What Was the Longbow and Why Was It Important?
The English longbow was the weapon that defined the Hundred Years’ War. A tall self-bow of yew or wych-hazel, standing about 6 feet (1.8 m) when unstrung, the longbow could draw a pull of 100–150 pounds (45–70 kg) and could loose arrows at a rate a crossbowman could not match. The longbow was the secret of the three great English land victories of the war — Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415) — and it gave the English a military advantage that lasted for the better part of a century.
The longbow did not win the war, and the war did not invent the weapon. Longbows had been in use in the British Isles since the Neolithic period; Welsh and English archers had used them in the 12th and 13th centuries; the longbow was a mature military weapon by the time of Edward I. The war’s contribution was to use the weapon at scale, in massed volleys from prepared positions, and to integrate it into a tactical system that maximised its strengths. The longbow was decisive at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt because the English had learned to use it; the longbow failed at Patay (1429), Formigny (1450), and Castillon (1453) because the French had learned to defeat it.
The construction of the longbow
A typical war longbow was made from a single stave of yew (the preferred wood, imported in large quantities from the Baltic and the Alps), cut from the heartwood and the sapwood so that the bow was a laminate of compression-resistant heartwood and tension-resistant sapwood. A well-made bow could last for ten years of campaigning, though most bows were replaced more often. The arrows, or “shafts,” were about 3 feet (90 cm) long, with steel bodkin or broadheads, fletched with goose or chicken feathers, and tipped with a steel pile. The shafts were the consumable of the war: a longbowman might carry two dozen into battle and loose ten of them in a minute.
The supply of yew was a strategic problem. English kings from Edward I on took active measures to ensure the supply: the statutes of the 14th century encouraged the planting of yew in English churchyards and estates; the import of bowstaves from the Baltic, the Alps, and the Pyrenees was a substantial item of the war budget. The supply of yew was not the only constraint: a longbow could not be mass-produced; every bow was, in effect, a hand-crafted article, and the supply of skilled bowyers was a limit on the size of the English army.
The training of the archer
A longbow could not be used by a man who had not been trained from childhood. The standard war bow of the late 14th century drew 100 pounds or more; a longbowman who had not been trained from boyhood could not draw it, let alone loose it accurately. The training began at seven or eight, with a lighter bow, and continued through adolescence; the statutes of the 14th and 15th centuries required the practice of archery at the village butts and prohibited other sports on Sundays in order to maximise the practice time.
The result was a substantial population of trained archers, especially in the Welsh marches, the West Country, and the home counties. The muster rolls of the late Edwardian phase show archers in proportions of three or four to one against men-at-arms; the English army that invaded France in 1415 was perhaps 1,000 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers, in the proportions that had become standard. The longbow was, in the social sense, a national weapon, and the longbowman was a national type.
The longbow in battle: Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt
The longbow at Crécy (26 August 1346) was the first great demonstration of its battlefield use. The English army, perhaps 9,000 strong, deployed on a ridge near the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu: the Black Prince’s vanguard in the front, Edward III’s division in the centre, the earls of Arundel and Northampton in the rear. The dismounted men-at-arms were formed up behind sharpened stakes; the longbowmen, in a thick line in front, opened the engagement with volleys of arrows. The French attacked uphill, in successive waves of Genoese crossbowmen, the cavalry of the first division, and the men-at-arms of the second and third divisions. The longbow fire broke each attack in turn. Modern estimates of French losses cluster around 1,500–2,500; the figure of 4,000 in the older chronicles is rhetorical.
The longbow at Poitiers (19 September 1356) was a tactical refinement of the Crécy deployment. The Black Prince, returning from a chevauchée through southern France with perhaps 6,000 men, was caught by King John II of France near the village of Maupertuis. The prince, advised by John Chandos and the Captal de Buch, chose a defensive position behind a sunken road and a hedge-line, with the longbowmen on the wings. The French attacked in successive waves, and the longbow, combined with the terrain, broke each attack. King John himself was captured on the field.
The longbow at Agincourt (25 October 1415) was the climax of the longbow tradition. Henry V’s army of perhaps 6,000 men — 1,000 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers — was deployed in a narrow plain between two woods. The longbowmen, firing in volleys, broke the French attacks on the muddy ground. The losses on the French side — 1,500–4,000 of all ranks, including a substantial proportion of the higher French nobility — were catastrophic. The English losses were 400–600.
The decline of the longbow
The longbow declined in importance during the Lancastrian phase of the war. The decisive engagements of the 1429–1453 period — Patay (1429), Formigny (1450), Castillon (1453) — were all won by the French, and the longbow was not the decisive factor in any of them. The French had developed effective countermeasures: dismounted men-at-arms in defensive positions, crossbowmen with pavises (large shields), and, above all, field artillery. The English longbow was still a formidable weapon, but it was no longer the dominant battlefield arm.
The longbow did not disappear from English use. English armies of the late 15th and 16th centuries continued to include substantial numbers of longbowmen, and the longbow remained a weapon of English warfare until the 16th century. But the longbow was not “replaced” by the crossbow and the harquebus. The crossbow was the longbow’s principal medieval rival, and the two weapons had been in use simultaneously throughout the war. The harquebus and the musket — the handguns of the 16th century — were the weapons that eventually superseded the longbow, and they superseded it gradually, in the 16th and 17th centuries, not in the 15th.
The longbow did not have a single moment of obsolescence. The weapons of the 15th century overlapped with those of the 16th; the longbow, the crossbow, the handgun, and the field gun all coexisted in the 15th-century army. The English longbow was a casualty of the wider military revolution, not of a particular French counter-tactic.
The historiography
The standard treatment of the longbow in the war is the work of three generations of military historians. The first generation — Hewitt, Oman, Burne — established the basic chronology and the basic tactical analysis. The second generation — Clifford Rogers, in War Cruel and Sharp (2014), and the contributors to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010) — refined the tactical analysis and placed the longbow in the larger context of the military revolution. The third generation — the archaeological work of the longbow research project at Southampton, in particular — has established the physical characteristics of the surviving bows. The longbow is treated in the military innovations cluster article, in the artillery long-tail, and in the English archery cluster.