Archery

[Chuck the Grey]

Thanks Patrick, I'll pull my copy of the book from the bookshelf and take a good look at the description.

I misremembered it slightly: it is five to ten arrows, not specifically six.

I seem to have the same problem with my memory (reference my posting on the hoplite phalanx thread and Marathon).

[Erpingham]

Our discussions of New World archery set me off searching for material and I've been looking at some sixteenth century accounts.  In particular, references about the effectiveness of armour.  It is often quoted that the Spanish rejected mail in favour of fabric armour, so I thought I'd offer these quotes for consideration - both are from the Florida capaign of 1539-40, both eyewitness accounts.

Thus, by a continual exercise, they [The Florida natives] shoot with surprising skill. But since it has become proper to speak of the extraordinary shots of the Indians, I shall relate an instance of them. Moscoso, in one of the first skirmishes with the Apalaches, received, in his right side, the shot of an arrow, which pierced his buff and his coat of mail without killing him, because the shot went aslant. The Spanish officers, astonished that a coat of mail of the value of a hundred and fifty ducats should be pierced by a single shot, wished to prove theirs, in order to know if they could depend upon them. As they were then in the town of Apalache, those who wore coats of mail took a cane basket, strongly woven, and adjusted around it one of the finest coats of mail. They then unbound one of the Indian prisoners, gave him a bow and arrow, and commanded him to fire, at the distance of one hundred and fifty paces, upon this coat of mail. At the same time, the barbarian, having closed his fist, stretched himself, extended and bent his arm to awaken his strength, shot through the coat of mail and basket with so much force that the shot would still easily have pierced a man. Our people, who saw that a coat of mail could not resist an arrow, adjusted two of them to the basket. They gave an arrow to an Indian whom they ordered to shoot, and he pierced both of them. Nevertheless, the arrow remained fixed, as much oil one side as on the other, because it had not been fired with sufficient skill. The barbarian requested that he might be permitted to shoot another, upon condition that if he should not pierce the two coats of mail with as much force as the first, he would forfeit his life.  The Spaniards would not grant his request, and afterward they held their coats of mail of no account, which they, in mockery, called Holland cloth. Therefore they made, of thick cloth, doublets four inches thick, which covered the chest and the croup of the horses, and resisted an arrow better than anything else.
Garcilasco de la Vega Florida of the Inca

Those people are so warlike and so quick that they make no account of foot soldiers; for if these go for them, they flee, and when their adversaries turn their backs they are immediately on them. The farthest they flee is the distance of an arrow shot. They are never quiet but always running and crossing from one side to another so that the crossbows or the arquebuses can not be aimed at them; and before a crossbowman can fire a shot, an Indian can shoot three or four arrows, and very seldom does he miss what he shoots at. If the arrow does not find armor, it penetrates as deeply as a crossbow. The bows are very long and the arrows are made of certain reeds like canes, very heavy and so tough that a sharpened cane passes through a shield. Some are pointed with a fish bone, as sharp as an awl, and others with a certain stone like a diamond point. Generally when these strike against armor, they break off at the place where they are fastened on. Those of cane split and enter through the links of mail and are more hurtful.

Gentleman of Elvas A Narrative of the expedition of Hernando de Soto into Florida

[Patrick Waterson]

A couple of interesting points there (well, more than a couple, but yours truly will select two).

1) The permeability of chain mail to Floridan arrows.  This chain mail was presumably of the same variety which had done sterling service over many generations resisting javelins and crossbow bolts alike in Granada and Italy, being shot at by everyone from Moors to Genoese, with nobody experiencing this kind of penetration as standard.

2) The cane arrows: "very heavy and so tough that a sharpened cane passes through a shield ... Those of cane split and enter through the links of mail ...".  We tend to despise the Achaemenid levies' reed arrows: perhaps we should not be quite so hasty to do so.  It is noticeable that ring mail never seems to have featured in the archery-rich ancient Near East.

[Erpingham]

This casualty breakdown from the storming of Mavilla from the Gentleman of Elvas might be of interest in judging the actual effectiveness of archery

Of the Christians there died eighteen; of which one was Don Carlos, brother-in-law to the Governor, and a nephew of his, and one John de Gamez, and Men Rodriguez, Portuguese, and John Vasquez de Villanova de Barca Rota, all men of honor, and of much valor; the rest were footmen. Besides those that were slain, there were a hundred and fifty wounded, with seven hundred wounds of their arrows: and it pleased God that of very dangerous wounds they were quickly healed. Moreover there were twelve horses slain, and seventy hurt.

It would appear that, despite comments the ineffectiveness of armour, it did enough to restrict most arrow hits to wounds and the wounds were quite light as they quickly healed.  Note the count of wounds v. number of wounded - most men must have received multiple arrow wounds.   See also the horse casualties.

[Nick Harbud]

Regarding all these wounds during the storming...

...were they all caused by arrows or did it also include hand-to-hand fighting?

Incidentally, I am not surprised that the Spaniards were surprised at how easily arrows could penetrate mail, given that all the civilized' types in Europe had long since switched to gunpowder - the effect of arrows had been forgotten!

[Erpingham]

Regarding all these wounds during the storming...

...were they all caused by arrows or did it also include hand-to-hand fighting?

There was certainly close combat - it is hard to see how much was hand-to-hand.  The Indians main weapon seems to have been the bow, Garcilaso de la Vega saying

The Indians make use of all sorts of arms except the crossbow and the musket. They believe that the bow and arrow give them a particular grace, and for that reason they always carry them to the chase and to the war.

Of the dead, at least five died in the prelude to the battle when de Soto was cut off in the town and two more in a rescue action to save a priest and companions who had become trapped in this incident - these could have been hand-to-hand casualties and doubtless some of the wounded also were injured in the close fighting.  The Indians did have the habit of shooting the horses if they could (hence one of the other quotes talking about developing cloth horse armour).

[Sharur]

Someone on another Forum just alerted me to this video, a critique of the fast shooting techniques demonstrated in several videos, including the Lars Anderson one, which is worth seeing. It is a bit rambling, but is usefully from a more military usage perspective.

It's also worth looking over the 517 (!) comments the video's had (when I checked it anyway), as some of the discussion makes further interesting points about ancient and medieval bow shooting, not all of which have surfaced in our discussion here so far.

[Nick Harbud]

I found some of his other videos also quite interesting.  For example the one on the relative strength needed to use war bows, single-handed sword and two-handed long sword.  Essentially he reckons the latter was the best weapon for the weedier and less practiced members of one's army.  The other two require quite a lot of effort/training to build up the necessary musculature.

[Dave Beatty]

Lars is a most impressive archer with much to teach us all.

As I noted in a previous discussion, we bow-hunt deer and elk in Oregon with great success most every year.  The minimum legal draw weight for a recurve, long bow, or compound bow is 40 pounds for deer and 50 pounds for elk (it is illegal to hunt with a crossbow).  I hunt with a 55 pound compound bow (30" draw, about 280 feet per second) (my son uses a draw weight of 70 pounds yielding about 310 fps) and we will almost never take a hunting shot outside 50 yards although we both can routinely hit an elk sized target at 200 yards and a 12" target easily at 100 yards.  The closest I ever came to anything like a combat shot was against a mountain lion that was stalking me once during deer season and I missed a 70 yard shot that was very much "from the hip" to use a rifle analogy.

I have taken infinite grief over the years because I shoot right handed with the arrow nocked to the right of the grip which means that I use a "left handed" bow (with the shelf on the right side).  I have no idea why I learnt to shoot this way, perhaps because my father was left handed.  So now I can show Lars' video to my nagging hunting buddies with a "I tolt ya' so."

Having said all that, I (like Crazy Horse) prefer hunting with a rifle (although my weapon of choice is a 7mm Remington magnum for deer and sometimes a 338 Weatherby magnum for larger game) and I'll usually only go bow hunting if I do not draw my rifle hunt area of preference.  I ALWAYS hunt dangerous game (cougar and bear) with a rifle although some crazies around here use a bow.

Thanks for bringing this to the Society's attention!

[Sharur]

Another, much stronger and point-by-point critique of the Lars Anderson video is here, picking up on some of the unsourced or dubiously-sourced comments and claims he'd made, as well as other matters. The video's just over 15 minutes long but is worth persevering with. There are also items used in this new video to show a) there are numerous other trick/speed shooters out there who are at least as good as Anderson, and b) some of his claims need very specific circumstances to replicate, so aren't nearly the "historical re-discoveries" he was claiming.

[Patrick Waterson]

And an (apparently) informed commentary on Anna Maltese's 'rebuttal' can be found here.

[Sharur]

Yes, it's all becoming a bit circular, projecting what an individual modern archer can, or thinks they can, do now, onto historical circumstances, where, as so often, we simply haven't the information surviving to make an informed judgement. All very familiar territory for SoA members, I suspect (and judging by many of the debates on this Forum elsewhere)!

[Patrick Waterson]

I suppose that at least Lars has shown what might have been possible and thus opened up a few more avenues for the interested to explore.  His basic thrust seems to have been that what he saw in ancient depictions seems to have had some usable basis in fact; we can ponder whether what they actually did was what he does, but he has done us a service by bringing these matters to light.

At the end of the day we all make up our own minds anyway.

[Erpingham]

On the broad subject of archery and ancient warfare and wargames, Nick Harbud's Behind the Curve - Archery in Wargames in Slingshot 298 offers some nice insights into how we look at ancient archery.  One particular element that fits well with this thread is Nick draws a contrast between the views of the traditionalists, who primarily base their view of archery tactics on what they read in the sources, and the Reconstructors, who base their views on modern experimentation.  Now, Nick is creating neater lines than those which actually exist for the sake of argument - probably the leading longbow traditionalist is Robert Hardy, who has always incorporated experimental data into his arguments.  However, we do have two major camps, who put more emphasis on one or other of these things, using other evidence to reinforce their primary arguments.

Unlike some of the earlier elements of this thread, Nick doesn't focus on trick shots or re-enactor stuff but focusses around particular work done experimentally, both 19th century musketry tests and modern experimental work on on longbows.  In doing so, he critiques how game rules cover archery (possibly a game mechanisms thread) but he also opens up some interesting arguments about how did longbowmen operate and how effective were they.  In particular he challenges the accepted wisdom of the traditionalists that longbowmen "bombarded" a "killingzone" (which he refers to as the Arrowstorm theory) and raises instead the idea that longbowmen engaged mainly in flat trajectory shooting at much shorter ranges.  In doing so, many of the arguments that usually float around longbows, like how far could they shoot and how quickly, fade into the background and we get to the question about were longbow victories more like later volley musket actions which were about shooting devastatingly at short range.

Nick says a great deal more in his article but I think to begin whether I'll leave two (and a half) queries in the air

• In an area like archery, where we can experiment effectively with reconstructed weapons and carry out scientific effectiveness tests, how should the sources and the evidence of experiment relate?
  Have we got longbows completely wrong and what are the implications for our reconstruction of longbow battles, historically and in wargaming?

[Patrick Waterson]

Nick says a great deal more in his article but I think to begin whether I'll leave two (and a half) queries in the air

• In an area like archery, where we can experiment effectively with reconstructed weapons and carry out scientific effectiveness tests, how should the sources and the evidence of experiment relate?
• Have we got longbows completely wrong and what are the implications for our reconstruction of longbow battles, historically and in wargaming?

I think part of Nick's ably presented and argued analysis is let down by some questionable data.

Data item 1: accuracy based on shooting at a canvas sheet.  This can measure flattish-trajectory arrivals in the target area, but is of no great help for the assessment of indirect shooting except against targets no more than about 1/4" deep.  Given that the average classical (and perhaps mediaeval?) formation would be at least eight men deep, or 24', maybe we should drop this particular data item until someone thinks to try massed archery on a three-dimensional canvas target, say, 5' high, 300' wide and 24' deep or a collection of a few hundred old shop dummies lined up in similar configuration.

Data item 2: first volley at Blenheim, etc.  There are problems with these: at Blenheim in Cutts' first assault each of the 800 casualties may have been hit by multiple balls, so although useful as a musket-induced casualty count it may be a poor guide to accuracy.  At Rorke's Drift much ammunition was expended keeping down Zulu riflemen on a distant bluff, while the close-range volleys against Zulu assaults would have provided a rather higher casualty-to-rounds-expended ratio than the overall average.  (Not sure how good a guide the film Zulu is, but when the Zulus are 'counting guns' it seems that it took about 600 rounds to put down 60 Zulus at a couple of hundred yards' range.)  Mr Hughes' book Firepower seems to have a penchant for over-averaging and not taking account of such details.

Data item 3: shields cannot stop missiles.  Probably true if those missiles are longbow arrows at close range.  Otherwise not a good rule of thumb given the clear source indications that a lot of other (non-longbow) missiles were stopped by shields.  One reservation I do have about parts of the article is the implicit assumption that longbow-related data can be broad-brushed across the entire spectrum of history - would the same conclusions be applicable to, say, Norman shortbow archery and the Anglo-Saxon shield wall at Hastings?

Data item 4: archers at 8' per man frontage.  What???  An archer occupies 2' of frontage - all well and good.  He needs another 1-2 yards per side to work his weapon.  Why?  What is there about nock, draw, loose, grab another arrow that requires 6' of clearance on either side?  It is not as if he is ejecting a shower of hot used cartridge cases or emitting a backblast (or sideblast).

That said, it would be advantageous to concentrate on evaluating the longbow and its effectiveness and use.  For this purpose we unfortunately lack a key ingredient - a thousand or so re-enactors trained in the mass-shooting tactics of the period, at least as we understand them to be.  Without this we are only going to be experimentally evaluating one side of the argument.