How much time would it take to train a bowman/archer in the Middle Age?

Just give me a generic answer and explaination, Veeky Forums.

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Any strong idiot can pick up archery in a few days.

depends what you're going to do with him. anyone can learn to shoot within a week, the thing is that if you're trying to shoot an armoured man from 300 yards you're going to need a heavy bow. and you need to get strong to draw that bow.

Depends. IIRC England banned all Sunday sport except archery at one stage so at that time you could just grab a peasant and expect him to be competent. I did a little bit of archery in high school and it took minutes to get the basic concept and hitting a stationery consistently from about 25m took only a day. Sure my grouping was terrible and I only got about a quarter of my shots on target but still. So in other words, not long at all.

Plus, generally your target is gonna be huge - an entire formation of men - so master archers are not a necessity.

In addition to that, if for every 20 levied peasants with bows you have 1 professional archer (and the bows are more or less standardised), he could set the angle and draw and everyone else could just copy him, so all that would be required is knowledge of the basic technique for shooting a bow and the strength to draw it.

Thanks for the answers.
You guys mean archery itself is not hard but it needs physical strength?

Follow up: high-powered bows required significant strength, but most farm workers and the like could be expected to be pretty strong due to the nature of their work. Still though, skeletons of longbowmen are identifiable because they developed bone spurs in their shoulder due to the immense force being exerted by the bow.

Yup. You won't be terribly accurate until you've spent a long time doing it but you can at least get an arrow going in the right direction. However, you still need a lot of strength to draw a worthwhile bow.

Thanks for the answers.

I have one more question.
Is Lars Andersen good at archery? I think skills are impressive, but some people say it is just flashy because he use a normal bow with light arrows, so in reality, it is useless.
youtube.com/watch?v=BEG-ly9tQGk

>skeletons of longbowmen are identifiable because they developed bone spurs in their shoulder due to the immense force being exerted by the bow.
that's more due to monotonic repeating of the same action again and again and again, same thing happens with galley slaves and you don't need to be that strong to pull the oar.

he's good

it'd be more impressive if the bows were stronger

Basically archers required a lifetime of training and conditioning supported by a good diet to give them the strong musculature needed for the heavy bows of the period.

It's one of the reasons crossbows and guns took off. No need to feed all these guys beef for years to make sure you army has archers, when instead you can just give some peasants weapons that need far less physical strength and only need a few weeks of drilling for proficiency.

>A lifetime

Hardly. A month of hard physical training would be plenty. And crossbows, particularly early ones, required just as much strength when not volley firing: without a windlass or similar cranking mechanism, you still have to draw the crossbow every time you want to shoot. The strength thing certainly does apply to guns though.

He does trick shooting
Which is impressive on its own but wouldn't be much use in war. For example he doesn't pull the bow back all the way for many of his shots, uses modified arrows and whatever. Thats not to say he isn't good but it's just trickshooting.
It's kind of like plinking with a .22. Yeah you have to be a good shoot to hit the target but it's not the same type of shooting you would be doing in war.

Archery is the sort of thing thats easy to learn, hard to master.

It would only take a few months to train a group of men to fire in volleys at pre determined ranges.

But if you want real good troops you're going to go for the men who are professional archers, who know the exact angle to fire at to achieve the range they want, they know their bow, they know flight physics (as in just how will arrows behave), they're accurate at flat trajectories, they have the endurance to fire at a fast rate for a long time, and they're also probably armoured and can at least hold their own in melee for a while.

>And crossbows, particularly early ones, required just as much strength when not volley firing: without a windlass or similar cranking mechanism, you still have to draw the crossbow every time you want to shoot.
but the movement is completely different so it isn't even near comparable, you draw the crossbow mainly with your legs and lower back. go to gym and try to do pull-ups with the same weight you do deadlifts with.

I'd really like to see his videos unedited
If you try enough you're guaranteed to do some wicked shots

Light bows and light arrows.

There's probably some truth in what he's saying, he is backed up by some manuscripts of the medieval Arabs, so there probably were some assassins, or hassashins, who did practice archery in such a way, but the majority of archers wouldn't have fought like him, they'd fire in massed archery volleys, we know this especially from Roman and Byzantine military manuals.

>Hardly. A month of hard physical training would be plenty.

For levy archers with light bows maybe. But if you want English longbowmen or Mongol archers you're going to need men who've shot bows since they were children.

>And crossbows, particularly early ones, required just as much strength when not volley firing: without a windlass or similar cranking mechanism, you still have to draw the crossbow every time you want to shoot.

Typically the simplest spanning devices were:
A hook attached to a belt, the crossbowman squats, hooks the bow and then rises to draw the bow string back.
A "goat's foot lever" which hooks onto the top of the crossbow and is then pulled back to draw the bow.

Both of them showed up within 200 years or so of the medieval crossbow beginning to proliferate around 1000 AD.

Lower end of military archery was around 100 lbs draw weight.

Depends on how much you train but I reckon it's feasible to learn in a year or two.

> reinvented

and btw i love how he shows old manuscripts and ignors the rest that dont suport his claims

>100lbs
>year or two
man less than that for skinny dyel, bet a farmer could do it day 1