[davem]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Hmmm...early 15th century Englishmen with massive shoulders? They'd be lucky to be 5 1/2 feet tall (vitamin deficiencies and poor diet, you know).

Unfortunately, virtually no bowstaves from the medieval period have survived. So how do we know how powerful the bows would have been? Some evidence can be obtained from the arrows, which have survived. Because the 'archer's paradox' demands that a particular bow needs an arrow of suitable spine (stiffness) then by measuring the properties of a medieval arrow we can estimate the strength of the bow for which it was designed. When these calculations were done, the answers were almost unbelievable. They suggested that the force needed to draw a medieval longbow could have been in the range 110 to 180 pounds (500 to 800 Newtons). Although these figures are astonishing, they have been confirmed by calculations based on the bows found in the wreck of Henry VIII's ship Mary Rose, which sank in 1545. It seems likely that in 1415, when archery was at its peak in England as a technique of warfare, bows would have been no less powerful than in 1545, when archery was already beginning to lose ground to firearms.....

Henry had approximately 5,000 archers at Agincourt, and a stock of about 400,000 arrows. Each archer could shoot about ten arrows a minute, so the army only had enough ammunition for about eight minutes of shooting at maximum fire power. However, this fire power would have been devastating. Fifty thousand arrows a minute - over 800 a second - would have hissed down on the French cavalry, killing hundreds of men a minute and wounding many more. The function of a company of medieval archers seems to have been equivalent to that of a machine-gunner, so in modern terms we can imagine Agincourt as a battle between old-fashioned cavalry, supported by a few snipers (crossbow-men) on the French side, against a much smaller army equipped with machine guns. http://www.stortford-archers.org.uk/medieval.htm

William de Braose, an English knight fighting the Welsh in 1188, reported that an arrow had penetrated his chain mail and clothing, passed through his thigh and saddle and finally entered his horse.

It has been claimed that drawing the bowstring back to your cheek bone is equivalent to lifting a 100lb block of concrete with two fingers. To cultivate the special back and shoulder muscles needed it would have been necessary to medieval peasants to have trained from a very young age. This had long-term consequences for the longbowmen. For example, the skeleton of an archer found in the wreck of the Mary Rose showed he had thicker bones in his right arm than his left and a deformed right shoulder from drawing the bow. Other evidence suggests that using such a high-tension weapon often left longbowmen with physical deformities.http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/YALDlongbow.htm

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