The English Longbow. >Thread

Is the English Longbow the Katana of the west in terms of wank?

lesson learned then, tanks user

Longbows had been around for way, way longer than that. It's that type of english longbow that might've been pretty new; we're not entirely sure.

The idea of having a bow as tall as a man is thousands of years old, and has been found on prehistoric remains, like Ötzi.

Otzi had a big fucking bow? Cool, I thought he was just found with a spear and a club or something.

I'd heard that that particular longbow was actually a Welsh invention that had been around for about a century and had then spread to the rest of Britain and some bits of Europe.

Pretty much. Yewaboos are silly little people.

>From what I've injested about martial history, the English Longbow was a huge deal

Stop learning from third rate youtube videos then. The longbow was a relevant part of a reasonably successful combined-arms approach, but it wasn't any major revolution in itself. It was probably the best weapon around for that specific tactic, but something like light crossbows would probably have done well enough there too. And for that you had a weapon that required very expensive materials to build (suitable wood was a strategic and limited resource to the English, who had to go to great lengths to secure an adequate import), required bulky arrows to be dragged around by the armies (you may need half a million for a single battle, a large amount of which wouldn't be recovered afterwards) and most importantly, you needed to find half decent archers. The problems with training good longbowmen are probably quite exaggerated in many cases, but you're looking at a point in time when you basically just didn't train any troops. You hired what was available, and they used what they knew to use. For missile troops this meant crossbows, because the available people to hire would mostly be ex-city militia (as apart from the nobility and their retainers, they're the only ones to do any military training really), and with a good city wall to hide behind during reload crossbows are great. Hand him a longbow and he'll smile, nod, and be gone next morning. Parts of the British isles on the other hand had a culture of longbow shooting amongst the peasants, meaning they (and pretty much they alone) had a recruitment base for archers.

>It's that type of english longbow that might've been pretty
The combined arms tactics of a knight-reinforced melee block supported by the longbow shooting at the enemy's flanks was put in use against the Scots in 1332, so even if it was somewhat new at that point by the time we get to Agincourt in 1415 it wasn't.

*unsheathes arrow*

Pssht, nuffink puhsonnel...lad

>city militia
Do you know anything about or have any good sources on stuff like city militia and household guards? It's really fucking hard to find stuff on medieval fighters who weren't knights or mercenary bands.

Ötzi's bow was about 6 feet tall afaik. Many more bows of that size were also found in a danish swamp, though they were flatbows rather than the same type as the english one.

>not weeabows

Not him but in that battle it reads like the archers barely got time to even engage and were swiftly ambushed and overwhelmed.

The cult of the longbow has been around for a long time. In the Anglosphere you got people like Ben Franklin suggesting arming people with longbows. First it's idiotic because there was no one around that could use it in colonial America and second it was dropped for a reason in 1595 in England. I remember seeing similar accounts during the Napoleonic Wars. The problem is that people take this writing seriously and see it as proof that the longbow remained superior centuries after it was dropped.

Even in the 16th century when you have all the military veterans siding with firearms over the longbow leading to the Privy Council declaring obsolete in 1595 you still had people clamoring for it. Of course they weren't taken seriously.

This cult still persists to this day with people making inane claims over it. Like saying it only became obsolete with the invention of repeating rifles.

Longbows were nothing new at that point.
Agincourt was mostly a complete blunder on the side of the french commanders.
If you want to catch the absolute horror show of encountering organised archer volleys for the first time, you need to set your game somewhere in antiquity.

>cherrypicking examples
>using a Wikipedia infobox with no context
Lol
See? Funny how that works
Suck a dick, you idiot

There were some reasonable points made through history that once the gun invalidated a lot of armour, it wouldn’t be too foolish to suggest a lighter longbow, in the 30-40lb range could still do some horrible damage to an unarmoured man, without the years on years of conditioning.
Definitely not something to replace your muskets with, but in terms of throwing out more men without adequate firearms industry or imports, it’s really probably not as stupid as you make out.

...

No need to be upset, it's right for what he intended. It was an open field, French cavalry was able to catch English longbowmen off guard. Now add to that the fact that at Agincourt most knights didn't even die due to longbow fire and he has a good point about knights trumping longbows in open fields. If you think there's something about the context that contradicts it, explain rather than just saying that there is a context.

Napoleons troops fought cossack archers in Russia, arrows did next to nothing while the French destroyed the cossacks.

Also you can't put bayonets on bows so you need dedicated pike/spearmen to scare of enemy cavalry.

>fought cossack archers in Russia, arrows did next to nothing while the French destroyed the cossacks
It was mostly Bashkirs, one of the steppe people in the Russian Empire. They fought as horse archers and presented bows and arrows as gifts to some Prussian officers.

The party KNOW about longbows & their effective range, and they know that d&d has rules for them.

Surprise the players with a parallel that works in your setting- a lethal threat from an opponent they assumed to be insignificant.

A major high-fantasy innovation might be something that improves troop logistics. Another could be instant communication. If you're modelling an entire army, an opponent that can deliver orders in seconds rather minutes would be a serious threat.

gottem

>the English Longbow was a huge deal

Not really, no. What was a huge deal was that the normans inherited a legal system from the Plantagenets that allowed them to force lots and lots of people into training with bows over generations.

Also the Normans and English apparently loved fighting on foot, so they never had issues with finding heavy infantry to back up their large blocks of archers.

the tactic worked for them for reasons that had nothing to do with physical technology, it was all due to culture and law. Which is also why the British remained the only successful users of massed archers in Europe.

>normans inherited a legal system from the Plantagenets
Got those in the wrong order

This, the bows themselves aren't that impressive, the highly trained archers were tough.

>Le battle of Patay ptroves that cavalry are better than longbowmen
>Never mind 3 french armies were destroyed at Clercy,Poitiers and agincourt and French king was taken prisoner

Not him, but british armies of the time were roughly 90% longbowmen

Like this one? It's especially good because it was against a force some neckbeards think was immune to archer fire.
>but muh testudo

Like maybe those spinning things from Hobbit?

My favorite demonstration of why Bows in 5e are kind of stupid when played as a grid-based game is to do the following

>A knight with a sword hits a straw dummy 1 square away
>A knight with a halberd hits a straw dummy 2 squares away
>Zoom out
>Keep zooming
>A bit more
>An Archer with a longbow and sharpshooter obliterates a target dummy from 120 squares away through 3/4 cover

ITT: youtube.com/watch?v=xhHfiAy0bWk

And the English longbows got defeated at Verneuil Patay and Castillion. French won the war. Longbow was a good weapon but it wasn't the end-all-be-all.

It's not about having a bigger bow, it's about having a fuckton of archers to fire the bow. The French at the time would not enjoy having to militarize their society in the way that the English were forced to do, it would probably destabilize it too much

The longbow was defeated by the cannon,not cavalry.

At Verneuil and patay they were.

The testudo did work against arrows, but not against Parthian cataphracts

do you mean the Roman general Crassus's defeat by the Parthians?

Didn't the winter break ended two weeks ago or something?
Why are you shitposting then?

... and?
No, really, what difference does it make? The weapon eventually ended up simply outdated. Even "massed" crossbowmen proved to be better over time, mostly because you could relatively easily replace their ranks, instead of spending next 20 years to get new batch of recruits.

The difference is wezwuz crossbows and wewuz cavalry were unable to defeat longbow heavy armies during the period from crecy to agincourt no matter what revisionists claim.

And then to claim Patay proves me wrong because an english relief force got ambushed on the road,thats the difference

... what?
No, honestly, I have no fucking clue what the fuck you are even posting about

>he difference is wezwuz crossbows and wewuz cavalry were unable to defeat longbow heavy armies during the period from crecy to agincourt no matter what revisionists claim.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ardres

Smaller battle but still proves you wrong.

Theres also a couple of battles the French win but it is not said if the English fielded lots of Longbowmen so I will not list those. But Du Guesclin defeated a lot of English armies, that's for sure.

> destroyed the cossacks
Is that the reason french cavalry ceased to be after 1812 campaign, whereas russian irregular cavalry made its merry way to paris?

Yeah the cossack bow did that and not the fact that the French were not able to care for their horses (or they ate them) in Russian Autumn/Spring.

Wasn't that more good ol' General Winter coming out to bat for the Russians again? Especially as one of the things a starving army tends to do is start eating the horses.

Wew Spring should be Winter
Russian Winter.

Cossacks weren't bow users, though. You are thinking bashkirs.

All in all, irregular cavalry was indeed non-performing on the battlefield; they would be dispersed by cuirassers or hussars every other time, and they couldn't break square formations.
But they exelled at harassing communications, roads, supply trains. I remmember reading most frost casualties french suffered were due to cossack presense: it is too dangerous to actually use village housing if you are afraid cavalry will come at night and just kill your unit house-by-house. So they camped together, in the cold - and fires didn't help much.

Is that related to the topic? Well, not really

Russia was hell for the cavalry. There was a rainstorm in the beginning of the campaign that killed about 20% of all horses in the whole army. In fucking july.

They also didn't use village housing, because villages were burned to the ground beforehand. Russians during that campaign made sure to deny absolutely any sort of advantage to Grand Army, even if it meant burning down pretty much everything between Prussian border and Moscow. Remember - life of a serf (which made between 80 to 82% of population back then, as long as you consider people enrolled into army as non-serfs) meant squat in Russia. Those weren't even considered human in full extent due to the most extreme serfdom that ever was. So burning down fuckload of your own villages and looting food supply from own subjects was considered fine and dandy, because they were serfs.
And the best part is - Russia wasn't exactly the most populous place back then, so go figure.

>Those weren't even considered human in full extent due to the most extreme serfdom that ever was
You take those words, slam them into your liar's throat and choke on them
Of course they were always considered human! How can you call Russia's serfdom "the most extreme" when there was Poland right next to it?..

So let me get this straight:
Rather than setting up an army camp in a village and set up a night watch, like any sensible human would do, they decided to sleep in the open, while also setting up night watches?
I'm not sure now if you are making out retarded shit here or French were retarded in their conduct. But considering Napoleonic armies rolled all over Europe without much problems, it's very tempting to assume you are just pulling shit out of your ass.

You are right on the burning villages though. But that was not due to some bad inclination towards peasantry - you see, burning of the old capital where old nobility has residences was performedf and recieved just as well.

>1812
>Poland
user... But wait, there is more:
>Russian serfs escaping to Poland left and right
>Polish nobles sheltering escepees, because a pair of hands is a pair of hands, doesn't matter if it's Russian and Orthodox
So... yeah, here you are, being retarded.

Ironically, the only reason why serfdom was eventually abolished was to deny Polish insurgents easy-to-convince conscripts, since suddenly with free peasants, there was no reason for them to rebel against tsars.

They setted camp in villages, all right. They didn't sleep in the houses.
They couldn't fit - and if they would try, they were too far apart, making it impossible to properly guard them all anyway.
Also consider the following: would they virtually perish in Russia if they were doing only sensible things, hmm?..

>How can you call Russia's serfdom "the most extreme" when there was Poland right next to it?..
Dunno. Ask Catherine why she was so pissed about serfs jumping over the border to the Commonwealth. Apparently they did so for any other reason than their life improving there, despite still being serfs.
What is this? Vata posting on Veeky Forums?

>>Russian serfs escaping to Poland left and right
I am going to ask you for source on that
>> 1812
>> Poland
Of course there was Poland. And independent Polish state, liquidated only after Vienne congress

>Also consider the following: would they virtually perish in Russia if they were doing only sensible things, hmm?..
... yes?
I mean let's get this straight - the orders to march to Moscow, rather than Petersburg was retarded. But aside that, even in most sensible set-up, a bunch of guys in tight-fitting ornate uniforms would freeze to death anyway, because the winter was -35 Celcius degrees (something around -30 Farenheit). That would be a harsh winter for modern army with all the accomodations for it. And it was a Napoleonic period army, with shitty food supply and uniforms unfit for any temperature at all, aside mild summer and late spring.
So yes, they would perish even if making most sensible decisions, for the exact same reasons.

Also, regarding the housing:
Are you at least aware that this was how army lodging was performed in that period? You showed up in place X, seized all the buildings, cram in as many soldiers as possible and just camp this way. Definitely better than any other option. In some rare cases the people providing the housing were even compensated for it. And don't Americans have it in their constitution or early bills to it the ban on army lodging, thus being the first country to stop doing that?

Not him, but Duchy of Warsaw didn't have serfdom. Nor was independent.

>don't Americans have it in their constitution or early bills to it the ban on army lodging
Yes
> thus being the first country to stop doing that?
No

The Polish historian, Jerzy Czajewski, wrote that the Russian peasants were escaping from Russia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in significant enough numbers to become a major concern for the Russian Government and sufficient to play a role in its decision to partition the Commonwealth.[8] Increasingly in the 18th century until the partitions solved this problem, Russian armies raided territories of the Commonwealth, officially to recover the escapees, but in fact kidnapping many locals.[8]

And said [8]:
Jerzy Czajewski, "Zbiegostwo ludności Rosji w granice Rzeczypospolitej" (Russian population exodus into the Rzeczpospolita), Promemoria journal, October 2004 nr. (5/15), ISSN 1509-9091, Table of Content online, Polish language

But Czajewski wasn't the first to wrote it, he's just the most modern one. Interwar period publications come with rather specific numbers for that, then there are commie-era publications with full access to Russian sources on that, too.
In short - a pretty well documented stuff. Mostly because serfdom in the Commonwealth really was nothing when compared with the shit going in Russia, especially after Peter the Great reformed the whole system.

So who did? Asking out of curiosity, I was sure that if they've passed a bill about it to their constitution, then it might be the first such case.

Reversal of those trends begun in the 18th century, as part of various reforms aiming the revitalize the ailing governance and economy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some serfs became emancipated by their owners, who replaced the physical labor rent with monetary one.[9] It became illegal for a lord to murder a serf, and the peasants regained some right to land ownership.[9] Describing the system as it existed by the end of the century, Wagner writes: "The situation of the peasants in Poland was better than in most other countries. In France and Germany, for example, the owners of landed estates had unlimited jurisdiction over them, including the power to punish by death. In Russia, their economic oppression was notorious, and one of the reasons Catherine II gave for the partition of Poland was the fact that thousands of peasants escaped from Russia to Poland to seek a better fate."[10] Polish government reforms aiming at improving the situation of the peasantry reached culmination with the Constitution of May 3, 1791, which declared that the government would protect the peasantry, and encourage the use of contracts between peasants and their lords.[11] Any further reforms were made impossible by the partitions of Poland and the resulting disappearance of the Polish state.

9) Juliusz Bardach, Boguslaw Lesnodorski, and Michal Pietrzak, Historia panstwa i prawa polskiego (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1987, pp.291–292
10) Wagner, W.J. (1992). "May 3, 1791, and the Polish constitutional tradition". The Polish Review. 36 (4): 383–395. JSTOR 25778591.

No idea, but the British passed laws against it in 1723, before the US even existed.
(and then they opened a loophole that allowed for doing it anyway, but only in rebellious colonies. This ended up being one reason for the Americans to ban it in their constitution)

>Of course there was Poland. And independent Polish state, liquidated only after Vienne congress
LOLNO
Poland was hardly independent even before the partitions in 1795. Russia was meddling heavily in the elections, that's the only reason how Poniatowski got to be king in the first place: he was Catherine's fuccboi. IIRC the last king that was elected without outside interference was Jan III Sobieski.

>How can you call Russia's serfdom "the most extreme" when there was Poland right next to it?..
Not sure if ironic shitposting or genuine Russian in denial.

>Of course there was Poland. And independent Polish state, liquidated only after Vienne congress
Since fucking when the puppet Duchy of Warsaw was independent in any way or form? Not to mention the fact the name was intentionally picked and internationally arranged to explicitly NOT being a "Polish state". Not just to deny it in name or some stupid pretense like that, but tu actually deny it in active fashion.

Thanks
It seems you are completely right on that account.
After some search, i have found numerous mentions of that in other sources as well, with phrasing such as "regions near Poland drew close to depopulation".

An open field Ned

>Not sure if ironic shitposting or genuine Russian in denial.
That's not surprising if you follow this It's a case of perception from different time periods clashing. Poland was notorious in Russian history in 16th and 17th century before serfdom was introduced in Russia and took its harsher forms after Peter I. Poland weakened serfdom in the 18th century due to economic reasons but speaking about 18th century most people would consider Poland a doomed country soon to be taken down. So when people think about Poland and Russia they usually think about time period when conditions of the peasants in Russia were no worse than in Poland.

>before serfdom was introduced in Russia
user, serfdom never was "introduced". It was a thing all the way since Kievan Rus, only growing in intensity as the time flowed. What was once literal slaves (in Slavic sense of communal, farming slave) literally turned into serfs somewhere around Mongol conquest. By Ivan the Terrible Russian serfdom reached it final, but still informal form, and was at that point the harshest shit on this planet, again going back to slavery-in-anything-but-name.
So there never really was any period when serfdom was "lesser" in Russia or any forms predating Russia proper.

And the real reason why Polish serfdom weakened wasn't as much of being a failed state (which it fucking was, thanks a bunch, Vasas and Wettins), but extreme depopulation that happend in two stages: first when Swedes invaded and the country was busy fighting on all fronts, between 1640 till about 1665 (roughtly third of population died) and then another one when Wettin decided to entangle Poland in fucking Great Northern War, AGAIN killing third of the population in the process. So conditions of serfs improved solely because there was so little of them left, you just couldn't any more pull the folwark shit, as there wasn't enough people for this kind of bondage. Lessening the burden also allowed to attract Dutch colonists (no, really) and as a by-product it also made it attractive for Russian serfs to hop the border.

tl;dr it's more complicated than single reason.

>before serfdom was introduced in Russia

user, Russia operated on the Asian model. As in there were no free men and nobody but the king had legal rights.

>Le battle of Patay ptroves that cavalry are better than longbowmen
I didn't say that, get your head out of your ass. I merely said that Agincourt had more to do with the circumstances than the longbow, and that UNDER THE CORRECT CIRCUMSTANCES (such as clear terrain and sunny weather, as opposed to muddy terrain and rainy weather) cavalry can give longbows a run for their money.

>Agincourt
I already mentioned that.
>Crecy
The big issue here is that it was a massive tactical clusterfuck. The Genoese crossbowmen were cut down by longbowmen because they didn't take their pavisses with them, the one massive advantage they had (being able to fire from behind cover). They then retreated and were promptly trampled by French cavalry because nobles weren't exactly happy with the guys they paid to fight running away.
>Poitier
Admittedly I know very little about this battle, but I'll eat a broom if it was just "le machinegun of le middle ages"

>Not him, but british armies of the time were roughly 90% longbowmen
Very impressive, considering British armies didn't even exist at the time.

>Poitier

it was the threat of the arrow barrage that caused the French to launch the ill-judged advance on foot thereby exposing them to the English/Gascon mounted charge that won the battle.

start eating the broom

>it was the threat of the arrow barrage that caused the French to launch the ill-judged advance on foot thereby exposing them to the English/Gascon mounted charge that won the battle.
>start eating the broom
These two sentences don't line up, because you mentioned a whole load of factors that aren't just "muh longbow" and came down to precisely the same thing as Agincourt: a tactical error by arrogant nobility.

Russian Spring isn't good either. Rasputitsa season is hell on any sort of army. I can't imagine horse like when they sink knee high in mud.

>Russia's biggest weapon is that it's such a shithole even the Russians barely want to live there

They are actively keeping it that way. The only thing that reliably works for transport in Russia is railway and it uses special, custom gauge. Roads? Fucking forget it. It's 21st century and going 30 km east of Moscow you are on gravel roads and poorly maintained asphalt that still remembers Khrushchev

>They are actively keeping it that way.

why?

Enemy can't use your roads if your roads are shit

The original choice of broad gauge for railway was... accidental. No, really. They've build the experimental railway using 1524 mm gauge, with the concept of "well, it's going from St. Petersburg to Moscow, so no need to connect it with other railway systems, so let's experiment". But then they've started connecting new lines to that experimental one and eventually by 1860 the broad gauge was declared standard one. The strategic advantage was non-existing, since retreating army can simply blow bridges or remove rails, while advancing enemy can easily re-adjust the rails to other gauge (Germans did so during both world wars).
Then, during USSR period, the rapid expansion of railway system allowed industrial growth and had huge potential for military mobility (since motor vehicles were still relatively new and limited), so railway was declared of strategic importance, while car industry never really picked off in Soviet Union (don't get me wrong, they had a lot of plants making cars... just not enough to truly motorise the country at any stage of its existence).
So eventually it all sticked to a situation where things are done by rail, or even river barges, but roads are neglected.
And under Brezhnev it became actual military doctrine to keep roads as useless for invaders as possible, since Russians weren't using roads anyway to the extent NATO armies did. USSR cease to exist, but the doctrine lingered till mid-90s and then everyone realised how costly it would be and generally pointless, sicne city areas have half-decent road systems and building roads through open swats of nothing was declared wasteful.

tl;dr they just really don't consider roads to be important

>Suck a dick, you idiot
Go back to bed Lindy

Are you stupid? Are you seriously having a history wankfest without actually knowing any history? Fucking kill yourself.

A YouTuber named Shadiversity has a video series on YouTube about what weapons fantasy races would use in real life. One of the things he suggested for orcs was big-ass murder bows that the average human would never have the strength to draw. He has also suggested that for most of the races he's done a video over, if I recall correctly.

Because realistically, the only two cities that matter in Russia are Moscow (administration and science) and St. Petersburg (culture and science). All of Russia really exists to just service those two cities. Inner commerce between other cities, while obviously a "thing," isn't really a focus, because the other cities don't matter as much.

Don't forget the ideological connotations of it. A country with poor roads means poor communications between the other cities, meaning people are less likely to organize. The Russian government keeps to the "divide and conquer" doctrine for its own people, because they are deathly afraid of what would happen IF the people actually united. As history has shown us, it's never pretty. Furthermore, it furthers the divide between the haves and the have-nots, so really, having a good road network, while tactically advantageous, would be awful strategically. This is why Russia is censoring the fuck out of its internet as well.

Some guy who's something akin to a Mormon Lindy Biege.

If the setting is the real world prior to the invention of the English longbow then that’s fine. Just remember that it was first used/invented by the welsh

>Mormon Lindy Biege
As if regular 'beige wasn't awful already

That reaction image probably describes Russian Grand Strategy throughout the ages better than anything.
>The enemy can't use your roads if your roads are shit
>The enemy can't take your cities if you burn them down first
>The enemy can't loot your soldiers' corpses for guns if they don't have guns
>The enemy can't intimidate our soldiers if we shoot them for taking a single step back

So he's unrelated to the notorious Shadman?

Explain Shadman.

>The enemy can't loot your soldiers' corpses for ammo if they don't have any
Here, ftfy. Russians didn't have problems with guns. Guns, you see, can be re-used. Once made, they can be even used by few different people, after all previous owners died. Bullets, on the other hand...
Seriously, Soviets have had some SERIOUS issues with delivering ammo to their soldiers. The whole "no guns" meme is almost entirely related with Enemy at the Gates, further reinforced by first CoD (that borrowed heavily from that movie)