How or why did the English become a bow culture?

[SimonUK]

It's my understanding that the english archers were very happy to join the army because it gave them a good salary and the prospect of loot in war.

[Dane]

Plus, they got great college benefits after discharge That is why I joined my Army. They never told me about the loot part, darn it.

[Loki]

Im not saying amateur or poor archers, but were they professional all of them?.

It depends on what you consider a professional,they werent drilled like Roman Legionarie's but they trained from Childhood to become Bowmen and then lived of the spoils of that profession,they didnt go back to the villages and farms after a Battle.

[SimonUK]

This is one of the things I love about the history of the warbow. These free-spirited men with little to loose, volunteering to take part in dangerous battles. Some of them were killed, but others came back and were wealthy free men for the rest of their lives.

[MalV]

Don't forget the social pressure from your peers to join in the service of your country. 
I do not think that it would have been so much different back then during the HYW. i.e. propaganda as to why they should serve their country and king, the French are evil etc.
Couple this with peer pressure from your mates around you who are going across the chanel. 
And finally; you have been training to use a warbow since you were a child, and being told all of the time that the warbow is the ultimate weapon, that against the French you are invincible, etc.
I would expect that in the young man's mind, the risks do not seem at all that much, and the benefits were great.

[Len]

The English army was in many ways ahead of its time compared to the French of that time who still relied on the feudral system(not very proffessional at all ) whereas the English employed contracted soldiers to make up the bulk of their armies. The french actually start to have some success against the English when they started using more proffessionaly raised and trained troops rather then local militias grouped together under the command of the local knight.
 As to the steppes people who used the bow it seems to me to have been more of a harrasing or skirmishing tactic rather then the massed artillary style of the English which would probably require more arrows per archer then what the horse archers would have used in a battle.

[Rod]

The longbow has been the common type across North Western Europe since the neolithic.
What distinguishes the English use of the longbow is the way in which it was employed to counter numerically superior forces.

Forget all this nonsense about Welsh bows being the precursor of the English warbow, that's just mindless recycling of uninformed opinion from an earler "authority".

War bow draw weights have developed in all warbow cultures to keep pace with defensive developments. The result is that cavalry bows came to be typically in the 90lb to 120lb range and infantry bows to a median of around 120lb to 150lb.

Before dedicated war bow development, a heavy hunting bow would have sufficed in war, but the race to achieve greater range and penetration with heavier arrows leads to escalation in draw weight.

Part of the fame of the English bow derives from the fact that the myth of the longbow has since Tudor times been accepted as an integral part  in the development of the myth of Englishness.

Given that this process carried through the growth and fall of Empire, starting life as a political tool when a predominantly Norman ruling minority had the good fortune to have  left in place a considerable amount of Anglo Saxon social infrastructure, which gave later Kings an armed social class in serjeanty that functioned coherently on the battlefield.

More coherently, for some time, than those who had the misfortune to attack them, since the key development was the use of massed archery in a defensive position against greater numbers that were often mismanaged with a less coherent chain of command.


Other warbow cultures (China, Korea, Japan, Mamluks, Scythians, Mongols etc)  have their own variations on this theme.

Rod.

 

[Allen]

I'm new to the site and just discovered this very interesting thread.

A question that I've wondered about for some time is did the availability of reliable bow string material have any impact on the use of the English long bows in war?

After all, those two sticks are a lot more effective with a string than without. 

thanks,
Allen

[Len]

Rod the term myth implies no basis on fact , don't you mean something more like aura or reputation ?

[SimonUK]

Allen
A well known bowyer in the UK , Pip Bickerstaffe has a theory that the upper limit on draw weight was dependent on the strength of the string. He thinks that the upper limit had to be about 100 lbs because a thicker and stronger string wouldn't fit inside the nock of the arrow. A lot of people dispute this and say that the draw weight had to be higher than that, given the dimensions of the bows found on the Mary Rose ship.

I think his theory is still important. These days we have strings made from modern materials and we forget how important the quality of string must have been in the middle ages.

[Rod]

Rod the term myth implies no basis on fact , don't you mean something more like aura or reputation ?

No Len, I said myth because in this context, the sense of national/racial identity is based upoon a construction, not upon hard facts.

Regarding the reported Bickerstaffe theory about there being a 100lb limit due to the deficiencies of the string, we have to ask ourselves why the Mary Rose bows (from a period past the peak of the English powers with the long bow) include bows capable of higher draw weights.
Taking all the evidence from war bow cultures in general, it is patently absurd to suggest a 100lb limit on warbow draw weight based upon an assumption drawn from the nock size of the Mary Rose shafts.

Rod.

[ChrisD]

Rod

I have to say I'm a little confused here. I can understand people arguing over Pips 'srtring theory' based on what they think a hemp or linen string of a given size could do but I really can't see any problem with the basic assumption that the MR arrows were meant for use with the MR bows and that therefore the strings had to fit the nocks. There was nothing special about those arrows - the nocking points were the same size as the Westminster arrow (although thats never been dated I know).

As an aside, Pips views on the poundage are not based only on the strings - he's had enough access to the bows and made enough yew bows out of various qualities of yew to have come to his own conclusions without being completely dependent on his views of the capabilities of the strings alone.

Chris

[n8dawg6]

..."the rule of thumb" (fistmele) and "A parting shot" are a few archery related sayings I know of.   Pat

i was told by a law professor who taught criminal law (much of which, in the U.S., is derived from the English Common Law), that the rule of thumb traditionally referred, at Common Law, to the diameter of the stick with which a husband could beat his wife and not be found criminally liable.  I never have attempted to verify this, but the professor tested on it.  sorry this is not directly related to ELB's, but I am curious now as to the true origin of this saying

[Loki]

It's a myth i'm afraid,there never was any such law  .It derives from a cartoon by James Gillray in 1783 which was attacking Judge Sir Francis Buller who had made a ruling in one of his cases,he had told a man to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb,but it wasnt the law  .
The phrase has been around since before Buller and Gillray anyway,the thumb has allways been used to estimate distances,have you never lined your thumb up with your eyeline  .

Sir W. Hope, Fencing-Master, 1692 - "What he doth, he doth by rule of Thumb, and not by Art."

[n8dawg6]

that's interesting!  that professor told our class of 70 or so that that was the law (and he believed it).  HA!