The article's point about the lethality of arrows.. I feel like every Youtube test I've seen on the subject shows that Arrows can pierce even full plate pretty reasonably easily, though this is not scientific at all ofc.
Check out Tod's Workshop youtube channel. It's only entertainment, but he has a far more realistic overall testing of arrows' armour-piercing capability.
A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.
Never eliminated though!
But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
> [I]n the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal.
That's likely talking about a shot at close quarters (from the strongest kind of pre-modern bows in the world), the chausses the arrow went through would have been mail not plate, and horses are much less resilient than humans.
Of course longbows could and did kill - they wouldn't have been used in war otherwise! But they did not routinely kill through plate armour at range.
Not sure what you mean by "strongest", but you might want to make a comparison with mongol composite bows.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
> Not sure what you mean by "strongest", but you might want to make a comparison with mongol composite bows.
I believe it's generally accepted that the longbows we're talking about delivered arrows with more force than Mongol composite bows.
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
Horses are notoriously fragile. The quote does not say that the horse died instantly, merely that it died.
No, they're not. One could argue that some of the recent breeds, designed for a particular aesthetic rather than practicality, are, but that's not really within this subject.
> horses are big and react poorly to being wounded: a solid arrow hit on a horse is very likely to disable both horse and rider. And while light or archer cavalry might limit exposure to mass arrow fire by attacking in looser formation, as we’ve discussed, European heavy horse generally engages in very tight lines of armored men and horses in order to maximize the fear and power of their impact. Unsurprisingly then, we see from antiquity forward, efforts to armor or protect horses, called ‘barding’: defenses of thick textile, scale, lamellar, and even plate are known in various periods, though of course the more armor placed on the horse, the larger and stronger it needs to be and the slower it moves. Nevertheless, the size and shape of a horse makes it harder to armor than a human and you simply cannot achieve a level of protection for a horse that is going to match a heavy infantryman on the ground, especially if the latter has a large shield.
> rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
This is the standard simplified narrative of what happened at Agincourt - English archers wiping out French noble heavy cavalry - although it also seems like that was an exception.
They were charging up hill in the mud. Noone really died from arrows, except maybe some of the horses. But a lot of their horses fell and then the knights ran back through their own infantry, though apparently that wasn't that big a deal in the battle.
The battlefield killing was done by light infantry wading in with daggers and hatchets apparently during a foot slog up the muddy hill which left the french heavy infantry exhausted. Another wave of killing afaik was when the captured prisoners were all executed since the english position seemed like it might be overrun by some follow up fighting.
(keep in mind the battle took hours and there was a lot more going on then just heavy horse riding up against arrows once or twice)
First, that archers can actually be more effective against mounted troops than foot: the mounted troops ride close together, horses are hard to fully armor, and one horse getting hit in the leg can cause a lot of chaos.
Second, at Agincourt, the French knights _walked_ through the arrow-fire quite successfully, but the effort (physical, mental, cumulative effect of small wounds) tired them enough that the English soldiers could beat them hand-to-hand. And that this ability to inflict small damage before the main fighting is why archers were valuable.
Angles matter. There’s a famous rout that happened in France where an English army overstayed its welcome and was trying to make its way back to England when the locals decided it would be better to never have to deal with them again by finishing it now. I thought it was William of Orange but I cannot find anything to corroborate that.
They pinned his army down with a fresher army meaning to destroy them. The English infantry and cavalry were vastly outnumbered due to attrition, but what he did have were longbows. And somehow they beat a superior army while losing a fraction as many men.
The historical military analysis I saw was that with the front lines so thin, the archers essentially didn’t have to fire long arching volleys. The flatter angle of the arrow trajectory and shorter flight distance increased the penetration force, and they just absolutely destroyed every charge against them, confusing the attacking army. Arrows should not be dropping this many men. WTF.
You must be referring to the Battle of Agincourt, as Henry V was heading back to Calais after laying a too-prolonged siege of Harfleur, during the 100 Years War.
If it's Agincourt, then Bret talks about it quite a bit in the article. Essentially, it was the best case scenario for bows and even then both the French infantry and cavalry were able to advance and get to the English lines. However, both were weakened enough that they were defeated by the English forces waiting for them.
In a YouTube test I have seen (Todd's Workshop) their plate armor didn't really care about a 100kg draw weight longbow. Though if I remember correctly they said it's possible it would have done a bit of damage back then depending on material quality.
I don't think 'plate' was a standard kind of quality either, so while the top quality plate might be effectively impervious to arrows except for an unlikely lucky splintering shot into a weak point or gap, there were probably lots of thinner, less coverage providing plate armours where the probability of defeat was still very low, but not completely zero.
