The article doesn't mention it - but firearms generally have a far greater psychological "punch" than bows & arrows. Especially when used at any scale, or against opponents unfamiliar with them - as would be the case for all but veteran troops, back in the early firearms era.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a bow is a good guy with a bow…

What about the English longbow? Or Mongolian horse bows?

This is ridiculously false on its face. Pick a novice and give them 1 hour of training and they'll be able to shoot faster and sustain that rate of fire with a modern semi-automatic pistol than any expert archer in the world.

Difficulty of that kit is the real question.

Slingers would need 20 lead bullets, one of the lowest melting point substances in the world. If lead were unavailable, slingers would make due with stone, or even clay bullets.

In contrast, equipping 20 arrows to 10,000 archers would be an incredibly more complicated undertaking. You need arrowheads, those arrowheads need to fit shafts. Even without fletching, building an arrowhead design that fits different width sticks of wood is an incredibly complicated undertaking. Especially if you only have access to tools from ancient-times.

To accurately launch the arrow, you must consistently make the same arrow (or extremely similar arrows). That's just how it works. Its far easier to make 20x lead bullets (or 20x clay bullets, or 20x stone bullets) that are all consistent... than it is to make 20x arrows that are all consistent.

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It was a real innovation to standardize stick sizes, standardize goose feathers, and standardize arrowheads to equip the British Longbowman. There's a reason why that strategy only really took place in the Medieval period, the ancient world didn't have the tools or inventions needed to support mass-archer strategies.

Yes in fact they did spend their whole lives practicing. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training):

"Longbows were very difficult to master because the force required to deliver an arrow through the improving armour of medieval Europe was very high by modern standards ... etons of longbow archers are recognisably deformed, with enlarged left arms and often bone spurs on left wrists, left shoulders and right fingers."

Further:

"It was the difficulty in using the longbow which led various monarchs of England to issue instructions encouraging their ownership and practice, including the Assize of Arms of 1252 and King Edward III's declaration of 1363."

The popularization of the crossbow, in part, was the reduceded need for training. In some areas it also paid better.

Romans carried 2 Pilum, a shortsword, and a shield. You had two shots, after which you rushed in with your swords.

Yeah, Longbowmen are obviously superior. But if you have 10,000 Longbowmen with 60 arrows per man, you require a production-capacity of 60,000 arrows per battle. That's a lot of goose feathers, even if you're recycling a significant chunk of arrows.

Note that the modern arrow has fletching for accuracy. Ancient arrows didn't have fletching: no spin, no accuracy.

Before the middle ages, mass production of arrows in this capacity was basically impossible. The British innovation to war wasn't so much the Longbow (there were plenty of archers before the British...), it was the invention of commodity mass produced arrows... which supported the Longbowman as a major unit of warfare.

Even the Roman Legionaries used Pilum (aka: Javelins) as their ranged weapon of choice. Bows existed (see the Sagittarii), but were an auxiliary (and often non-Roman) force.

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Slingers (!!) were still used in Roman times. Now a Sling... THAT is an ideal ancient weapon. A trained slinger can kill a Lion or Bear, and you only had to find rocks to throw. Mass production of sling-bullets (really, just a shaped rock) is easy, even with an army marching to a distant location.

Slingers used rocks, clay, and even lead bullets throughout history. They were effectively the longbowmen before the British learned to mass produce arrows.

In fact, the ancient world believed that Slings had greater range and accuracy than bows. Since fletching won't be invented for another 1000+ years, ancient arrows had very limited range and accuracy.

That was pretty small number of people in the middle ages, and they would already have been trained as mounted knights or men-at-arms so retraining them as archers would not be a net gain unless one archer was more valuable than one man-at-arms which I don't think is likely.

The advantage of the longbow is that once trained, you could raise a large army quite cheaply but that army only worked as part of a combined arms operation that also had armoured infantry and cavalry. That means that you don't want to sacrifice the other elements of your army in order to build a longbow capability.

Didn't England lose the Hundred Years War? At least looking at the map before and after - it lost everything on the continent, incl. last remnants of Angevin and Normandy lost to France, with France rising up significantly bigger and stronger as a result of the war.

While long bow is a nice nostalgic weapon, the crossbow is technologically more advanced, and in our civilization technology wins :

"Plate armor that could be penetrated by large crossbows, but was impenetrable by longbows, was uncommon in Europe until about 1380"

(funny that while a child i was initially making bows, yet soon switched to making crossbows - and they were interesting until i made my first single shot handgun at the end of the 1st grade :)

This is a cheap shot, but preparing laserwort or dodo.

More practically, anything that is done by hand and needs a lifetime of training. But you need to be sufficiently specific. No one can use a longbow the way medieval british could, but anyone with a bit of training and a modern compound bow could probably match them. So you'd need to be specific to longbows.

> England alone, for a 150-year window in late medieval Europe, was politically stable enough to render the longbow its rulers’ optimal technology choice. In contrast, in France and Scotland political instability prevailed, rendering the crossbow the optimal technology choice for rulers in these nations.

Now if theres a collapse the bow would be a requirement to know how to use and build.

I don't think that's true either, plate armor should give good protection against arrows and bolts.

I was under the impression that English Archery was a very specialized discipline, given its very skill intensive. The English did use the Longbowmen, but as a specialized unit in specialized situations.

Speed of reloading is another advantage the longbow has, but I think this article overstates it. While some crossbows do require using a stirrup or crank to load them, there are others that you can reload against your hips, and shoot from there, to increase your speed considerably, at some cost to accuracy. I know people who have managed to get 6 bullseyes at 20 yards on a crossbow in 30 seconds. Meanwhile, archers would not be firing at the maximum possible rate in battle; ammunition is a limited resource, and with the draw weights of warbows fatigue would set in quickly. Overall, with the archers they had and bows they had at the time, it is likely that the longbows were able to be a little faster than the crossbows, but it's not a night and day thing; and the range, accuracy, and penetrating power on the crossbows were better.

The simplicity became an advantage in a few battles, which came after substantial rainstorms that caused problems with crossbows more complicated mechanisms. But the main advantage was how cheap and fast to produce they were; you could easily arm a large populace quite quickly. In order to take advantage of the longbow, you had to do that; you needed a very large number of archers to effectively take advantage of longbows, while you needed fewer archers to be effective with crossbows. But because it was cheap and simple, it was feasible to do that.

I think that cost and simplicity of the longbows were their biggest advantage; speed perhaps a secondary factor, but the sheer numbers were likely to be more important.

There is, of course, an interesting parallel here with some trends in modern military spending. The Joint Strike Fighter is a technological marvel; one of the most advanced pieces of military equipment ever. However, they are staggeringly expensive, and not actually the best dogfighters in the sky. You wonder how much more effective spending that money on more and simpler weaponry might have been.

"Cheap" wasn't always the major factor. Some spears were cheap, but others were pretty darned expensive. In wars -- where trained people fought in groups and formations -- spears just worked better than swords.

The Greek phalanx, the Roman pilum, the lances of the medieval period, early modern pike-and-shot, etc. all showed the effectiveness of a long sharp, pointy stick.

Swords have many niches, like closed-quarters combat in cities, terrain (e.g. forest or mountain battles), etc., but the spear almost always dominated for mainstream war.