be untrue for other reasons not assessed.
Maximum range varies per archer. Each bow is different, and each archer is different. This isn't modern mass-produced armaments (though they did mass-produce bows, each one was still made from a different piece of wood with its own quirks), and maximum range also depends on the archer's draw length (how long their arms are) and strength.
One of the stories about Agincourt (that the author didn't mention and I don't know if it's true) is that the French underestimated the range of the English archers and drew up inside their maximum range, so were getting shot before they were ready for it.
So "everyone shoots when the enemy gets into range" would still not be a volley as each archer judges for themself when the enemy is in range.
Videogames are unrealistic. There's no such thing as a discrete "maximum range" for archery, because the closer the target the harder the arrow will hit, and there's a point where the arrow will simply fail to do any damage when it hits.
Also, not everyone can fire an arrow equally fast. And even if they did, when they're acquiring different targets (lest they all shoot the same person) they can take slightly different amounts of time to choose who to shoot.
Also, speed isn't really the limit for firing in the first place - if someone thinks there aren't any good options just yet, they might wait a second or two before there's a good option, and now they're way out of sync with anyone who saw a good option immediately.
Videogames are just terrible because their physics are wildly unrealistic, and the human factors are removed entirely.
archers wouldn't do the because unlike a gun you cannot hold it loaded for long. So your order would be draw and fire. You can of course hold abow drawn for maybe a minute - but why do that when you can fire 6 arrows in that time which might hit.
If the enemy is out of range you might wait with an arrow knocked but not drawn - but if that is what they were doing the order would be to draw. there is no real point of such an order though - archers are themselves smart enough to estimate their own range (which as the other response pointed out was not the same for every archer), and thus make their own decisions. The only reason to hold fire until everyone was ready was if the combine fire was devistating enough - but there is every reason to think combined fire wouldn't be devistating.
It's difficult to hold even a 30-40# for more than ~10 seconds fully drawn.
You can of course have the arrow nocked for as long as you desire.
It's only logical with video game reasoning imo. In actual life each archer would have a different bow, varying physical strength, ability at the extreme end of their range, visual acuity, practice assessing where the extreme end of their range even is, etc etc.
It seems extremely unlikely that a group of individuals would all make the exact same choice simultaneously without a prearranged signal for it. And I think the post itself makes a strong enough case for why that signal wouldn't be made.
> But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.
It’s not perfectly reasonable at all. When the enemy is charging, what you want is maximum efficiency, which means a rate of shooting as high as possible, which means everyone shoots as soon as they are ready, which precludes synchronisation.
When the enemy is not charging and just manoeuvring, volleys are counter-productive because you just give them some time to hide behind their shields and move between volleys.
I can imagine maybe one time when such tactics could work, it’s in an ambush. But then it’s not large scale and it is quite difficult to pull it off, because you need to synchronise the archers without giving away their presence. And it’s quite far from the autor’s pet peeve, which was archers fighting like they had guns in big battles.
> upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
You cannot really do that without extensive drills that were not really a thing in pre-modern armies. There are too many variations in individual strength, not really standardised equipment, and different people behaving differently. Even if you take 10 people, you would not get synchronised arrows if you did that.
> Am I missing something here?
Why would they? What advantage would they gain doing so? Particularly when doing it more naturally is more efficient and effective (not going to repeat the story’s argument, but there are several).
>You cannot really do that without extensive drills
Allow me to introduce the longbowmen whose skeletons adapted to being professional longbowmen.[0]
[0]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285885888_Architect...
That is entirely different. The drills in question are necessary to have a group of people act in a coordinated way. That requires collective training and discipline, not merely individual training. Your example is of people who trained extensively, sure, but this was not collective manoeuvres that are required for something like firing volleys. It’s also discussed in the story.
Do you think these professional soldiers trained enough to modify the structure of their bones yet not in a highly coordinated manner with each other? Have you heard of military drills?
They aren't military drills; they're legally required to practice for two hours every Sunday (IIRC), which is a world apart from coordinated formations. Notably, you can practice just fine alone, while coordination drills notably require multiple people.
The fact that I used the term should have tipped you off… Now, can you read the posts before replying?
I don't see what's so beneficial about a volley. Concentrating the arrows allows the opposing force to ready their shields which renders the volley less effective, and advance in between volleys. It's better to rain arrows continuously which prevents the opposing force from defending in any capacity without stopping their advance entirely.
Arrows are not more effective (e.g. armor penetration) in a volley, and the psychological effect is also less for volleys I would argue: you know a volley is coming, duck and cover, and afterwards it's clear, vs a continuous rain where you never know when an arrow is headed toward you specifically.
The one thing that theoretically would be advantageous about a volley is that it's impossible for a target to block/dodge all of them. FTA (though focusing on how useful shields and armor are):
> arrows at range move slowly enough to be actively blocked and dodged
It's just that this one theoretical advantage isn't enough to make volleys useful in practice, since volleys decrease the total number of arrows you can shoot.
>Arrows are not more effective
In this scenario, how big is this impenetrable (and undoubtedly heavy) shield you are lifting over your head with one arm while charging the enemy?
TFA has diagrams showing the size and coverage of some typical shields, and discusses how even light armor was effective against arrows.
One example given is a Scutum (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutum) which weighs around 22 lbs- "light enough to be carried with one hand"
Looks good. Now run across a field towards archers with that thing over your head and try not to take an arrow in the gut.
Or, you can protect your front while the arrows get dropped on your head. Decisions, decisions...
Generally arrows are gonna be coming from in front of me in the field, not arcing over like artillery.
https://youtube.com/shorts/0AWfhAcFu_k?si=XokulP_9f3aFl2mu
However, if the enemy has an elevated position, that is literally what the romans did.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testudo_formation
Anybody who has ever been in a serious snowball fight knows the power of the two snowball technique, a high lob to distract followed by a quick fastball (to the face/torso). An army of professional archers would undoubtedly be experts in the same technique.
A unit of archers has a very limited supply of arrows, enough to shoot for a few minutes before they have to resupply. They also cannot precise aim a lobbed shot because their weapons do not have the appropriate sight nor a rifled barrel to maintain accuracy or energy with a high lob. Arrows fired in an excessively high arc are wasted.
It seems like your intuition of weapons and warfare comes from mass media, not historical evidence or practitioners.
We have skeletal evidence of professional archers. It takes years of dedicated practice since adolescence in order to modify the bone structure like that. That additional bone strength means these professionals were likely able to use draw strengths no modern enthusiast could even touch. It also follows that if they were part of a standing army, they also undoubtedly practiced skills together and used a variety of equipment, like short bows and longbows.
Unfortunately, we have no mass media that reflects what a professional archer of yesteryear looked like because that profession died centuries ago and nobody has modified their skeleton to amuse us. However, we can tell from some of their bones they were somewhat lopsided as the arms were conditioned for purpose. For example:
"The men of the Towton population appear to have been engaged in a habitual activity that preferentially loaded the left humerus when compared with the right. This disparity is strongest in the distal humeral shaft. The loading pattern varies such that it creates significant differences between limbs in diaphyseal shape from the mid-distal to midproximal shaft." [0]
Despite what the weekend warriors and LARPers would like to believe, the historical professionals really were anatomically and physically better at the job.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285885888_Architect...
What does draw strength have to do with not having an computed sight for hitting a moving target with a top-down shot, or the lack if rifling to keep an arrow from tumbling when gravity slows it down at the top of the required ballistic curve? Or the scarcity of ammunition? These are issues if technology, not of training or exercise.
Who needs sights or rifling? Just like any professional athlete, thousands and thousands of practice shots (eg, 10,000 hours) to develop muscle memory is all it takes to become proficient.*
*And we have the bones to prove it!
What would a high lob do, when your target is wearing a helmet and shoulder armour?
More importantly, people's silhouette from side-on is far bigger than their silhouette from the top down.
Maybe go to a LARP or reanectment event and participate (arrows with rubber endings) to compare if there are differences with your close range snowball fight.
"army of professional archers would undoubtedly be experts in the same technique."
Because I do doubt that a lot. There is no one shooting in the air on a battlefield to distract.
Your LARPers are nothing like historical professionals. It's like asking a bunch of chubby Sunday Leaguers to imitate a Champions League team.
Not. Even. Close.
To answer below: My fellow Sunday Leaguers also study and re-enact Champions League football. It's a lot of fun but I'm not foolish enough to think I belong on the pitch in a real competition. I didn't train my whole life to be an expert footballer and most researchers didn't train their whole life to drive an arrow through a man in battle.
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And there are still native tribes doing hunting and warfare with bows, that were and are studied. And some reenactment freaks are in a way better shape than their ancestors ever were, due to heavy training and better food.
Nobody is shooting in the air with an arrow to distract like you would a snowball. You shoot straight.
Do you have any experience with a professional athlete in any meaningful direct way?
It's normally described as a professional is to a good amateur as a good amateur is to a 5 year old toddler.
Please comment here when you know of any LARPers taking on (${insert_professional_sports_team_here}) so I can watch the match!
Hm. Are you aware that reenactment and research often go hand in hand? And if those people won't know, who actually try it out - then sureley you would know better. But how?
You might have mixed up LARP and HEMA.
Dangerous arrows tend to come from the same general direction. If the archer is close enough to shoot straight, arrows coming from above have so little energy that they are mostly harmless. If the archer had shot them with enough energy to penetrate armor, they would land behind you.
There is literally an entire section dealing with this exact question that answers it.
I think the blog post is arguing against a volley that happens all in one instant, requiring all the archers to synchronize perfectly. This seems pretty easy to argue against because while movies do it because it's dramatic and cool, it's harder to justify in actual combat situations (and the post goes into great detail on the pros and cons).
However, it seems a lot more reasonable to suppose that archers were sometimes told to hold until a given strategic moment. In that case, you might see something resembling a volley when, say, an advancing enemy reaches a particular position and the archers begin loosing. But I don't think that's what the post was talking about.
I agree. It’s talking about large scale synchronized firing. That’s the normal definition of a “volley of fire” isn’t it?
Just waiting until someone says to start shooting isn’t a volley. It’s just holding fire.
> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields
Why wait for a specific command? It sounds like as an archer maybe you could try and hit a few far-off enemies whenever you wanted. There will be a critical period when most of the arrows will be released and be most effective, but the primary limiting factor is the archer's fatigue level. The article makes it clear there's not really a shortage of arrows.
So it's probably more like "people start talking, some arrows start flying, as the enemies get closer more arrows start flying". Which is pretty different from a coordinated volley.
"Am I missing something here?"
The way a bow works. I could shoot much more arrows in my own rhytm, then coordinating with everyone in the unit and wasting energy holding the string longer than needed.
So I am pretty sure, there were some sorts of volley fire, when the archers start firing when the enemy gets in range. But once the shooting starts you would loose lots of kill power restricting your archers for very little gain.
I would ask the question the other way around: if you wouldn't learned of it in spectacular movies - why would anyone ever implement it?
With crossbows and musquets, where holding the fire does not cost energy - different story. But maybe try it for yourself: hold a war bow at full strength - you don't want to any longer than needed. So typical you pull and release.
There's no evidence of it in contexts where we would expect something like this to be mentioned. So the absence is a strong indication that it didn't happen.
> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy.
Yeah, pretty much nothing of that is actually reasonable.
First off, pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent. The only command that can be reliably given is "go", and even then, unless you're decently well drilled, that's still as likely to come from following what your neighbors are doing than being able to pay attention to your battlefield commander who might be a half-mile away. And archers are the least trained portion of the pre-modern battlefield!
Second, actually trying to hold everybody for a single coordinated volley seems incredibly counterproductive. The primary purpose of volley fire, as explained in the article, is to mitigate slow reload times. Archers have the opposite problem; they're going to exhaust their ammunition supply in a few minutes. Staggering the start time of the archer attack over, say, 30 seconds is actually a very significant percentage increase in the amount of time the attacking army is going to be harried by the archers.
> And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
Already by this point, that means you don't have a single, solid pulse of arrows, but rather a continuous stream that's going to take--at least--2 or 3 seconds before everyone has loosed their first arrow. And quite probably, your slowest archers are loosing their first arrows after the fastest archers have loosed their second arrow. It doesn't make sense to me to call that a "volley", since it's not going to look anything like what we would think of as a mass volley of arrows.
Given that you're already stretching the definition of "volley" quite hard to match what you think is happening, and given that there is absolutely no sign that anyone ever thought trying to achieve a more cohesive initial volley was worth striving for, I think it does more harm than good to argue that volley fire existed in some form with regards to regular bows.
> pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent
I think you mean strategic level. Tactically, they were able to hold formation, rotate, do all kinds of maneuver. Just look at how many "NCOs" are in a Roman legion. But it was difficult to control the units strategically, e.g. taking several units and moving them across battlefield in an organized fashion.
> There's no evidence of it in contexts where we would expect something like this to be mentioned.
What are those contexts?
Firsthand accounts of battles involving massed archers.
I think the most obvious context is visual art. There are thousands of depictions of medieval battles. Would really nobody think of depicting a volley of arrows in any of them? That would be a pretty spectacular sight with supposedly devastating effect.
I don't think the article is arguing there would not be a starting point to archer fire. One would expect commanders to make some decision about when their forces would engage, and even without explicit command most soldiers would probably recognize the same point as being ideal to start firing. It might not be as sharp as a line of muskets, but odds are everyone would have shot an arrow before anyone got off their second.
But volleys imply a specific coordinated cadence. If you're just telling your troops to open fire, whether it be with bows or fire arms, that's not a volley.
The general making a visible signal is a bad idea. Most generals even today don't have a cool bird's-eye view of the battlefield; they simply won't notice the moment, let alone be able to communicate their decision instantly. Okay, let's replace the general with the sergeant leading the archers.
But this leads us to the more important question: why wait until that last moment? If the enemy is within your range of fire, shooting at them is better than not shooting at them. You shoot at them all the way until they reach your own infantry, accumulating wounds and breaking up their ranks. Not shooting at them won't make the final arrow you loosen before they charge any more damaging.
The blog author has a great multi-part series on just this topic: https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...
Large scale coordination during pre-modern warfare was effectively impossible. The battlefields would often stretch for hundreds of meters or even a few kilometers and it was too chaotic to see anything once in the heat of battle. Generals could issue some local commands, especially if they were at the head of a cavalry charge, but only the officers and bannermen leading a small formation could exert any real control over their soldiers. A general signaling ranged combatants is just unrealistic.
Your second point is spot on. Infantry formations don’t generally charge the way we think of charges - they were rather slow, controlled forward movements with weapons and shields lowered. otherwise the first soldier to trip or take an arrow would take down the entire formation. No one ever really pitches battle with their infantry starting in range of the other army’s archers so there’s never really a clear opportunity for a volley.
Cavalry charges are a bit of a special case because they’re especially vulnerable to archers, but they’re also the group most capable of avoiding volley fire. Cavalry charges don’t run into soldiers, they train for coordinated feints so they can quickly change direction unlike infantry. When attacking cavalry, archers generally want to have random fire to increase the chances of bringing down a single horse, which often causes enough chaos to break the charge.
The importance of having a reserve, so you can make a last minute change if you needed to.
I think his argument about draw weight is compelling. In order to do a coordinated valley you would have to have everyone draw and hold.
Bows have highly variable “lock time”. There is no trigger and you can’t reasonably get an army to draw at the same rate.
Reload times are fast enough that the fastest archer may be able to be ready to fire again before the last archer has completed their first shot.
In those circumstances, you would simply get orders to start and stop firing.
You wouldn't hold the bow drawn. The archers would nock their arrows and at the command would draw and loose the arrow. That would result in them all shooting at roughly the same time. Just a second or so delayed from the command.
Agreed; it's completely impractical for someone to "hold" a proper non-modern war bow at full draw. Every single instance I've seen of reenactment archery using an authentic bow has the archer smoothly nock, draw and release in one motion. There is no "aiming" like we see in modern competition archery - this occurs during the draw. Not to say these weren't accurate, some video I've watched of reenactment archery looks positively lethal out to about 30 metres or more.
I would think it would work to drill on draw speed (where the faster archers paced the slower ones). So you'd be able to tighten up the release window quite a bit vs doing nothing.
In a cavalry charge, the shield protects as much (or as little) as otherwise. The horse is doing the actual work, while the rider can use the shield normally.
An infantry charge starts at the last moment. At that point, the infantry formation has been in the effective bow range for a couple of minutes. It would be stupid to exhaust yourself by running a long distance over rough terrain carrying a heavy load before the fighting even starts. And shields tend to be large enough that the additional protection from them outweighs the gains from reaching the enemy faster.
You're literally arguing with a professional military historian specializing in the time period where bows were heavily used. Consider re-examining your preconceived notions of "common sense" from this perspective.
Another point: bows and arrows don't have a consistent load time or range across users. Different archers have different timing and effective ranges with the same bow and arrow. How do you pick a volley range? Or do you trust your men to know about how far they can shoot, based on their practice?
Nock time can be drilled, just like any other skill.
I think the main argument against volley fire was that it's just impractical. An archer wrote a comment in another thread here on HN saying that they would do volley fire for an audience because it was expected, but the leader had only seconds to wait while they all drew back before they had to shout for them to loose. An archer just doesn't have the strength to hold the bow drawn and wait for a command like that. It's a waste of energy and resources.
What we see on TV is always one completely unprotected army, and one squad of arhcers.
But in the real world if squads of archers exist, then every single army would have a protection against them. The romans had the tortoise formation, I can't believe this was just forgotten for 1000 years.
Organized volleys would give the advancing infantry convenient time slots to hunker down behind their shields and reduce the effectiveness of arrows even further. A less dense but continuous stochastical distribution would be objectively more deadly, except perhaps against a force going for arrow evasion.
I remember from a Lindybeige video that war bows have too much draw weight, so you can’t hold it drawn like in the movies. You have to almost instantly shoot it. You want war bows to be as powerful as possible.
you could hold a bow for maybe a minute - if you had extensive training. However there is no reason for anyone to train like that (they they didn't / couldn't). Someone strong can hold 200 lbs for a minute - but not longer. Or in that same minute you could launch 6 arrows - which is why they did the 6 arrows.
60 seconds?! No way. A few at war bow #s, at most. Even 30-40# is often <10 seconds.
That would be extensive training in holding a drawn bow. Which isn't training anyone would have had.
No one can sustain a hold of war bow weights for 60 seconds. That's 100#+ over three fingers and I'm not sure what the quality of tabs were like back then.
Yeah, these bowmen weighed about 1.3X this draw weight. Imagine holding a one handed pull up, with 3 fingers, for a full minute.
Generality: If (1) X is not done in the modern real world, and (2) your only experience with X is seeing dramatic Hollywood depictions of it, then "common sense" does not apply.
I don't think that the onus should be on historians to prove that something didn't happen. Rather, the onus should be on people to prove that something did happen. It's fine to have arguments about how it's plausible (or not) that something occurred when we don't have direct evidence. But at the end of the day, I think it's better to not draw conclusions without actual evidence.
What is the point of this post? Devereux is a literal expert in the field who has studied this for decades. You're...someone on the internet? What are you posting for? This is rank anti-intellectualism.
I love this comment. It’s just so peak Hacker News. You read the work of a professional, you have no clue about the field at all, and yet with full confidence you start writing a massive comment about how the professional is wrong based on you having watched some tv shows and your gut feeling.
Investigate your pre-conceptions. Watch some actual tribal warfare. Realize that ALL FILM IS UTTERLY FAKE and ruled mostly by the rule of cool. "the general makes a visible signal" How? Turns out you can't actually do that on the battlefield for the most part.
I'm pretty sure nobody in the historical record mentioned how their armies have never once used blackcurrant jam to destroy a rampaging army from Venus. Does that make such an event more or less likely for you?
People mostly don't go around listing off things they're not doing and have never done. Therefore, lack of mention that someone's not doing something isn't really evidence they are doing it, or at least is very weak.
Tbh, reading all this makes my head spin a little but I def love how deep some folks get into the nitty gritty of old school tactics - you think there's actually any lost technique out there we'll never fully figure out?
I think lost techniques are the rule rather than the exception. There are loads of fundamental questions about how premodern combat took place that will probably never be decided. You can get a feel for lots of them by reading this very blog.
Stuff like: did opposing infantry lines actually stay in contact for long periods at a time or did they clash for a couple of brief minutes at a time and then mutually retreat a few paces to recover stamina?
In Warhammer we call it Fall Back in Good Order.
Lost techniques are the field of experimental archaeology.
We need a chronoscope.
And in the movies you never see any of the arrows collide; ever.
They didn't research the upgrade.
Question: What does this author think happened instead of the volley? Does he expect that archers just started randomly firing when they felt like doing so? Of course not. They waited for the order to start firing. So the first shots would, imho, constitute a "volley" in that everyone would be launching in the same few seconds. Subsequent shots would then become less coordinated, but that first wave would be a true volley. Then orders would come to stop/move/start, resulting in other coordinated volleys.
The author has an entire series of posts on how pre-modern generalship did and didn't work, including a post on issuing commands. The tl;dr is that there cannot have been a generalized order to fire on cue because pre-modern armies didn't have that kind of command resolution and speed. Best case you have a few guys who start firing because they're told to and the rest follow suit when they notice that it's started, more likely there's an established doctrine for when firing should happen and archers use their judgement for whether to start.
https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...
I don't think a command to start firing is that complicated. A simple flag wave suffices especially for <100 archers that's standing still. There are more complicated commands that a centurion had been able to do.
There is something strange about the way this article was written. Besides that it could have been 25% of its final length, it repeats itself quite a bit.
I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.
The name of the blog is "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry". The symptoms you see are caused by Unmitigated Pedantry. It's the author's style
I found the overuse of italics for emphasis fatiguing
It annoyed me as well, I eventually stopped reading due to this
I don't quite buy it. There's a line in Herodotus' Histories about Persian arrows blocking out the sun, and that implies a volley to me.
I don't have time to find a link now but if you google it you'll see.
(Incidentally, it's also in the movie 300)
If you happen to have Randal Munroe's what if? [1] on your bookshelf, look up the chapter titled "Sparta". It should convince you that the story of arrows blocking the sun is probably not true.
If you don't have it, you could try to do the math yourself. Munroe assumes that 1) an arrow intercepts 40 cm² of sunlight, 2) an archer looses 8 to 10 arrows a minute and 3) each arrow spends an average of three seconds in flight. You could adjust those numbers to taste, but I would not expect the conclusion to change.
[1] https://xkcd.com/what-if/
Herodotus, the famously accurate historian
I disagree with the point about the word "fire". How can you criticize the English word used if historically they weren't even speaking English?
Scenes are depicted in English instead of the native language of the setting for the benefit of the audience (and budget), and in modern English it's perfectly okay to use "fire" as a translation for the act of loosing a bow, even if "loose" is more commonly used in archery.
But English-speaking places have bows and arrows. (Even a particularly famous historical one!). So it’s reasonable to expect a translation into English to use the English word for sending an arrow from a bow.
If it were some science fiction setting with a weapon very unlike any real historical weapons then sure, the particular etymology of the English word wouldn’t be very relevant.
There were no English-speaking places that used bows extensively. The closest would've been Early Modern English, which is still drastically different to Modern English.
If the actors were actually speaking Shakespearean English then sure, it would be wrong for them to say "fire"/"fyr", but if they did that then you wouldn't understand half of what they're saying.
I'm sure there's a few actual examples of this though, for scenes depicting battles in England after 1800 or so that use bows. I would still say it's debatable whether you could consider this truly modern English but it's close enough.
Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.