h e bow was also employed throughout most of Europe in the Middle
Ages. h e most common tactic was to begin a battle with one or two volleys
of arrows from a few hundred archers, partly to soften up and also to
rattle the nerves of an enemy. It has been established, for instance, that
Duke William started his assault on the Saxon infantry
at the Battle of Hastings with a big discharge of missiles
from his bowmen.
Nowhere else in Europe, however, did archers compare
with those who developed in England in the three
centuries following the encounter at Hastings. Not all
English foot soldiers, called yeomen, were bowmen. But those infantrymen
who came to use the longbow were by far the most numerous and
most lethal.
Despite its name, the longbow’s ef ectiveness was not based on its
size, as it was not much longer than the average hunting bow. Also, the
longbow could not i re arrows as far as the typical crossbow could. Two
specii c factors made the longbow more deadly than the crossbow in the
average land battle, one being the rapid rate of i re possible with a longbow.
An average longbowman was able to load and i re four or i ve shafts
in the same amount of time it took a crossbowman to let loose just one.
A yeomen-archer could i re up to a dozen arrows a minute.
h is speediness of i ring combined with the second major advantage
of the longbow to make English archers among the i nest infantrymen
of the late Middle Ages. h at other advantage consisted of the sheer
numbers of longbowmen who fought in a typical battle. As Ayton says,
“Massed archery by men able to unleash perhaps a dozen shafts per minute
would produce an arrow storm, which at ranges of up to 200 yards
[183 m] left men clad in mail and early plate armor, and particularly
horses, vulnerable to injury, while causing confusion and loss of order in
attacking formations.9
One potential danger for these bowmen was that they could be
run down and killed by enemy cavalrymen who had managed to get
through the initial arrow storm. To lessen this danger, in the early 1400s
an English commander came up with a novel idea. Longbowmen were
to carry three or four long wooden stakes, sharpened on both ends, into
battle along with their bows. After letting loose a volley of arrows, an
archer would drive one end of each stake into the ground in front of
him, so that the other end pointed outward at an angle. Any oncoming
horses would be impaled, or at least badly injured, by these spikes.
Scholar Michael Prestwich points out that this clever defensive arrangement
“made it possible for the archers to establish a new defensive
position with great speed.” Moreover, these infantrymen could pack even
more of a punch if necessary. “In addition to their bows and stakes,”
Prestwich says, “they had axes, mallets, or swords at their belts.”10 With
these backup weapons, they often held their own in the hand-to-hand
i ghting that occurred if and when the enemy managed to penetrate the
English lines.
World History
