Medieval history prof says English Longbows can shoot through plate armor

Not the guy you were asking, but I'll have a go at this.

Gold and silver were the earliest metals to be worked by humans, because they have low melting points and can be found on its own (not as part of an ore). All you have to do is accidentally put some gold on a cooking fire and bingo, you've got the invention of metallurgy. Of course, gold isn't actually useful for any practical purpose (if you're a neolithic hunter), but you know what - people like shiny things. The native americans really did trade stuff for glass beads. If you can trade gold jewellery for a deer carcass, that makes it valuable.

Once you've established that gold is valuable that gives people a reason to learn how to actually work it properly (like learning how to build better smelting fires, or learning to cast it for example), and a reason keep an eye out for more shiny rocks they can melt. It's easy enough for people to discover copper this way - then suddenly you've got a metal that you can actually use as a tool. Not a very good tool, but it's easier than chipping fucking flint.

Once you've established that there are different metals and you can use them for various purposes, it's only natural to try mixing them together. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the first person to mix copper with tin was trying to mix a valuable metal with a less valuable one in order to get more money (or goat hides) out of someone.

Of course, then you've got bronze, which is a very useful metal for making tools. So useful that basically the entire economy of the bronze age was based around it. And once your society reaches the stage where metal-working is an integral part of it rather than an occasional side line, you start to professionalise the industry. People start trying to make better alloys, better furnaces, and from there it's pretty much inevitable that you'll get to iron working at some point, and from there to steel.

They could, you retard. Metallurgy was not that great in the era of the Longbow.

Using a modern steel recreation of armored plate doesn't prove anything. You need to read the documents of historians and find out the way these weapons were actually used in that time period to know their strengths and limitations.

Source: Battle of Crecy and the 100 year war

But there is more to a 14th century knight's kit than just roughly 16 to 18 gauge plate. There usually was mail and 1 to 2 layers of quilted gambeson underneath. So even if you penetrate the plate you still have to get through the other layers below, which period bows have been shown to struggle with.

youtube.com/watch?v=CULmGfvYlso

>Metallurgy was not that great in the era of the Longbow.
that's a half-truth. There was plate armour made of steel that was of a high enough quality to stop longbow arrows. It's just that a large portion of the army - even a lot of the knights - wouldn't have had top-quality plate (although still, a significant chunk of them would have had decent quality steel plate).

the other problem with modern testing can be seen here
youtube.com/watch?v=D3997HZuWjk
notice anything about this? They only test the breastplate, the strongest part of any suit of armour.

If you actually read first hand accounts of longbows in action, they don't talk much about longbows penetrating breastplates. But that doesn't mean they weren't dangerous, even fatal. The armour at the extremities - on the hands, feet, and especially the visor - was much weaker. The chronicles at agincourt describe the rain of arrows penetrating faceplates, forcing the knights to trudge through the mud with their faces pointed directly at the ground. And there's always a chance that the arrow will find its way into one of the joints, like at the neck.

It may be difficult for a single archer to find the weak point in a suit of armour, but when you have thousands of arrows being fired every minute, that's going to fuck up a lot of knights. At at very close range, during the final charge, even a steel breastplate can't stand up to a longbow. The archer might only have time for one shot at that distance, but as I said with thousands of shots that makes for a lot of dead knights.

This. The details of weapons and how they work just aren't interesting to most historians, because those things are unrelated (and mostly unimportant) to the things they're supposed to be focusing on. The same goes for most archaeologists, actually. Unless it's a technology that they have a specific interest in and some real experience with, at least some of the things they say could be complete bullshit, because certain kinds of practical knowledge involve details that most people don't think of in academic settings.

I'm in an archaeology graduate program right now, and it's something my professors full acknowledge. In fact, me and a friend of mine were basically pushed into doing our research because faculty figured they were projects that needed to be done and were were the only ones that could do it. I'm identifying historical weapons based on a small scattering of materials found at a site; it's something that requires an insane amount of knowledge relating to small changes in firearms technology and what certain artifacts entail, and most people who don't know about the history of guns don't bother to lean that stuff. My friend is working on experimental stuff related to bow and atlatl usage; since he's done archery for years, he can ask better questions and design better tests than most archaeologists.

It's just one of those things that has to do with depth of knowledge. For lots of things, most people are content to take things they've read as fact and not questions it. That can apply to historians and archaeologists, too.

Longbow is useless

Source; Battle of Patay and 100 year war

The English started using longbows around 1130 and started to phase them out in 1570. Plate improved over the course of that time. Longbows were very effective against the plate of 1346 at the Battle of Crecy and un effective against the plat of 1415 at Battle of Agincourt. Read up on modern estimates on longbow effectiveness at that battle.

there was also the fact that horses are very fragile creatures and a single arrow to a joint would cause one to collapse and throw its rider, at which point the english men at arms could move in

that was an important factor overall, but I was specifically addressing the assertion that longbows couldn't penetrate plate armour.

all the battle of patay proves is that unprepared infantry in a open field are dogmeat if hit by a heavy cavalry charge, if the troops had been Napoleonic french line infantry the result would be the same.

as for the hundred years war, the british won most of the pitched battles and campaigns but in the end couldnt sustain the expense, particularly not against a background of civil war with the war of the roses going on as well, but it took 100 years for the french superiority in population size and economics to defeat the english

tested it, its possible.
also this
>Consider all the myths that can be disproved just by actually trying the thing.
precisely

>Do they just deal with documents all day and never figure out any of the technical stuff?

Yes. Most historians base their understanding on what they have read rather than handling historical pieces or modern replica

Totally missed the point of what I was saying, at some point in the past there was a guy who didn't know mixing compound X with compound Y would produce toxic gas or an explosion and their contemporaries would probably refer to such people not as a craftsman but as that guy who killed himself. No need to be so defensive craftsmen are great, whatever.

that's not really true for all historians. Some are more inclined to deal in written sources, some take more of an interest in archaeology.

Silver rarely occurs as a metal in surface deposits. Oxidizes to a black color rapidly, making placer deposits difficult to find. Native silver is rarer than native gold.

Native copper used to pretty common in the near east. Some of the earliest metal artefacts we have are bits of native copper hammered into shape with rocks.
That said, there isn't necessarily rhyme or reason for how metallurgy developed the way it did. It's a series of people doing what worked for them in their own circumstances