The Sling: king of the missile weapons

[Justin Swanton]

This article has considerably revised my opinion of the ancient and mediaeval sling. A trained and experienced slinger was deadlier than a javelineer, archer, crossbowman and even musketeer. The trouble was finding one. It is about the hardest missile weapon to learn to use well.

I wonder if we haven't underestimated the power of slingers in many standard rulesets.

[aligern]

Not really, Edward the First, for example has slingers and archers in his armies against the Scots, yet we do not see the English Slinger dominating European warfare.  In theory slingers do not need more training than archers because, in warfare, they are aiming at a very large target. Armies such as the Roman or better still the Byzantine could have had a major training programmefor slingers, but they stick to bows in battle, though I think that Vegetius has Roman legionaries trained in its use.

Perhaps its major problem is overhead shooting which means that archers can mass a dense fire against a target, but which must be much harder for slingers. Of course slingers could shoot overhead, but I suppose that they cannot shoot at a high angle to gain power from a dropping shot?
Roy

[Erpingham]

I wonder if we haven't underestimated the power of slingers in many standard rulesets.

Roy makes good points - slings were about so there were opportunities to train elite units of slingers that would sweep their enemies from the field in the late Roman through to medieval but it didn't happen.  There may, of course, be good reasons but an obvious one is that they weren't considered effective enough to make the effort.

Also, perhaps rule writers err on the side of caution in this case to avoid a superweapon?  Better to strike a happy medium and boost certain specialists with extra bonuses when they can be historically justified, perhaps.

[Justin Swanton]

From what I have read it appears the English longbow ceased to the be the principal arm of the late Mediaeval English army not primarily because of any inherent defects - plate armour notwithstanding - but simply because the English yeoman was not longer prepared to devote the time and effort necessary to become skilled in its use (and strong enough to use it). Much the same thing seems to have happened to the sling.

Add to that the impossibility of creating massed slinger fire. Individual slingers needed plenty of room. I don't know enough about the mechanics of slinging, but it seems overhead fire was not practicable. It could never be more than a skirmish weapon, nonetheless a weapon superior to other kinds of skirmish weapons. Slingers perhaps need to have the most devastating effect of all skirmisher class troops.

[aligern]

Aha, we have the longbow. debate again!
The longbows found on the Mary Rose are apparently as high a draw weight as anything that went before. That looks as though archers in the mid 16th century were as good as their forbears.
Armour does affect  longbow arrow penetration. Fully armoured French knights on foot. are all but impervious to their arrows, though there will be an. effect from multiple high energy impacts.
I rather suspect that the longbow died out because it was militatily ineffective rather than that its demise was social. After all, the longbow was cheap and the bowmen trained themselves so from the king's point of view they were very cost effective, they just were not as militarily effective as they once were.
At the risk of being out of my depth in the XVth century, my reading of the battles in France is that the longbowmen often fought hand to hand with sword and buckler or a polearm after using the bow, so at Castillon, for example they are part of a force that makes. repeated assaults on the French camp.
Reading about Poitiers, the longbow there do not mow down the French, they degrade them, but the French footmen still get through and melee repeatedly.
At Najera the Spanish deployed slingers, possibly specifically against the English bowmen. They were very likely unarmoured and thus an excellent target for the bowmen, but the sling missiles themselves were nasty.

[aligern]

if the sling is so effective why don't the Andean slingers take down the horses of the Conquistadors? There are relatively few horses and presumably many slingers. Just because a writer , wanting to  exaggerate the opposition, tells us that a slinger could take down a horse, does not mean that that was a frequent or even likely event.
As a  comparator, I could, potentially, shoot down a member of the SAS with a Lee Enfield. However, in one on one combat in real terrain my chances of survival would be one in a thousand. If I did manage to get a shot in and killed the opponent then that could be written up as A 60 year old shooting an  SAS man with 60 year old rifle thus proving that an army of pensioners with antique weapons would be a viable defence strategy for Britain!

Roy

[Erpingham]

From what I have read it appears the English longbow ceased to the be the principal arm of the late Mediaeval English army not primarily because of any inherent defects - plate armour notwithstanding - but simply because the English yeoman was not longer prepared to devote the time and effort necessary to become skilled in its use (and strong enough to use it). Much the same thing seems to have happened to the sling.

Bit confused at this point because I'm not sure if the argument covers all slingers or only medieval ones as per original article.  Your argument may have merit in the ancient world to explain why elite slingers like those from the Balearics didn't dominate and eventually died out but I don't know we have any records of elite slingers in the Middle Ages.  The few mercenary slingers I've come across appear to be staff slingers (very useful in sieges).  Also, do we know if metal sling bullets were used after classical times?

Slingers perhaps need to have the most devastating effect of all skirmisher class troops.

I think we need a bit more evidence on this.  They may shoot further than we sometimes allow (doesn't Xenophon say his slingers outranged the Persian archers?) but we would need to factor in skills, ammunition type etc.  It's a bit like archery - we separate composite, longbow, ordinary self bow - do we need a more sophisticated sub-division of slingers to allow specialists to be more effective than random conscripted shepherds (though some of them could be devastating against very tall opponents ).

[Sharur]

Those interested in investigating more about the sling may care to check article author Chris Harrison's slinging website, which has both historical notes (albeit mostly just from Classical times onwards) and modern experimental evidence, including another copy of the article Justin drew attention to.

[Justin Swanton]

From what I have read it appears the English longbow ceased to the be the principal arm of the late Mediaeval English army not primarily because of any inherent defects - plate armour notwithstanding - but simply because the English yeoman was not longer prepared to devote the time and effort necessary to become skilled in its use (and strong enough to use it). Much the same thing seems to have happened to the sling.

Bit confused at this point because I'm not sure if the argument covers all slingers or only medieval ones as per original article.  Your argument may have merit in the ancient world to explain why elite slingers like those from the Balearics didn't dominate and eventually died out but I don't know we have any records of elite slingers in the Middle Ages.  The few mercenary slingers I've come across appear to be staff slingers (very useful in sieges).  Also, do we know if metal sling bullets were used after classical times?

Sorry, I was thinking of the extinction of elite slingers in Antiquity. One needed to train with the sling from childhood to become really good with it, and as Chris Harrison points out there is an enormous difference between the effect of a skiller slinger and an unskilled one.

Slingers perhaps need to have the most devastating effect of all skirmisher class troops.

I think we need a bit more evidence on this.  They may shoot further than we sometimes allow (doesn't Xenophon say his slingers outranged the Persian archers?) but we would need to factor in skills, ammunition type etc.  It's a bit like archery - we separate composite, longbow, ordinary self bow - do we need a more sophisticated sub-division of slingers to allow specialists to be more effective than random conscripted shepherds (though some of them could be devastating against very tall opponents ).

We probably do need more differentiation. A force of Balearic slingers should be a very different proposition to a band of poorly-trained conscripts, presuming anyone could be trained to use a sling within a short space of time.

[Patrick Waterson]

Reading about Poitiers, the longbow there do not mow down the French, they degrade them, but the French footmen still get through and melee repeatedly.

Interesting observation: I have come to the conclusion that against troops with any degree of effective protection the main effect of shooting was to slow them down and possibly also disorganise them, casualties being almost incidental but rising appreciably once disorganisation passed a certain threshold.  Unprotected targets seemed to go through to the appreciable losses stage a lot faster.

At Najera the Spanish deployed slingers, possibly specifically against the English bowmen. They were very likely unarmoured and thus an excellent target for the bowmen, but the sling missiles themselves were nasty.

The Spanish slingers may have been skirmishing types or the staff slingers who seem on occasion to have taken the place of archers as shooting ranks in a mixed formation.  Either way they would have lacked the depth, density and rapidity of shooting (and instantaneous fire control) of the English archers, so that while at certain ranges an individual slinger could do more damage than an archer and just as accurately* collectively, as Justin points out, it was hard to get slingers into effective massed shooting units, although the medieval Portuguese seem to have tried.

*In one of the earlier Slingshots (not sure which) is an article on Balearic slingers, which points out that they had not one but three slings: one for shooting at long range, one at medium and one at short - and they used different ammunition at each range.  I do not remember what was used at long range (perhaps small stones), but at medium range they used metal bullets and at close range big stones which were very damaging indeed.

If the sling is so effective why don't the Andean slingers take down the horses of the Conquistadors?

When they had the chance, they did.  However it seems that the Incas used  comparatively small stones as ammunition (when you are slinging away for an afternoon at high altitude you want a fair supply of ammunition as breaking off to get more is not an option, and small stones are not only easier to carry plenty of but also take less effort to sling than large ones) - these were perfectly adequate against fabric-clad tribal opponents but bounced off Spanish armour at anything more than point-blank range.  The Spanish referred to the Inca slingers as 'mosquitoes' in respect of the number and limited effect of their missiles (though took care not to expose horses to them needlessly), but would have sung a different tune if the Incas had used Balearic-style ammunition.

One point to note is that ammunition really matters for a slinger: if one has a powerful and well-organised empire, or a traditional and practising culture, behind one, then one tends to get good ammunition ('good' meaning effective against all known opponents).  If one is just one of a band of wolf-scarers brought along to plump out the ranks of an army, one is lucky to get any at all and will probably have to improvise, with mediocre results.  If coming up against a new and invulnerable opponent one is is trouble.  Being able to select a few decent rounds can make all the difference, especially (as Anthony has reminded us) in a duel with a significantly more sizable opponent.  (There could also be considerable career opportunities. )

As a  comparator, I could, potentially, shoot down a member of the SAS with a Lee Enfield. However, in one on one combat in real terrain my chances of survival would be one in a thousand. If I did manage to get a shot in and killed the opponent then that could be written up as A 60 year old shooting an  SAS man with 60 year old rifle thus proving that an army of pensioners with antique weapons would be a viable defence strategy for Britain!

Roy

This puts me in mind of the defence of the power station at Hong Kong on the 18th-19th December 1940, held by the Hughes group of a few dozen "men of 55 or over who felt the call to duty though they themselves were outside the terms of the Compulsory Service Act".  They and their Lee Enfields held the station against a battalion of crack Japanese assault troops of the 38th Division (who in terms of experience and fieldcraft could have given the SAS a run for their money) for at least six hours.

Let us not despise Britain's triarii. 

[aligern]

December 1940? 41 surely??
Roy

[Paul Innes]

I liked the way that WRG 6th dealt with the sling.  Basically, it counted effect as a short-ranged longbow, if I remember correctly.  So relative range limitation and the fact that it had to be used by open order infantry made it quite powerful, but not overly so - certainly better than open order archers or javelinmen.  There may well be scope for doing something like this for trained slingers such as the Balearics or Rhodians, but not for the majority, who might just be counted as equivalent to skirmish bowmen; this latter option is how Tactica and perhaps Armati deal with them.  It might be the same for other rulesets.

[Patrick Waterson]

December 1940? 41 surely??
Roy

1941, correct.  Sorry about that.

[Patrick Waterson]

I liked the way that WRG 6th dealt with the sling.  Basically, it counted effect as a short-ranged longbow, if I remember correctly.  So relative range limitation and the fact that it had to be used by open order infantry made it quite powerful, but not overly so - certainly better than open order archers or javelinmen.  There may well be scope for doing something like this for trained slingers such as the Balearics or Rhodians, but not for the majority, who might just be counted as equivalent to skirmish bowmen; this latter option is how Tactica and perhaps Armati deal with them.  It might be the same for other rulesets.

Yes, the sling and longbow used the same factors, but the longbow had a range of 280 paces and the sling 120 paces.  However - and this was a rather nice finesse - the short range of all bows (including longbows) was 80 paces and the short range of the sling was 120 paces, so when you could shoot with a sling it shot at full effect and slightly outranged the best (i.e. short) range of any bow.  This was very handy for a WRG 6th or 7th Inca army ... 

[Dave Gee]

There was an interesting article in, I think, Ancient Warfare magazine some time ago about slings and slingers. There appears to be 2 basic methods known as 'mortar' and 'pistol' within the article. Mortar involves hefting a large stone in an arc to come down on top of your foe. Pistol involves a flatter trajectory with a smaller stone or cast metal bullet. They involved 2 different types of sling, the mortar sling being more robust/heavy duty.

The slingers would vary what they fired, so half the unit would fire mortar and half would fire pistol. As the foe raised their shields overhead to fend off the mortar barrage the pistols would have a good target. As the foe drop their shield forward to protect against the pistols then the mortars would rain down!

This worked well until troops got better armoured. Head projection would make the likelihood of a "kill shot" very small. Any warrior wearing a helm, chain mail and a shield would be all but impervious against slingers (but not able to ignore them). Any mounted troops, whose horses where not armoured, and similarly lightly armoured troops could still take a mauling from a unit of slingers.

And of course, a sling is easy to carry. Nothing to stop your archers becoming slingers once the arrows run out!

Dave