English kings actually passed laws that demanded that their citizens owned bows and trained with them and often subsidized archery tournaments to keep people motivated to practice archery.
That makes quite a fair bit of sense actually And back then its not like they had social media to scroll on, this probably was a fun use of their spare time too
They had mandatory trainings on Sunday, and these trainings ended up being incredibly useful in the hundred years war where the English could just go to any random village and find tons of skilled bowmen to recruit. The french couldn't do the same, and so they had to use crossbows which were significantly worse due to a number of reasons.
@@abhi5504 Crossbows are not inferior to bows. If anything they are supperior. they were even banned by the pope to use against other christians becouse they were op. they are much more expensive however.
@@Somespideronline Because they are acting like Archers were over armored, which just isn't the case. Archers wore a amount of armor that made sense. They were under the threat of being flanked or having enemy archers volley on them... They also might be required to engage in melee combat, if their frontlines failed. So the amount of armor archers wore, made total sense. It wasn't about overly protecting their skilled archers.
Using a warbow isn't just about skill. Strength training is also a significant concern and it has to be the right muscles. Archeologists can identify the skeleton of an English longbowman by how their skeleton deformed. We are talking draw weights over 100lbs. Not only do they need to be able to pull that string back, but they need to be able to aim as well and repeat the action multiple times in a battle. A proper archer would practically need to learn from childhood to develop the right muscles.
Well i dont kwow Drifters , but i Heard about oda Nobunaga. He was an Important Warlord in Japan and guess What , he introduced fireweapons (in great scale) to japanese battlefields.
@@geheimeWeltregierung well yes and no. Nobunaga was actually the guy who managed to use guns effectively in field battles(the Japanese were already using quite effectively in sieges , but their use in field battles were an enigma until he came along)
Well, he was usually willing by throwing larger armies of muskets, torches and pointy sticks at elite forces of warrior monks, so his career was a microcosm of this principle. That and the principles that you can't parry a forrest fire or a collapsing building with a katana, and that losing honorably is still losing. Scary man, that guy.
@@MrFelblood well no one was fighting honorable at the time either. This whole idea about samurai loyalty and honor was a myth created centuries after the warring states period of Japanese history. What set Nobunaga apart from his fellow warlords was a) he had a plan for unifying the fractured country and b) when he committed atrocities he made no excuses to the point he had a "what you see is what you get and then some" type of mentality about them . Basically many historians seem to believe that many of his atrocities were exaggerated/embellished by his enemies and nobunaga didn't bother to correct them because those stories made him appear more terrifying
World War 2, a British army officer named Jack Churchill, although most people called him “Mad Jack”. In May 1940 Jack and his unit ambushed a German patrol in France close to L'Épinette. Jack gave the signal to his unit to attack by shooting the enemy staff sergeant with a barbed arrow using a long bow, making him the only British soldier to ever down an enemy using a long bow in World War 2.
"Point and shoot" weapons really changed logistics more than tactics. Any school kid can point an imaginary crossbow in the general direction of a target.
Except guns and crossbows were prestige weapons handled by professionals. People weren't arming peasants with expensive weaponry and shooting guilds were prestigious institutions handling crossbows. Indeed 16th century writers write that guns were the weapons of the professionals while bows were weapons best suited when there weren't enough guns to be around. By the tail end of the 16th century men showing up with longbows to muster were classified as unarmed men.
@@moisesflores5405... what? you know, if for "professionals" you mean menthat could coordinate their volley of fire to shoot in a consecutive fire line non stop while the ones who shooted were reloading counts as "professional" I get it, but I doubt a bow that needed a lot more of training was considered under a early gun wich was literally a cannon on a stick and about crossbows in late medieval Japan... I have no idea
imagine being a member the warrior elite aristocracy of your kingdom. you've trained for 20 years to a master of warfare and combat. then in your last battle you get yeeted out of existence by a 16 year old stable boy who was just taught how to make the firestick go pew.
No kidding. That happens even as we speak. I've heard accounts of USAs tier 1 guys getting hit by potshots taken from a kid with a smooth bore AK. Guns are really something
This is basically what happened at the battle of Cerignola. Elite French cavalry and Swiss mercenary pikemen (the best money could hire of the day) were defeated by a force of Spaniards armed with firearms and pikes. Pike and shot tactics (formations that allowed firearm welding troops to engage enemy infantry and cav while being covered by friendly pike infantry) then took over Europe. At that battle the French lost about 4,000 men and the Spaniards only lost around 500.
The Battle of Shiroyama was a great example of this. Although, when WW1 rolled around, it was found that well-trained units still had their advantages over conscripts.
The point isn't that crossbow and gun equipped soldiers weren't trained, but that to get an equivalent effectiveness crossbows and guns required several orders of magnitude of training less than bows.
Those are called mercenaries. Most mercenaries cross trained the most popular weapons of the time based on what they could afford. Sword as a sidearm, bow for the higher paying spots if the army could afford to pay the higher wages, crossbow if they army couldn't afford it, and gun if the mercenary could afford to own one.
Get Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword. It has the very thing you're looking for... You can be a Swedish Musketeer, a Cossack Serdjyuk, Russian Streltsy, Polish Hayduk, or an Ottoman Janissary under Crimea... Heck you could just lead a troop of those guys and be a Mercenary Captain
Another advantage of crossbows and guns over bows is that you can keep them ready to fire for an indefinite length of time. So you can aim and wait, then when someone steps into range, there is no delay to firing
Keeping an arrow nocked but not drawn just doesn't have the quick fire potential of a finger on a trigger, but that's more of an urban warfare concept than field battles and sieges. Tactical moments might save the life of a single soldier, but to save a country you need to think about logistical and strategic scale stuff like, "we can train twice as many ranged units and have them ready before they enemy reinforcements arrive."
Which is why crossbows and guns were better during sieges. Because you could wait and only expose a small portion of your body to the enemy. A bowman needs to stand up and stand almost completely out of cover to get a shot off
I’ve used a bow with a 50lbs draw weight and it’s no joke to pull that to the rear and keep it steady. Medieval longbows would often have weights well over 100lbs. It would take years to train large numbers of people to use a bow like that consistently and accurately.
There was also the fact that as time went on guns just became better than bows. People often besmirch the musket’s accuracy, but in a decent few cases, bows were even worse-for example, an arrow’s accuracy could be heavily affected by the wind, a gun’s could not. And the rate at which guns improved outpaced protection, so guns could more easily penetrate armour compared to bows.
Battle of Cerignola is a great example of this. Most french officers got killed by spanish handcannoneers, which surprised not just the french but even the spanish, so much they reacted by mounting the first of what would become the spanish tradition of mourning for enemy deaths. Because indeed guns, even those early ones, had way more precission and armor penetration than bows and even crossbows. A trained longbowman had at best the same accuracy as a shotgunner (that's what they called a shotgun then, not what we call so now), and about the same penetration too. The non-wall-mounted arquebus had more pen but less accuracy. Early muskets (the long kind with the sticks) had both more pen and accuracy, locks made them more accurate, rifling even more so. A Musketeer from the 18th century was objectively better than a longbowman in every sense but frequency of shots, and that's only short term, because longbowmen got tired much faster too.
Muskets were superior in basically every way. This argument only really applies to *really* early guns. And btw armour that could protect from muskets existed and was actually quite common. It was standard equipment for cuirassier. It just couldn't take musket shots at close range.
Qi Jiguang & Humphrey Barwick both wrote that matchlock firearms were more accurate than warbows, while Sir John Smythe indicated otherwise. Based on modern tests, I suspect matchlocks were significantly more accurate than warbows in skilled hands & in prime condition. If loaded poorly or too hastily, or with heating & fouling, maybe not. In any case, matchlocks offered much higher velocity & power than warbows as well as greater ability to shoot from cover.
I’ve been listening to his podcast, but what I really want to know is… how annoyed is his coworkers? My mom gets annoyed when I talk about history… imagine THIS GUY with the history of the universe 😂
@@sigismundafvolsung5526True enough that a volley of arrows is scary too, but the key difference being you can at least *SEE* the hail of arrows coming at you :P With arrows you can at least see whose firing them and the poor bastards they are falling upon. You also at least have a sense of security from arrows with a shield. Guns take away all of that. You cant really see the projectiles, you dont know where its going to hit. All you see is a puff of smoke and next thing you know your friend next to you has a hole through his shield and his chest
This is true when you're talking about *very* early firearms- say, the middle of the 15th century. Unfortunately, too many people take this argument to its ridiculous extreme and claim bows were better than flintlock muskets. Horsemen continued to use bows long after the infantry traded them in for guns, since mounted men have trouble reloading muzzleloaders. I mean, consider the Japanese who were great archers and had excellent bows. And Japanese infantry gave up their bows for *matchlock* muskets as soon as they had the chance.
Yet the Manchus didn't give up their (probably better) bows & continued using them with success at least into the 19th century (& longer with less success). It's true was mostly for cavalry, but some Qing infantry also used bows & some even used both firearms & bows based on artwork.
Uhmmm not all Japanese armies replaced their bows. They still kept units with bows and matchlocks hence while the gunners are reloading the archers can still rain down hell
I feel the training aspect only really applies to the Gun/longbow comparison. Crossbows were just as easy to get the hang of as a gun. A point I had heard on TH-cam (will update if I remember who from) was that musketballs had much higher lethality than arrows. Arrows would rarely cause instant or near-instant death/incapacitation in a way bullets could I also would have thought the prevelance or armour on medieval battlefields would have made the gun more viable
A zhuge crossbow is, as far as the soldier using it is concerned, just a wooden SMG powered by levers instead of gunpowder and springs. Metal ammo, standardized replacement parts, machined barrels and chemical energy add more accuracy, reliability and power, but the real **revolution** in battlefield technology was point and shoot weapons. 1. Point business end at enemy. 2. Operate lever. 3. Go to 1
Same thing with crossbows and why the French used them so much back in the day. Just like you said regarding early firearms, it was much easier and far faster, and more cost effective to train someone to be proficient with a crossbow then it did to train someone up to use a bow
One of the reasons Sparta fell is essentially the same. Because Spartan training was so lengthy, if they took mass casualties, they couldn't easily replenish their ranks. There are other reasons, but this was a major factor.
Spartans weren’t significantly more effective at warfare then their enemies and didn’t participate in a a lot of battles directly, it was more to do with the fact that very small amount of people were granted Spartan citizenship.
@@pianoman-1359 That was also a significant factor. There's also the fact that they didn't really change their tactics. The small population of fighting men combined with the lengthy training time, were the two main factors in their decline & fall.
+pianomaN I’ve heard they were highly effective because frequent, military drilling wasn’t common among other Greek city-states. Once that DID become more common, though, the Spartans lost most of their edge. Then their xenophobia and small population combined with contual losses in frequent wars lead to their decline.
It was more the fact they had too many slaves. Their entire economy relied on slavery and if they were forced to fight a war for too long they risked the slaves revolting due to the army being away.
@@samiamrg7ecause most other Greek cities relied on militia for infantry. The hoplite formation ostensibly came out of defensive needs of the polis and light infantry was probably recruited from poorer populations or mercenaries. The only ones who could actually afford to train or gain firsthand war experience were oligarchic elite, but the hoplite formation was only as offensively effective as the discipline of its full force so they would lose cohesion during movement. What set Sparta apart was their hoplite phalanx marched as one, never drifting as others did and it's implied wouldn't retreat unless ordered. It's important to note that their school system wasn't initially a unique institution in Greece, but at some point they converted the education of the leisure class into a training regimen that conditioned and desensitized male youth of the citizen class to follow orders and kill at a moment's notice without question. It's also important to note that the period of Spartan hegemony was relatively short and the list available of Spartiates (hoplites) got smaller every year. There are a lot of theories why but there was clearly enough of a manpower shortage that they relied on non-citizens and even freed Helots to fill gaps in the phalanx, though not enough that they opened the agoge to them so their formation discipline was never what it once was. Given who beat them, and who beat THEM, and who beat the successors of that guy, there's probably a lesson in there about needing to scale resources and training while applying innovation to maintain military advantage, which those guys actually managed for a few good centuries.
I find it hilarious that there are some people who genuinely think that bows were better for armies than the muskets of the Napoleonic era. If that was the case, nobody would have used guns. We can see this, for instance, with the air rifle. It was superior in every statistic to the musket, but it wasn't used because the overhead was so high that it made no logistical sense. Not that nobody ever used them. They were popular with private hunters, for instance. But they weren't used on the battlefield.
Are you familiar with tests of Girandoni air rifles? They most certainly were not superior in every statistic to the flintlock musket. The kinetic energy & velocity were quite low, even if originals performed better than replicas. If air rifles had become more common, soldiers could easily have adopted lightweight armor to protect against them. Air rifles were used on the battlefield, but not for very long & in limited numbers.
@@b.h.abbott-motley2427 That would have made such an interesting meta! It'd necessitate the use of both light and heavy armor for protecting from air guns vs. powder guns.
Don't forget logistics. To create an arrow you need a fletcher, carpenter and blacksmith. For a lead ball you need lead and a form. Anyone can do it. Gunpowder is more difficult to make but it's easy to transport (Obviously, it's risky by it's nature but not logistically difficult, only safely.)
@@koreancowboy42 I was only talking about ammunition there, not crafting of the weapons, the weapons crafting were usually done out of the war where it wasn't time consuming. They didn't fight Total Wars of industrial scale then. HOWEVER. A bowyer does require more time than a gun barrel, and their resoruces are more expensive. Iron vs high quality yew. As for design, I mean sure it's more advanced technologically, but once it's been desigend you're done there. Don't need to keep designing every gun.
@@TheIfifi That's true, but before standardization and replaceable parts, gunsmiths had to customize every gun. Replaceability really changed the game in terms of cheap, easy manufacturing and maintenance of firearms.
Your friend should look into the historical availability of wood staves suitable for making longbows. You have to kill a ~20 year old yew tree to make 2-3 bowstaves, and bowstaves wear out. England would have had to transition away from bows even if guns didn't get better, because all that (necessary) archery practice killed most of the suitable trees in Europe.
@@swissarmyknight4306 You are probably wrong, opening new farmlands, wood houses, ships (most important compenent) and another wooden tools depleted forests in Europa not Longbows. Korean and Eurasian nomads made more bows than European counterparts (English, Vikings, Franks etc.) but their forest ratio is very high. Making ships deplete forest mostly.
I’ve read somewhere that additional reason as to why the first lockless guns stuck around was that the huge amount of smoke and the noise created during discharge had a tremendous psychological effect on the enemy.
Muskets are superior to bows and the idea that it’s simply a matter of bows being difficult to use is preposterous. With that logic, elite units that go through really long training like Royal Guards would use bows, but they chose guns… Because they were superior.
Crossbow is the only bow that can compete with guns after the invention of matchlock, while longbow almost imediately died out, mostly because crossbow were far more easy to train with than longbow.
There’s also the fact that the amount of arrows or bolts a soldier can carry was not even close to how much ammunition a soldier using a gun would be able to carry
Also the fact making bullets is easier than it is to make arrows. Arrows you need feathers from chickens, the wood need to be good and of quality, the arrow head iron work needs to be good.
Fun fact swearing comes from bows when you stick up two fingers, it comes from British archers. Longbow were so skilled they could have 3 to 5 arrows in flight at one time, the French said they have catch a charger to cut off its fingers, so the two fingers stick up is to say I still have my fingers to the French
Agreed although emergency trained archers can still be somewhat effective. A 50lb bow with broadheads is stil useful (against no armor) shot from beginners en masse
that chinese han dynasty crossbow, with the right poundage & bolt it should be able to reach 400-500 m & that would outrange the effective range of a musktet (200 m) twice + without armor the bolts would still be lethal at that range / since that particular crossbow was spanned by hand, back and feet, it would also have a higher rate of shot
That was the big reason why guns replaced bows. As soon as archers were up against armored infantry or cavalry. Even well trained archers and crossbowmen could do very little against them. Meanwhile even some half decent arquebuiser firing in volley would tear through armor and shields
@@lordulberthellblaze6509 That's not really true, Because the archers & especially the crossbowmen could still wound & incapacitate them / the only parts of the armor that could be considered arrow proof (not bolt proof, because crossbows need more testing) would be the chest armor and the helmet in case of lamellar and plate But Limbs protection due to thinner armor was still vulnerable to arrows, It would be especially a problem if the Arrows were to be poisoned which was rare but did happen historically On top of that, there is the wounding and killing of Horses, since horse protection was rare and still provided limited protection
@@lordulberthellblaze6509 the big reason why they replaced them was less training in case of comparison to the Bow and in case of comparison to the crossbow, cheaper ammunition, the terrifying effect of firearm sounds & ofcourse more power, but that wasn't the main reason
@@aburoach9268 Limbs were also harder to hit especially if the person had shields. Also getting hit in the limbs with an arrow or crossbow wasn't guaranteed to kill or incapacitate a person like a bullet could. Both arrows and bullets had been coated in poison. And unlike poison arrows, the lethality of poisoned bullets led to the Strasbourg agreement of 1675 that banned their use. In the aftermath of the battle of crecy many more knights and nobles were captured than killed. Meanwhile arquebuises were pretty much guaranteed to punch through breast plates and helmets at optimal range. This was important since archers became increasingly ineffective as armor became increasingly more effective and common on the battlefield. By the 16th century and the important Battle of Cerignola (1503) most combatants were wearing armor and the French Cavalry and Swiss pikemen found themselves repeating the battle of Crecy and Agincourt only this time at the hands of 1000 Spanish Arquebuisiers at not the 5000 to 6000 English Longbowen at Crecy or Agincourt. The point was you didn't need as many arquebuisers compared to archers to do as much damage to an enemy army.
Crossbows were time consuming to make. Not every smith knew how to make them correctly. Also, despite how they're often portrayed, they had about the same ability to punch through plate armor that longbows did, which wasn't much. If a bolt or arrow struck hit a weak point like a joint them it could do damage to the target, or if it hit the very edge of the plate it could deform the metal without losing too much force, meaning there would be more left over for penetrating a significant amount, but plate was very difficult for arrows or bolts to defeat. At close range, a bullet was sure to punch through. It was guaranteed to do serious damage if it hit. Being easy to use and able to reliably kill a fully armored knight made the difference. Although, on the point of crossbows being used, usually armies would have as many crossbows as they could get, but again; complicated to make correctly.
Well depending on the place, they did. The earliest known crossbows are from bronze age China, and theoretically simple wooden crossbows may be much much older. As for why it only spread so far: money. It is more expensive, time consuming and resource intense to build a large strong crossbow that noticeably outperforms a simpler cheaper bow. Add to that the strength and training needed to use a proper siege crossbow that rivals a longbow, well a bunch of the benefits are gone. Now if you were ancient China you absolutely could spend the money to throw crossbows at a few thousand soldiers that dont have an archery background to get your ranged troops, but for most ancient and early medieval states it was cheaper, simpler and faster to just use pre existing sling, javelin and bow traditions and infrastructure
They did take off. Longbows were the thing in England, most everyone else in Western Europe used crossbows for military purposes. Crossbows were very popular. Its just that they were surpassed by firearms in the late medieval period.
@@koreancowboy42 yep and the earliest found are Shang centuries earlier than the Qin in the bronze age. The lack of clarity is if/when crossbows overtook bows/became common mass weapons
people keep saying this crap, but the accuracy of early handguns competed with the accuracy of bows until say 100-200 meters. It may take longer to reload but that doesn't mean an archer can just pelt fools with arrows all day long. The penetrating power was devastating, whereas only the most powerful archers with the heaviest bows stood a chance of penetrating the armor contemporary with early guns.
Another thing people forget is that the same thing happened to swords and knights with the pike. With guns still being shit at the time of the early modern age, formations of pikemen replaced knights and most forms of infantry due to their easiness to train with
A while ago, inspired by your plate armor video. I have done some research into the usefulness of maces or Warhammers against plate armor. Some say such weapons will demolish plate while some say it’s as effective as swords. What’s your thought on this?
i'd like to know the answer too, i guess it would be somewhere in between, i believe that the best area to hit would be the helmet. though the mace and warhammer are a horseman's sidearm, so i guess that makes sense
It's a kinda nuts thing to think about - the invention of the gun literally brought down the individual value of your own soldiers life, meaning you could simply throw away more human lives in order to win.
It would also be worth mentioning that any arquebus sufficiently well made will have more power and a quicker and easier reload than a heavy windlass crossbow. European crossbows are notoriously inefficient, with massive draw weights combined with a really short power stroke, which in the case of the more powerful crossbows that might have *some* chance against armour, would have to be reloaded with a windlass. Even then their armour penetrating capabilities aren't anywhere near a properly made arquebus. Now they did manage to make armour that could stop anything up to a musket, but that'd be ridiculously expensive, meanwhile a relatively cheap mild steel cuirass will be more than enough to stop a crossbow bolt fired from almost any crossbow, or at the very least it will take a lot of energy out of the bolt before it gets to your body.
Expensive and un-maneuvreable, I'm guessing. Can't run away from artillery, can't flank easily, the opposing side can just run up to you and stab you with their bayonets. And meanwhile you can just build up a fortification or trenches that acts as shields more effectively than armor...
Todd's Workshop just did Arrows vs. Armor 2. One part of that series pointed out that we don't know what a war bow really is, i.e. what draw strength a bow had to have in a military setting. You have to keep in mind, that in a medieval army, an archer brought his own bow, because each bow is different and you can't simply pick a new bow and expect to shoot well with it.
It would be more correct to say that the term "war bow" is undefined. There is a multi dimensional continuum of possible meanings, and little contextual signposted as to which values are likely to correlate to a specific time or place in history.
War bows for most European armies is at 70-75 pounds. For the English archers it's at 100+ pounds on a bow. And yes we do know the standard of draw weight for bows and military standardization. English archers were among the best archers and trained all their life from child hood to adulthood. Which means they have higher standard for archers. Compared to most of European archers. And yes archers can bring their own warbows however, the archers would need the right type of arrow to be used so as to not break on impact of the arrow being released from the bow.
@@natotomato4625 that trajectory isn't much of a training issue, bows take long with training because they're much harder to aim when preparing to fire.
Crossbows aren't really harder to train with, they just have many of the same problems as early guns. Difficult to manufacture, slow to reload, etc. In training requirements early guns and crossbows weren't that different. There's a video on this same channel about crossbows being banned because after their invention a single soldier with a day of training could kill an armoured knight with years of experience and nobles (typically well armoured) didn't like that. Bowmen at least took a long time to train and if they fought on the wrong side could be dealt with by removing two fingers. That wasn't the case with crossbows and the cost of metal limbed crossbows was the only thing that kept them out of the hands of peasants.
Most types of crossbows used across history required strength just like warbows. It was mainly in 15th-century Europe that this changed, with the windlass & cranequin, & even then the goat's-foot lever remained popular.
Which is one of many reasons why everyone should have one. Having a sword or bow for defense doesnt mean shit when youre a 55 year old woman, but having a firearm does.
Indeed, something a lot of people don't realize is that by having a mass produceable and standardized weapon, you get something invaluable, a standing army. By being able to afford to train and maintain a large standing army you can do away with feudalism and consolidate power into absolutist monarchies which can subsequently now afford even bigger standing armies and no longer rely on levies. It wasn't until we could mass produce rifled weapons that guns truly became better than bows
@@johnbu9098 You realize that flintlock muskets are known to be extremly inaccurate, the bullet is almost non-lethal if you bear the right armor, needs precious time to reload and you'll need more time to know how to effectively use a musket than a bow.
Also, muskets are for right-handed people only while a bow is binary, a bow had more penetrating power than a flintlock and doesnt make an ear-piercing sound when fired (perfect when stealth is a great advantage).
@@thebobbingtonYou are astoundingly incorrect, Flintlocks are not nearly as inaccurate as you’ve been lead to believe, nor are they as weak as you believe. They outclass bows in almost every scenario other than long-range shooting.
You forgot to mention about the sound that early gun make after being shot. Modern guns are loud, but at least not a lot of people turned deaf after firing hundreds of thousands of bullet. Unlike early guns, that ruptured the eardrum of every people that firing it right after the first shot.
This is also why you still see pirates and Civil War era U.S. American soldiers with swords, but by the turn of the 20th century they were fully ceremonial.
They were still largely ceremonial. The American Civil War was between napoleonic and modern warfare. There are very few applications where a bayonet wouldn't be a more practical choice.
Swords were ceremonial by the 1870's with the advent of metallic cartridges. That's when we had repeating rifles and revolvers that were quick to reload.
You missed out on the king of ancient warfare. The sling. It could out-range and over-power bows, was arguably even easier to use, and was only phased out when crossbows were becoming popular. Only after the arquebus was adopted did the sling finally become obsolete.
ive noticed a trend with weapons, the more complicated the weapon design is, the easier and faster it is for an untrained person to pick up and be deadly. in the inverse, the simpler a weapon design is, the harder it is to use effectively and takes much longer to learn to use.
Ok, I can’t believe no one has mentioned this yet. Guns are also better for another reason, hand to hand combat. Guns are better than bows for when the enemy gets close. They carry more weight than a bow, they’re generally tougher than a bow, they’re generally more solid than a bow, ect.
Most bows and crossbows didn't have enough kinetic energy to penetrate heavy cavalry armor despite of the greater range and accuracy compared to early firearms. That is why the guns replaced them.
This is exactly why bows and crossbows coexisted for so long. Bows were hard to use but could shoot much more rapidly whereas crossbows were slow but were easy to learn (plus they eventually packed a bigger punch as they got stronger and stronger over time)
At least for europe, other than britain which still relied on bows for longer than mainland europe, it was not really a contest between gun vs bow but gun vs crossbow and here its much easier to see why guns took over so fast once the early arquebus was a thing.
Another big advantage is fatigue. Bows use human strength and energy to propel their arrows. This can exhaust the energy of an archer quickly. A gun uses the chemical energy in the gunpowder to propel the bullet. You can keep firing your gun until you run out of powder or shot. When that happens, you can still maneuver across the battlefield since you aren't fatigued.
Bows were better than VERY early guns but, by the the 1600s, maybe earlier, guns started to become better in almost every way. Their killing potential is much greater than a bow, for example.
It was also easier to outfit gunmen than archers. Arrows cost a lot of money and arrows were usually destroyed after use. Compared to some cheap scrap metal (hopefully lead) being melted into a ball. Until saltpetre became cheaper, the only thing that was holding guns back was the powder
Muskets where able to penetrate armour. It took 1 month to train from peasant to musketeers in compare with years of training archer. But key reason was enlarged army. You can't find 100k archers in Britain but you can train 400k musketeers in one year.
The thing I would say is often times with the whole bow vs gun is the bow tests are conducted in ideal weather and in cases of military application i.e. massed fire bows would rarely be aimed in any case. In terms effectiveness whilst battles such as Agincourt and Crecy are often used the day was won by English men at arms rather than the bowmen as arrows rarely pierced armour it was the French knights getting bogged down in the muddy conditions that lost them the day
The bow an important part of the armies of Asia for hundreds of years after gunpowder weapons were invented. Outside of Europe and Japan the mounted knight wasn't important enough to the battlefield to require guns in large quantites
This is also partially why chariots fell out of use. Of course humans finally had horses that could be armored, but also because it takes lots of money, time, and effort to create and maintain chariots and charioteers. Those are irreplaceably trained men
I had this exact same question asked of me 2 weeks ago as I own, and have basic skills in archery, and in black powder firearms (Dutch matchlock, 2x flintlocks, and one percussion cap 3 band 1843 enfield.) I told him if I had a lifetime of training I would choose the bow of a gun however learnt much faster as you said in the 3 type of black powder guns in a matter of a week on each!!!
It depends on which guns and which bows. The first question that comes is: Why not crossbows? The second is: Which guns? There are firsthand accounts from English veterans such as Humphrey Barwick explaining why the gun is superior to the longbow, despite the fact that the longbow at the time of writing was still mandatory to train with (mostly for moral reasons). Not to mention the Japanese, whose samurai houses were the houses of Bow and Arrow, not Sword, very quickly took up guns because of their superior penetration power.
I’m slightly skeptical of this analysis. While the part about training is true, there are several factors that are not being mentioned: 1. Logistics- an arquebusier can carry more powder and shot for the weight than a bowman can carry arrows, which are far longer and bulkier than any bullet. 2. Cost- bows are actually quite difficult and time consuming to make, requiring a highly trained bow maker to ensure the long process is done correctly. A matchlock arquebus (let alone a medieval handgun) is easy to make by relatively low trained metalworkers. The most difficult bit would be the trigger mechanism, which was similar to the already common crossbow. 3. Stopping power- Guns are more powerful than any bow. Period. The difference is quite stark; firearms are orders of magnitude more powerful than any bow. Most armor of any type at close ranges was useless against firearms; bows, not so much.
Its insane how skilled you had to be to be a bowman back then you had to be strong with good aiming skills and you need to be able to keep pulling that 100lb pull back weight for the length of an entire war
One thing that everyone always forgets to mention whenever this topic comes up is the psychological impact that guns have, especially in a time when you're average combatant would have never heard a gunshot before, until they are finally being shot at by one.
I kind of wish that in the beginning of firearms they created a pole arm cannon hybrid. Basically the same thing as a musket or rifle with a bayonet. But an actual heavy spear, javelin, lance, or pole arm weapon that fires projectiles. It would be even cooler if it utilized the pump air guns of the 1700s that were semi automatic. That way you get a bunch of shots before during and after melee combat.
Some of the other reasons guns won out: The production of bows could be much longer and more costly. Needing the right kind of wood to begin with, the drying and seasoning process could take at least a month, the hours spent shaping them. Then the cordage needed to string the bow. And then there're the arrows. Again needing the right wood. Which not only had to be of a certain type, but within that the grain structure had to be right within each arrow shaft, the weight was needed or at least desired to be consistent. And then there's the arrow head, the fetching, and kind of paints or coatings. And when considering the difference types of arrowheads, whether they wanted a needle point, plate cutter, or something capable of carrying a payload... The production of bows, arrows, and archers was so much longer and more expensive that it made more sense to cast stuff with iron and lead.
A nobleman of wealth becomes a knight, bringing with him assistants, several horses, and a variety of swords and armor everywhere he goes. He must maintain his wealth to protect his noble standing. Then 5 randoms from the countryside decide to become archers. They are hired on for a nominal wage and easily slaughter Sir Clanksalot. They go back to practicing their archery. Then the rival King decides he's going to take 100 peasant farmers with no skills, train them up in 4 weeks, and send them to battle with a musket and a few tins of hard-tack as payment. 20 of them die in the process of killing the archers, but that is a sacrifice the King is willing to make. The rest go back to growing potatoes until the next conscription. This continues on for some time. Eventually, The President enters his secret code to launch the ICBMs. All of Europe is erased from existence 22 minutes later. The Aliens see this development and decide to take the Intergalactic Armada somewhere else.
Even when archery was still widely practiced the question of whether bows or matchlock muskets were more accurate in a direct comparison seems to have been debatable at best. Writing about his early years as in the English army in the mid 1500s, Humfrey Barwick claimed that his commander held trials of arms 2-3 times a week involving longbows, crossbows, and firearms which wound up leaving little doubt that firearms were the most accurate of the three. He also concluded that after just a few months of training with his arquebus he could hit any target near or far as well as "the best archers in England." When the matchlock musket arrived in China and Korea, local sources wrote that on the practice field they would strike the target "five times better than the bow and arrow."
Gun ammunition was also significantly cheaper than arrows or bolts. Lead balls could be produced even in the army’s camp by basically anyone. Gunpowder could be mass produced from mills from charcoal (a common substance) sulfur (less common, but depending on location could be very common), and salt peter (again, less common, but was abundant depending on location). Arrows require a hiring a blacksmith (a skilled laborer) to make the heads from good quality iron, require the gathering of straight shafts (often from pollarded trees whose branches were in demand for other purposes as well) and gathering feathers for fletching, which were also a limited resource used for many purposes. In the end, you then have to have fletchers (another specialized craftsman) assemble the arrows or bolts.
There's also the fact that as they got better a musket could punch straight through plate. Which is also why armor started going away until we finally developed armor that could match the rifles.
and they made a lot of noise witch was very terrifying in that moment, thats why the were shoulder by shoulder, to raise the morale and avoiding the troop to disband
"If you want a great bowman, start with his grandfather."
"If you want a great rifleman, start on Tuesday."
And if you want great chicken, come to Los Pollos Hermanos. Los Pollos Hermanos, where something delicious is always cooking!
Only two comments under this thread and i love it already
"you said you want me to be free but all i want is ice cream"
Is that neptune as your pfp? I wouldnt know as the only reason i know she exists is due to dal sp collabing while i was still playing
English kings actually passed laws that demanded that their citizens owned bows and trained with them and often subsidized archery tournaments to keep people motivated to practice archery.
Huh. Now that is interesting
That makes quite a fair bit of sense actually
And back then its not like they had social media to scroll on, this probably was a fun use of their spare time too
They had mandatory trainings on Sunday, and these trainings ended up being incredibly useful in the hundred years war where the English could just go to any random village and find tons of skilled bowmen to recruit. The french couldn't do the same, and so they had to use crossbows which were significantly worse due to a number of reasons.
That's actually brilliant.
@@abhi5504 Crossbows are not inferior to bows. If anything they are supperior. they were even banned by the pope to use against other christians becouse they were op.
they are much more expensive however.
General upon losing 6 dudes: Years of academy training, wasted!
Assistant: Sir, they were gunmen.
General: ...Well, don't forget to bury them.
This general studied in Russia.
@@MrFelblood **shots fired**
@@MrFelblood
Well if it's worked for a thousand years.
@@MrFelblood No. Every country in the world has that mindset. Even today. Has been that way for centuries.
@@jaypeedesuyo662uh huh…
It could actually take as much as a decade to replace your best archers. It's why they were often better armored than they generally needed to be.
I’m stealing this for future conversations in which I have nothing else to say.
@@jackmrsich3178 smart move
Lol huh??? Archers were not that heavily armored, and there was always a threat of getting flanked... Why do people just make shit up?? Lol
@@dijonjohn1011 what makes you think that the comment was made up? Serious question btw
@@Somespideronline
Because they are acting like Archers were over armored, which just isn't the case.
Archers wore a amount of armor that made sense. They were under the threat of being flanked or having enemy archers volley on them... They also might be required to engage in melee combat, if their frontlines failed.
So the amount of armor archers wore, made total sense. It wasn't about overly protecting their skilled archers.
Using a warbow isn't just about skill. Strength training is also a significant concern and it has to be the right muscles. Archeologists can identify the skeleton of an English longbowman by how their skeleton deformed. We are talking draw weights over 100lbs. Not only do they need to be able to pull that string back, but they need to be able to aim as well and repeat the action multiple times in a battle. A proper archer would practically need to learn from childhood to develop the right muscles.
Does 100lbs mean they force needed to pull the string back equates to a 100lbs or the force of the impact is a 100lbs?
@@senseishu937 the pulling of the bowstring back takes 100 lbs of force.
Yes and no, it takes muscle but you can train anyone who is bellow 30 if you put enough effort into it but training is vital
Yep a common joke for the time goes like how do you train an archer you train his father.
@@senseishu937 yes the amount of force needed to pull the strong back. Also known as draw weight.
Once again I'm reminded of Oda Nobunaga from Drifters and his obsession with introducing guns to the fantasy world he was dropped into.
Well i dont kwow Drifters , but i Heard about oda Nobunaga.
He was an Important Warlord in Japan and guess What , he introduced fireweapons (in great scale) to japanese battlefields.
@@geheimeWeltregierung well yes and no. Nobunaga was actually the guy who managed to use guns effectively in field battles(the Japanese were already using quite effectively in sieges , but their use in field battles were an enigma until he came along)
@@james-97209exactly, i agree thats basically what i wanted to say :)
Well, he was usually willing by throwing larger armies of muskets, torches and pointy sticks at elite forces of warrior monks, so his career was a microcosm of this principle.
That and the principles that you can't parry a forrest fire or a collapsing building with a katana, and that losing honorably is still losing. Scary man, that guy.
@@MrFelblood well no one was fighting honorable at the time either. This whole idea about samurai loyalty and honor was a myth created centuries after the warring states period of Japanese history. What set Nobunaga apart from his fellow warlords was a) he had a plan for unifying the fractured country and b) when he committed atrocities he made no excuses to the point he had a "what you see is what you get and then some" type of mentality about them . Basically many historians seem to believe that many of his atrocities were exaggerated/embellished by his enemies and nobunaga didn't bother to correct them because those stories made him appear more terrifying
World War 2, a British army officer named Jack Churchill, although most people called him “Mad Jack”. In May 1940 Jack and his unit ambushed a German patrol in France close to L'Épinette. Jack gave the signal to his unit to attack by shooting the enemy staff sergeant with a barbed arrow using a long bow, making him the only British soldier to ever down an enemy using a long bow in World War 2.
Fucking madlad
He's also the one carrying a longsword into battle, right?
@@Diyel yep, also became a commando and escaped a few prison camps
That is cap, he literally said his bow was crushed
K
Bro it’s 2022. Stop repeating trivia everyone and their Boomer parents know already
"Point and shoot" weapons really changed logistics more than tactics. Any school kid can point an imaginary crossbow in the general direction of a target.
Except guns and crossbows were prestige weapons handled by professionals. People weren't arming peasants with expensive weaponry and shooting guilds were prestigious institutions handling crossbows. Indeed 16th century writers write that guns were the weapons of the professionals while bows were weapons best suited when there weren't enough guns to be around. By the tail end of the 16th century men showing up with longbows to muster were classified as unarmed men.
@@moisesflores5405... what?
you know, if for "professionals" you mean menthat could coordinate their volley of fire to shoot in a consecutive fire line non stop while the ones who shooted were reloading counts as "professional" I get it, but I doubt a bow that needed a lot more of training was considered under a early gun wich was literally a cannon on a stick
and about crossbows in late medieval Japan... I have no idea
@@moisesflores5405 youre wrong lol
imagine being a member the warrior elite aristocracy of your kingdom. you've trained for 20 years to a master of warfare and combat. then in your last battle you get yeeted out of existence by a 16 year old stable boy who was just taught how to make the firestick go pew.
"Damn, three days from retirement."
the Battle of Shiroyama is exactly that, its the absolute elite of the elite from the old days VS 1 infantry unite, and they got shredded
When a group of African child soldiers beat the shit out of medieval knights. 🤣🤣🤣
No kidding. That happens even as we speak. I've heard accounts of USAs tier 1 guys getting hit by potshots taken from a kid with a smooth bore AK. Guns are really something
This is basically what happened at the battle of Cerignola. Elite French cavalry and Swiss mercenary pikemen (the best money could hire of the day) were defeated by a force of Spaniards armed with firearms and pikes. Pike and shot tactics (formations that allowed firearm welding troops to engage enemy infantry and cav while being covered by friendly pike infantry) then took over Europe. At that battle the French lost about 4,000 men and the Spaniards only lost around 500.
"I have a bow!-"
*"DODGE LEAD THY FILTHY CASUAL-"*
i have a time machine and a nuke wait my time machine is the nuke better not overheat the reactor
I read that in the "I can see the futuuuurrre! We're all going to die!" Voice
Thee*
*BANG*
“Oh the horror i did miss-“
“Thee very much sucketh at aiming yond thing thee knoweth yond?” *pulls back bow*
@@bluscout1857Morden guns can shoot multiple times before archers can reload, don't challenge Guns, ye filthy peasant.
The Battle of Shiroyama was a great example of this. Although, when WW1 rolled around, it was found that well-trained units still had their advantages over conscripts.
The point isn't that crossbow and gun equipped soldiers weren't trained, but that to get an equivalent effectiveness crossbows and guns required several orders of magnitude of training less than bows.
Well to be fair the Samurais in shiroyama were outnumbered 60 to 1
@@tadferd4340 Crossbows didn't need any more training than a gun, probably less in fact.
@@fen3311 I didn't say they did.
I said both crossbows and guns require less training than bows.
@@tadferd4340 You right I musta done a hella misread
I now want a game where you play as a historically accurate but highly skilled soldier who can wield a sword, a bow, and a gun
Try Kingdom Come Deliverance. It should be what you are looking for.
Try Mount & Blade then lol.
So basically we play as "Mad Jack" in video game? 😳😳😳
Those are called mercenaries. Most mercenaries cross trained the most popular weapons of the time based on what they could afford. Sword as a sidearm, bow for the higher paying spots if the army could afford to pay the higher wages, crossbow if they army couldn't afford it, and gun if the mercenary could afford to own one.
Get Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword.
It has the very thing you're looking for... You can be a Swedish Musketeer, a Cossack Serdjyuk, Russian Streltsy, Polish Hayduk, or an Ottoman Janissary under Crimea...
Heck you could just lead a troop of those guys and be a Mercenary Captain
Another advantage of crossbows and guns over bows is that you can keep them ready to fire for an indefinite length of time. So you can aim and wait, then when someone steps into range, there is no delay to firing
That is actually the reason why crossbows and guns can do formation fire wel and bows usually don’t
Keeping an arrow nocked but not drawn just doesn't have the quick fire potential of a finger on a trigger, but that's more of an urban warfare concept than field battles and sieges.
Tactical moments might save the life of a single soldier, but to save a country you need to think about logistical and strategic scale stuff like, "we can train twice as many ranged units and have them ready before they enemy reinforcements arrive."
Which is why crossbows and guns were better during sieges.
Because you could wait and only expose a small portion of your body to the enemy.
A bowman needs to stand up and stand almost completely out of cover to get a shot off
Now I'd like the explanation of the historic significance of "the kitty at the end" I'm sure this guy could find it.
I’ve used a bow with a 50lbs draw weight and it’s no joke to pull that to the rear and keep it steady. Medieval longbows would often have weights well over 100lbs. It would take years to train large numbers of people to use a bow like that consistently and accurately.
Yes, but an AK is better than a bow
@@lollogamer05 Not if you’re out of bullets. In all other aspects, yes.
@@MoistNuggeteer haha
@@MoistNuggeteer but it is more possible that you finish the arrow instead of the bullet ☺️
@@lollogamer05 I actually own both, and I must say if I could only choose one it would be the AK.
There was also the fact that as time went on guns just became better than bows. People often besmirch the musket’s accuracy, but in a decent few cases, bows were even worse-for example, an arrow’s accuracy could be heavily affected by the wind, a gun’s could not. And the rate at which guns improved outpaced protection, so guns could more easily penetrate armour compared to bows.
Battle of Cerignola is a great example of this. Most french officers got killed by spanish handcannoneers, which surprised not just the french but even the spanish, so much they reacted by mounting the first of what would become the spanish tradition of mourning for enemy deaths. Because indeed guns, even those early ones, had way more precission and armor penetration than bows and even crossbows.
A trained longbowman had at best the same accuracy as a shotgunner (that's what they called a shotgun then, not what we call so now), and about the same penetration too. The non-wall-mounted arquebus had more pen but less accuracy. Early muskets (the long kind with the sticks) had both more pen and accuracy, locks made them more accurate, rifling even more so.
A Musketeer from the 18th century was objectively better than a longbowman in every sense but frequency of shots, and that's only short term, because longbowmen got tired much faster too.
Muskets were superior in basically every way. This argument only really applies to *really* early guns.
And btw armour that could protect from muskets existed and was actually quite common. It was standard equipment for cuirassier. It just couldn't take musket shots at close range.
Qi Jiguang & Humphrey Barwick both wrote that matchlock firearms were more accurate than warbows, while Sir John Smythe indicated otherwise. Based on modern tests, I suspect matchlocks were significantly more accurate than warbows in skilled hands & in prime condition. If loaded poorly or too hastily, or with heating & fouling, maybe not. In any case, matchlocks offered much higher velocity & power than warbows as well as greater ability to shoot from cover.
I’ve been listening to his podcast, but what I really want to know is… how annoyed is his coworkers? My mom gets annoyed when I talk about history… imagine THIS GUY with the history of the universe 😂
Tell your mom to cope and seethe 😎
@@Swedishmafia101MemeCorporation I will 😂
People who get annoyed at history anecdotes are usually pretty dull themselves. Sorry.
@@TripleBarrel06 Agreed. People who don't want too learn history are the same ones who will repeat it if they get too live long enough.
@@jillvalentinefan77 That’s what IM sayin
and the intimidation also really helps. it doesn't help morale when you hear all of the gun shots, the smoke and just holes appear in people
sure, but a hail of arrows is terrifying as well
Not only that a single volley you can see like alot of your comrades the same line as you just fall down dead at the same time
@@sigismundafvolsung5526True enough that a volley of arrows is scary too, but the key difference being you can at least *SEE* the hail of arrows coming at you :P
With arrows you can at least see whose firing them and the poor bastards they are falling upon. You also at least have a sense of security from arrows with a shield.
Guns take away all of that. You cant really see the projectiles, you dont know where its going to hit. All you see is a puff of smoke and next thing you know your friend next to you has a hole through his shield and his chest
Arrows arent made to kill, sometimes arrows will injure most of the time than how it is seen in hollywood.
@@sigismundafvolsung5526a bow twang doesn’t make someone involuntarily twitch the way a gun’s report does.
Just thought you should know that watching your channel is my favourite thing to do on my lunch breaks at work
Thank you my friend
Your lunch breaks surely must be pretty short, i must say
@@quakeknight9680 I binge his videos for half an hour😁👍
@@kadenkc3923 Oh well, that seems reasonable
The arquebus consistently outperformed the bow in battle - it wasn't just more practical, it was a superior weapon.
Unless.... your fighting a mongol. Guns were little use fighting a mobile hit and run tactics of a cavalry based army.....
@@aetius7139mongols would have been crushed with guns. But they didnt fight europeans in 16th century now did they
@@aetius7139hence the bayonet was invented...
This is true when you're talking about *very* early firearms- say, the middle of the 15th century. Unfortunately, too many people take this argument to its ridiculous extreme and claim bows were better than flintlock muskets. Horsemen continued to use bows long after the infantry traded them in for guns, since mounted men have trouble reloading muzzleloaders. I mean, consider the Japanese who were great archers and had excellent bows. And Japanese infantry gave up their bows for *matchlock* muskets as soon as they had the chance.
Yet the Manchus didn't give up their (probably better) bows & continued using them with success at least into the 19th century (& longer with less success). It's true was mostly for cavalry, but some Qing infantry also used bows & some even used both firearms & bows based on artwork.
Native Americans, too.
Uhmmm not all Japanese armies replaced their bows. They still kept units with bows and matchlocks hence while the gunners are reloading the archers can still rain down hell
@@b.h.abbott-motley2427 and lost to a small British army in two wars 😅
I feel the training aspect only really applies to the Gun/longbow comparison. Crossbows were just as easy to get the hang of as a gun.
A point I had heard on TH-cam (will update if I remember who from) was that musketballs had much higher lethality than arrows. Arrows would rarely cause instant or near-instant death/incapacitation in a way bullets could
I also would have thought the prevelance or armour on medieval battlefields would have made the gun more viable
A zhuge crossbow is, as far as the soldier using it is concerned, just a wooden SMG powered by levers instead of gunpowder and springs.
Metal ammo, standardized replacement parts, machined barrels and chemical energy add more accuracy, reliability and power, but the real **revolution** in battlefield technology was point and shoot weapons.
1. Point business end at enemy.
2. Operate lever.
3. Go to 1
Same thing with crossbows and why the French used them so much back in the day. Just like you said regarding early firearms, it was much easier and far faster, and more cost effective to train someone to be proficient with a crossbow then it did to train someone up to use a bow
One of the reasons Sparta fell is essentially the same. Because Spartan training was so lengthy, if they took mass casualties, they couldn't easily replenish their ranks. There are other reasons, but this was a major factor.
Spartans weren’t significantly more effective at warfare then their enemies and didn’t participate in a a lot of battles directly, it was more to do with the fact that very small amount of people were granted Spartan citizenship.
@@pianoman-1359 That was also a significant factor. There's also the fact that they didn't really change their tactics. The small population of fighting men combined with the lengthy training time, were the two main factors in their decline & fall.
+pianomaN I’ve heard they were highly effective because frequent, military drilling wasn’t common among other Greek city-states. Once that DID become more common, though, the Spartans lost most of their edge. Then their xenophobia and small population combined with contual losses in frequent wars lead to their decline.
It was more the fact they had too many slaves. Their entire economy relied on slavery and if they were forced to fight a war for too long they risked the slaves revolting due to the army being away.
@@samiamrg7ecause most other Greek cities relied on militia for infantry. The hoplite formation ostensibly came out of defensive needs of the polis and light infantry was probably recruited from poorer populations or mercenaries. The only ones who could actually afford to train or gain firsthand war experience were oligarchic elite, but the hoplite formation was only as offensively effective as the discipline of its full force so they would lose cohesion during movement.
What set Sparta apart was their hoplite phalanx marched as one, never drifting as others did and it's implied wouldn't retreat unless ordered. It's important to note that their school system wasn't initially a unique institution in Greece, but at some point they converted the education of the leisure class into a training regimen that conditioned and desensitized male youth of the citizen class to follow orders and kill at a moment's notice without question. It's also important to note that the period of Spartan hegemony was relatively short and the list available of Spartiates (hoplites) got smaller every year. There are a lot of theories why but there was clearly enough of a manpower shortage that they relied on non-citizens and even freed Helots to fill gaps in the phalanx, though not enough that they opened the agoge to them so their formation discipline was never what it once was. Given who beat them, and who beat THEM, and who beat the successors of that guy, there's probably a lesson in there about needing to scale resources and training while applying innovation to maintain military advantage, which those guys actually managed for a few good centuries.
It should be mentioned that while guns were more expensive than bows bullets were a hell of a lot cheaper than arrows
I find it hilarious that there are some people who genuinely think that bows were better for armies than the muskets of the Napoleonic era.
If that was the case, nobody would have used guns. We can see this, for instance, with the air rifle. It was superior in every statistic to the musket, but it wasn't used because the overhead was so high that it made no logistical sense. Not that nobody ever used them. They were popular with private hunters, for instance. But they weren't used on the battlefield.
Are you familiar with tests of Girandoni air rifles? They most certainly were not superior in every statistic to the flintlock musket. The kinetic energy & velocity were quite low, even if originals performed better than replicas. If air rifles had become more common, soldiers could easily have adopted lightweight armor to protect against them. Air rifles were used on the battlefield, but not for very long & in limited numbers.
@@b.h.abbott-motley2427 That would have made such an interesting meta! It'd necessitate the use of both light and heavy armor for protecting from air guns vs. powder guns.
Don't forget logistics.
To create an arrow you need a fletcher, carpenter and blacksmith.
For a lead ball you need lead and a form. Anyone can do it.
Gunpowder is more difficult to make but it's easy to transport (Obviously, it's risky by it's nature but not logistically difficult, only safely.)
Also don't forget the creation of the gun barrel and overall design of the firearm. Needs expert craftsmen.
@@koreancowboy42 I was only talking about ammunition there, not crafting of the weapons, the weapons crafting were usually done out of the war where it wasn't time consuming. They didn't fight Total Wars of industrial scale then.
HOWEVER. A bowyer does require more time than a gun barrel, and their resoruces are more expensive. Iron vs high quality yew.
As for design, I mean sure it's more advanced technologically, but once it's been desigend you're done there. Don't need to keep designing every gun.
@@TheIfifi That's true, but before standardization and replaceable parts, gunsmiths had to customize every gun. Replaceability really changed the game in terms of cheap, easy manufacturing and maintenance of firearms.
As my friend once said, "the longbow didn't fail us. We failed the longbow."
No we human always seek better tools
Gun > Longbow
Your friend should look into the historical availability of wood staves suitable for making longbows. You have to kill a ~20 year old yew tree to make 2-3 bowstaves, and bowstaves wear out. England would have had to transition away from bows even if guns didn't get better, because all that (necessary) archery practice killed most of the suitable trees in Europe.
@@swissarmyknight4306 You are probably wrong, opening new farmlands, wood houses, ships (most important compenent) and another wooden tools depleted forests in Europa not Longbows. Korean and Eurasian nomads made more bows than European counterparts (English, Vikings, Franks etc.) but their forest ratio is very high. Making ships deplete forest mostly.
I’ve read somewhere that additional reason as to why the first lockless guns stuck around was that the huge amount of smoke and the noise created during discharge had a tremendous psychological effect on the enemy.
Logistics wins war. Napoleon has spoken the truth.
Crossbow was actually a lot easier to learn than a conventional bow, because it was essentially an arrow gun.
I imagine it was the same effect with the first cross bows we're made too.
Muskets are superior to bows and the idea that it’s simply a matter of bows being difficult to use is preposterous. With that logic, elite units that go through really long training like Royal Guards would use bows, but they chose guns… Because they were superior.
This tbh
Muskets weren't the first gun though.
We're talkung about Handgonnes not muskets.
Penetration Power. They put an end to the knight-in-shiny-armour era.
Crossbow is the only bow that can compete with guns after the invention of matchlock, while longbow almost imediately died out, mostly because crossbow were far more easy to train with than longbow.
Skill wins battles, logistics wins wars.
There’s also the fact that the amount of arrows or bolts a soldier can carry was not even close to how much ammunition a soldier using a gun would be able to carry
like, you can carry around 240 bullets and still have space for other equipments, but with bow, you can only bring some arrows.
Also the fact making bullets is easier than it is to make arrows.
Arrows you need feathers from chickens, the wood need to be good and of quality, the arrow head iron work needs to be good.
English longbowmen were such fucking beasts, it's unreal.
They are vastly overhyped by anglo-centric popculture
Fun fact swearing comes from bows when you stick up two fingers, it comes from British archers. Longbow were so skilled they could have 3 to 5 arrows in flight at one time, the French said they have catch a charger to cut off its fingers, so the two fingers stick up is to say I still have my fingers to the French
Now I am curious how long it took for gunpowder to be produced in large enough quantities for guns to be viable for the battlefield
Don't know about the early period, but by the mid-1700s the French were producing about 700 tons of it a year.
Imagine going back in time and training a knight to wield and M240B and be accurate with it.
There's also the intimidation factor. Getting shot at is much scarier than getting bowed at
People don't realize that the most expensive part of an army is the training.
Agreed although emergency trained archers can still be somewhat effective. A 50lb bow with broadheads is stil useful (against no armor) shot from beginners en masse
that chinese han dynasty crossbow, with the right poundage & bolt it should be able to reach 400-500 m & that would outrange the effective range of a musktet (200 m) twice + without armor the bolts would still be lethal at that range / since that particular crossbow was spanned by hand, back and feet, it would also have a higher rate of shot
That was the big reason why guns replaced bows.
As soon as archers were up against armored infantry or cavalry.
Even well trained archers and crossbowmen could do very little against them.
Meanwhile even some half decent arquebuiser firing in volley would tear through armor and shields
@@lordulberthellblaze6509 That's not really true, Because the archers & especially the crossbowmen could still wound & incapacitate them / the only parts of the armor that could be considered arrow proof (not bolt proof, because crossbows need more testing) would be the chest armor and the helmet in case of lamellar and plate But Limbs protection due to thinner armor was still vulnerable to arrows, It would be especially a problem if the Arrows were to be poisoned which was rare but did happen historically
On top of that, there is the wounding and killing of Horses, since horse protection was rare and still provided limited protection
@@lordulberthellblaze6509 the big reason why they replaced them was less training in case of comparison to the Bow and in case of comparison to the crossbow, cheaper ammunition, the terrifying effect of firearm sounds & ofcourse more power, but that wasn't the main reason
@@aburoach9268 Limbs were also harder to hit especially if the person had shields. Also getting hit in the limbs with an arrow or crossbow wasn't guaranteed to kill or incapacitate a person like a bullet could.
Both arrows and bullets had been coated in poison. And unlike poison arrows, the lethality of poisoned bullets led to the Strasbourg agreement of 1675 that banned their use.
In the aftermath of the battle of crecy many more knights and nobles were captured than killed.
Meanwhile arquebuises were pretty much guaranteed to punch through breast plates and helmets at optimal range.
This was important since archers became increasingly ineffective as armor became increasingly more effective and common on the battlefield.
By the 16th century and the important Battle of Cerignola (1503) most combatants were wearing armor and the French Cavalry and Swiss pikemen found themselves repeating the battle of Crecy and Agincourt only this time at the hands of 1000 Spanish Arquebuisiers at not the 5000 to 6000 English Longbowen at Crecy or Agincourt.
The point was you didn't need as many arquebuisers compared to archers to do as much damage to an enemy army.
Why did crossbows not take off like early guns did? Like guns, they didn't require as much skill to use and were effect against armor.
Crossbows were time consuming to make. Not every smith knew how to make them correctly. Also, despite how they're often portrayed, they had about the same ability to punch through plate armor that longbows did, which wasn't much. If a bolt or arrow struck hit a weak point like a joint them it could do damage to the target, or if it hit the very edge of the plate it could deform the metal without losing too much force, meaning there would be more left over for penetrating a significant amount, but plate was very difficult for arrows or bolts to defeat.
At close range, a bullet was sure to punch through. It was guaranteed to do serious damage if it hit. Being easy to use and able to reliably kill a fully armored knight made the difference.
Although, on the point of crossbows being used, usually armies would have as many crossbows as they could get, but again; complicated to make correctly.
Well depending on the place, they did. The earliest known crossbows are from bronze age China, and theoretically simple wooden crossbows may be much much older. As for why it only spread so far: money. It is more expensive, time consuming and resource intense to build a large strong crossbow that noticeably outperforms a simpler cheaper bow. Add to that the strength and training needed to use a proper siege crossbow that rivals a longbow, well a bunch of the benefits are gone.
Now if you were ancient China you absolutely could spend the money to throw crossbows at a few thousand soldiers that dont have an archery background to get your ranged troops, but for most ancient and early medieval states it was cheaper, simpler and faster to just use pre existing sling, javelin and bow traditions and infrastructure
They did take off. Longbows were the thing in England, most everyone else in Western Europe used crossbows for military purposes. Crossbows were very popular. Its just that they were surpassed by firearms in the late medieval period.
@@Rynewulf Qin Dynasty era is famed for their crossbows
@@koreancowboy42 yep and the earliest found are Shang centuries earlier than the Qin in the bronze age. The lack of clarity is if/when crossbows overtook bows/became common mass weapons
people keep saying this crap, but the accuracy of early handguns competed with the accuracy of bows until say 100-200 meters. It may take longer to reload but that doesn't mean an archer can just pelt fools with arrows all day long. The penetrating power was devastating, whereas only the most powerful archers with the heaviest bows stood a chance of penetrating the armor contemporary with early guns.
Another thing people forget is that the same thing happened to swords and knights with the pike. With guns still being shit at the time of the early modern age, formations of pikemen replaced knights and most forms of infantry due to their easiness to train with
A while ago, inspired by your plate armor video. I have done some research into the usefulness of maces or Warhammers against plate armor. Some say such weapons will demolish plate while some say it’s as effective as swords.
What’s your thought on this?
i'd like to know the answer too, i guess it would be somewhere in between, i believe that the best area to hit would be the helmet. though the mace and warhammer are a horseman's sidearm, so i guess that makes sense
*Archer dies*
YEARS OF ACADEMY TRAINING WASTED
It's a kinda nuts thing to think about - the invention of the gun literally brought down the individual value of your own soldiers life, meaning you could simply throw away more human lives in order to win.
It would also be worth mentioning that any arquebus sufficiently well made will have more power and a quicker and easier reload than a heavy windlass crossbow. European crossbows are notoriously inefficient, with massive draw weights combined with a really short power stroke, which in the case of the more powerful crossbows that might have *some* chance against armour, would have to be reloaded with a windlass. Even then their armour penetrating capabilities aren't anywhere near a properly made arquebus. Now they did manage to make armour that could stop anything up to a musket, but that'd be ridiculously expensive, meanwhile a relatively cheap mild steel cuirass will be more than enough to stop a crossbow bolt fired from almost any crossbow, or at the very least it will take a lot of energy out of the bolt before it gets to your body.
Expensive and un-maneuvreable, I'm guessing. Can't run away from artillery, can't flank easily, the opposing side can just run up to you and stab you with their bayonets. And meanwhile you can just build up a fortification or trenches that acts as shields more effectively than armor...
Todd's Workshop just did Arrows vs. Armor 2. One part of that series pointed out that we don't know what a war bow really is, i.e. what draw strength a bow had to have in a military setting. You have to keep in mind, that in a medieval army, an archer brought his own bow, because each bow is different and you can't simply pick a new bow and expect to shoot well with it.
It would be more correct to say that the term "war bow" is undefined. There is a multi dimensional continuum of possible meanings, and little contextual signposted as to which values are likely to correlate to a specific time or place in history.
War bows for most European armies is at 70-75 pounds. For the English archers it's at 100+ pounds on a bow.
And yes we do know the standard of draw weight for bows and military standardization.
English archers were among the best archers and trained all their life from child hood to adulthood.
Which means they have higher standard for archers.
Compared to most of European archers.
And yes archers can bring their own warbows however, the archers would need the right type of arrow to be used so as to not break on impact of the arrow being released from the bow.
I understand bows being difficult to train for but why are crossbows so difficult to train for?
Shooting in a arch vs shooting straight. Plus, crossbows are heavy and expensive.
@@natotomato4625 that trajectory isn't much of a training issue, bows take long with training because they're much harder to aim when preparing to fire.
Crossbows aren't really harder to train with, they just have many of the same problems as early guns. Difficult to manufacture, slow to reload, etc.
In training requirements early guns and crossbows weren't that different. There's a video on this same channel about crossbows being banned because after their invention a single soldier with a day of training could kill an armoured knight with years of experience and nobles (typically well armoured) didn't like that.
Bowmen at least took a long time to train and if they fought on the wrong side could be dealt with by removing two fingers. That wasn't the case with crossbows and the cost of metal limbed crossbows was the only thing that kept them out of the hands of peasants.
They are not difficult to train
Most types of crossbows used across history required strength just like warbows. It was mainly in 15th-century Europe that this changed, with the windlass & cranequin, & even then the goat's-foot lever remained popular.
People who say early guns were worse than bows don’t understand bows.
Bows were a weapon that almost always wounded. Early guns almost always killed.
Which is one of many reasons why everyone should have one. Having a sword or bow for defense doesnt mean shit when youre a 55 year old woman, but having a firearm does.
And they go BOOM smoke and fire and lead.
Any peasant can be trained within days or weeks!
Americans: 😮
Why would Americans be surprised by that? Have you heard of the US Army? They train "peasants" to shoot on a continuous basis.
@@swissarmyknight4306 That was my point, he just called Americans peasants! :D
Yet the people in charge fear an armed peasantry, funny no?
Indeed, something a lot of people don't realize is that by having a mass produceable and standardized weapon, you get something invaluable, a standing army. By being able to afford to train and maintain a large standing army you can do away with feudalism and consolidate power into absolutist monarchies which can subsequently now afford even bigger standing armies and no longer rely on levies. It wasn't until we could mass produce rifled weapons that guns truly became better than bows
God made Man, Sam Colt made 'em equal, and John Browning made 'em civilized
Bows are easy to make, require little to no moving parts, easy to use and can prove to be deadlier than a gun (at that time) if you got used to it.
Takes years to train a good bowman then just one lead to the chest he’s dead. Just take a flintlock, point and shoot, easy.
@@johnbu9098 You realize that flintlock muskets are known to be extremly inaccurate, the bullet is almost non-lethal if you bear the right armor, needs precious time to reload and you'll need more time to know how to effectively use a musket than a bow.
Also, muskets are for right-handed people only while a bow is binary, a bow had more penetrating power than a flintlock and doesnt make an ear-piercing sound when fired (perfect when stealth is a great advantage).
@@thebobbington If muskets were so bad then why did they use them.
@@thebobbingtonYou are astoundingly incorrect, Flintlocks are not nearly as inaccurate as you’ve been lead to believe, nor are they as weak as you believe. They outclass bows in almost every scenario other than long-range shooting.
The Walking Dead fans: yes. Correct.
Crossbow are like the medieval version of an ak
Absolute, a crossbow IS such a complicated concept , even If IT has the Same fire Power of a gun...
Gun has far greater firepower than a crossbow.
"Guns are better than bows."
Comanche: Hold my Feathers
You forgot to mention about the sound that early gun make after being shot. Modern guns are loud, but at least not a lot of people turned deaf after firing hundreds of thousands of bullet. Unlike early guns, that ruptured the eardrum of every people that firing it right after the first shot.
This is also why you still see pirates and Civil War era U.S. American soldiers with swords, but by the turn of the 20th century they were fully ceremonial.
They were still largely ceremonial. The American Civil War was between napoleonic and modern warfare. There are very few applications where a bayonet wouldn't be a more practical choice.
Swords were ceremonial by the 1870's with the advent of metallic cartridges. That's when we had repeating rifles and revolvers that were quick to reload.
You missed out on the king of ancient warfare. The sling. It could out-range and over-power bows, was arguably even easier to use, and was only phased out when crossbows were becoming popular. Only after the arquebus was adopted did the sling finally become obsolete.
Same thing happened with slings, better than early bows but have the craziest skill gap
ive noticed a trend with weapons, the more complicated the weapon design is, the easier and faster it is for an untrained person to pick up and be deadly. in the inverse, the simpler a weapon design is, the harder it is to use effectively and takes much longer to learn to use.
if guns fell out of favor during medieval times i can imagine modern wars were fought with electric motor powered automatic crossbow
Ok, I can’t believe no one has mentioned this yet.
Guns are also better for another reason, hand to hand combat.
Guns are better than bows for when the enemy gets close.
They carry more weight than a bow, they’re generally tougher than a bow, they’re generally more solid than a bow, ect.
Man, that is why Guns has been a significant weapons, imagine if ancient people thinks Guns are hard to use, maybe we have now bows or something.
Funnily enough, guns becoming more widespread and armor becoming less common also leads to bows becoming deadlier again
Most bows and crossbows didn't have enough kinetic energy to penetrate heavy cavalry armor despite of the greater range and accuracy compared to early firearms. That is why the guns replaced them.
This is exactly why bows and crossbows coexisted for so long. Bows were hard to use but could shoot much more rapidly whereas crossbows were slow but were easy to learn (plus they eventually packed a bigger punch as they got stronger and stronger over time)
I completely agree they should have used crossbows instead of guns if they want to go the easy route
At least for europe, other than britain which still relied on bows for longer than mainland europe, it was not really a contest between gun vs bow but gun vs crossbow and here its much easier to see why guns took over so fast once the early arquebus was a thing.
I also heard somewhere that creating ammunition for guns was easier than bows, making them still cheaper to field. Not certain about this, though.
Another big advantage is fatigue. Bows use human strength and energy to propel their arrows. This can exhaust the energy of an archer quickly. A gun uses the chemical energy in the gunpowder to propel the bullet. You can keep firing your gun until you run out of powder or shot. When that happens, you can still maneuver across the battlefield since you aren't fatigued.
Bows were better than VERY early guns but, by the the 1600s, maybe earlier, guns started to become better in almost every way. Their killing potential is much greater than a bow, for example.
In ww2, the Red Army sometimes used bow to hunt down Germans in quite
It was also easier to outfit gunmen than archers. Arrows cost a lot of money and arrows were usually destroyed after use. Compared to some cheap scrap metal (hopefully lead) being melted into a ball. Until saltpetre became cheaper, the only thing that was holding guns back was the powder
Arrows also were insconsistent in quality as they were handmade.
"Bows are better than Guns!"
Gravity : *I dont think so.*
Muskets where able to penetrate armour. It took 1 month to train from peasant to musketeers in compare with years of training archer. But key reason was enlarged army. You can't find 100k archers in Britain but you can train 400k musketeers in one year.
The thing I would say is often times with the whole bow vs gun is the bow tests are conducted in ideal weather and in cases of military application i.e. massed fire bows would rarely be aimed in any case. In terms effectiveness whilst battles such as Agincourt and Crecy are often used the day was won by English men at arms rather than the bowmen as arrows rarely pierced armour it was the French knights getting bogged down in the muddy conditions that lost them the day
The bow an important part of the armies of Asia for hundreds of years after gunpowder weapons were invented. Outside of Europe and Japan the mounted knight wasn't important enough to the battlefield to require guns in large quantites
"as the founding fathers intended"
This is also partially why chariots fell out of use. Of course humans finally had horses that could be armored, but also because it takes lots of money, time, and effort to create and maintain chariots and charioteers. Those are irreplaceably trained men
I had this exact same question asked of me 2 weeks ago as I own, and have basic skills in archery, and in black powder firearms (Dutch matchlock, 2x flintlocks, and one percussion cap 3 band 1843 enfield.)
I told him if I had a lifetime of training I would choose the bow of a gun however learnt much faster as you said in the 3 type of black powder guns in a matter of a week on each!!!
It depends on which guns and which bows. The first question that comes is: Why not crossbows?
The second is: Which guns?
There are firsthand accounts from English veterans such as Humphrey Barwick explaining why the gun is superior to the longbow, despite the fact that the longbow at the time of writing was still mandatory to train with (mostly for moral reasons). Not to mention the Japanese, whose samurai houses were the houses of Bow and Arrow, not Sword, very quickly took up guns because of their superior penetration power.
I’m slightly skeptical of this analysis. While the part about training is true, there are several factors that are not being mentioned:
1. Logistics- an arquebusier can carry more powder and shot for the weight than a bowman can carry arrows, which are far longer and bulkier than any bullet.
2. Cost- bows are actually quite difficult and time consuming to make, requiring a highly trained bow maker to ensure the long process is done correctly. A matchlock arquebus (let alone a medieval handgun) is easy to make by relatively low trained metalworkers. The most difficult bit would be the trigger mechanism, which was similar to the already common crossbow.
3. Stopping power- Guns are more powerful than any bow. Period. The difference is quite stark; firearms are orders of magnitude more powerful than any bow. Most armor of any type at close ranges was useless against firearms; bows, not so much.
Its insane how skilled you had to be to be a bowman back then you had to be strong with good aiming skills and you need to be able to keep pulling that 100lb pull back weight for the length of an entire war
One thing that everyone always forgets to mention whenever this topic comes up is the psychological impact that guns have, especially in a time when you're average combatant would have never heard a gunshot before, until they are finally being shot at by one.
I kind of wish that in the beginning of firearms they created a pole arm cannon hybrid. Basically the same thing as a musket or rifle with a bayonet. But an actual heavy spear, javelin, lance, or pole arm weapon that fires projectiles. It would be even cooler if it utilized the pump air guns of the 1700s that were semi automatic. That way you get a bunch of shots before during and after melee combat.
Some of the other reasons guns won out: The production of bows could be much longer and more costly. Needing the right kind of wood to begin with, the drying and seasoning process could take at least a month, the hours spent shaping them. Then the cordage needed to string the bow.
And then there're the arrows. Again needing the right wood. Which not only had to be of a certain type, but within that the grain structure had to be right within each arrow shaft, the weight was needed or at least desired to be consistent. And then there's the arrow head, the fetching, and kind of paints or coatings. And when considering the difference types of arrowheads, whether they wanted a needle point, plate cutter, or something capable of carrying a payload...
The production of bows, arrows, and archers was so much longer and more expensive that it made more sense to cast stuff with iron and lead.
A nobleman of wealth becomes a knight, bringing with him assistants, several horses, and a variety of swords and armor everywhere he goes. He must maintain his wealth to protect his noble standing.
Then 5 randoms from the countryside decide to become archers. They are hired on for a nominal wage and easily slaughter Sir Clanksalot. They go back to practicing their archery.
Then the rival King decides he's going to take 100 peasant farmers with no skills, train them up in 4 weeks, and send them to battle with a musket and a few tins of hard-tack as payment. 20 of them die in the process of killing the archers, but that is a sacrifice the King is willing to make. The rest go back to growing potatoes until the next conscription.
This continues on for some time. Eventually, The President enters his secret code to launch the ICBMs. All of Europe is erased from existence 22 minutes later.
The Aliens see this development and decide to take the Intergalactic Armada somewhere else.
Even when archery was still widely practiced the question of whether bows or matchlock muskets were more accurate in a direct comparison seems to have been debatable at best. Writing about his early years as in the English army in the mid 1500s, Humfrey Barwick claimed that his commander held trials of arms 2-3 times a week involving longbows, crossbows, and firearms which wound up leaving little doubt that firearms were the most accurate of the three. He also concluded that after just a few months of training with his arquebus he could hit any target near or far as well as "the best archers in England." When the matchlock musket arrived in China and Korea, local sources wrote that on the practice field they would strike the target "five times better than the bow and arrow."
Gun ammunition was also significantly cheaper than arrows or bolts. Lead balls could be produced even in the army’s camp by basically anyone. Gunpowder could be mass produced from mills from charcoal (a common substance) sulfur (less common, but depending on location could be very common), and salt peter (again, less common, but was abundant depending on location). Arrows require a hiring a blacksmith (a skilled laborer) to make the heads from good quality iron, require the gathering of straight shafts (often from pollarded trees whose branches were in demand for other purposes as well) and gathering feathers for fletching, which were also a limited resource used for many purposes. In the end, you then have to have fletchers (another specialized craftsman) assemble the arrows or bolts.
There's also the fact that as they got better a musket could punch straight through plate. Which is also why armor started going away until we finally developed armor that could match the rifles.
and they made a lot of noise witch was very terrifying in that moment, thats why the were shoulder by shoulder, to raise the morale and avoiding the troop to disband