Flintlock Muskets are better than English Longbows
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2021
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Muskets...slow to reload, inaccurate, unreliable, and they throw up massive plumes of smoke! Why use them at all when a quieter, faster, and more reliable weapon not only existed, but predated the musket by so many years?? Well the disadvantages of the musket may not be quite so numerous as you imagine! In this video, I discuss why the flintlock musket was a superior weapon- both of war and of battle- than the longbow.
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...and you can find the blog I reference here: kabinettskriege.blogspot.com/...
...and the video from Tod's Workshop about armour versus longbows: • ARROWS vs ARMOUR - Med...
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I need to know if Wales is an important country
I am actually puzzled that a video like this is needed.
Don't think you've hidden your artificial beef with Atun Shei well enough. :-D He will find you, and he will make fun of you. Again.
I always find it hilarious when people try to compare the bow to the predictable operation & expectation of deflagration ordinance!
Never Mind the difference in training time of weeks compared compared to month or years
The nonsense about rain but even by Leonardo's time his wheel lock covered pan/later designs mitigated much of this problem to at minimum practically guarantee one volley.
I want attention to a sling lobbing a grenade;) Because I think that would have worked to upset tight packed formations cheaply & effectively?
Edit: What if perhaps you just built a pre determined length of cord/rope into a grenade to assist in it biomechanical propulsion?
I'd be curious to see the results for ground warfare.
If injured or ill a musket men can still possibly load & fire unlike a bow men whom relies on biomechanics.
Just something to add to the pro's of deflagration;)
The best argument: If bows were better, they would have used them.
I left this reply on another comment, but just a thought experiment is that sometimes armies just don't come up with a certain idea. Jeorge Sparve from the slingshot channel indulged in some experimental archeology and made a bow that was capable of holding an arrow magazine, made out of materials available to the time period and made with the tools and techniques of the time as well. Maybe there was a hidden use for the bow that no one came up with simply because they didn't come up with it. No one came up with the magazine fed bow until recently.
Ah, but maybe it was a conspiracy! Big Musket suppressed the truth, or something.... :P
@@Del_S They shattered the truth! With a volley! A big volley!
This is usually but not universally true. There are many circumstances where despite certain innovations being technologically and logistically possible they took a significant period of time to come about (intermediate calibre rifles being the one I can most easily think of). There are also examples where doctrines with inefficiencies were commonly used taking a while to come up with better ones (the 18th century has at least a good bit of this but it's more apparent with the pike and shot era especially in terms of cavalry doctrine). There are also examples of times when more efficient military solutions are politically infeasible such as with the mass mobilisation of citizen armies as pioneered by Napoleon. I would say that longbows would be subject to all of these and more to some degree as well as just their factor of really not being as useful as muskets.
@@blakebailey22 The instant Legolas really wouldn't be that useful as compared to a regular bow. In the best case scenario it'll have an advantage in firing a quick arrow burst at the beginning, but the archers will still get tired - and the regular bow will keep on going for a much longer period of time.
The only Longbow more effective than muskets carries hellfire missiles and a 30mm cannon.
And the only Archer company more effective than a 17th century musket line has 12 pieces on six heavy duty wheels, a self propelled hydraulically articulated all terrain armored chassi and a magasine fed multi piece ammo 155mm howitzer with 50km range and a remote controlled weapon station sporting either an FN MAG or a 'Ma deuce' machinegun for close in self defence.
This is a valid statement.
loooooool
Okay but a good old Massachusetts Minuteman beats an apache, it's base, and the cities around it any day
@@essexclass8168 yeah, but by that logic a three-prong spear or a large freshwater fish that produces caviar is also better than a longbow 😂
"If artillery is the king of battle, then logistics is the god of war." This video has summoned a like from me regardless, but this quote ought to get it's own like button.
Reminds me of a saying I heard some time ago: "Lieutenants and captains study tactics, majors and colonels study strategy, generals study logistics."
It was overlooked for the longest time as it was seen by largely aristocratic officer corps as unbecoming of gentlemen... Military academies being themselves aristocratic, it was neglected for the longest time. Revolutionary France, having no such impediment for obvious reasons, had an edge in logistics, and it quickly caught on. Not for everyone though, as the Russian underperformance in WWI is largely due to lacking logistics, again explainable by a very aristocratic military
That's going in my quote book btw
Common misconception, that's actually Kratos
@@Kevin_the_Caveman >Not for everyone though, as the Russian underperformance in WWI is largely due to lacking logistics, again explainable by a very aristocratic military
Replace 'WWI' with their current war, and this is equally as valid. Well, 'aristocratic' is a very generous term, but anyhow.
I was in the army as infantry for a number of years , and Brandon is absolutely correct about ambushing. Silence is critical up until the moment the ambush is sprung. Then, it’s the complete opposite: you want as much noise, light, smoke, shrapnel and whatever other shit you can think of to amplify shock and confusion.
I never understood why modern know-it-alls critique or judge the adoption or discontinuation of military arms /armor or tactics within history as ignorant or misguided. Throughout all of human history nations rose and fell due to the ever ongoing arms race. Don't you think if ANY advantage on the battlefield was to be gained a nation would adopt it? People in the pre modern era weren't stupid. If the longbow was replaced then there must have been a good strategic reason for it, and I think Brandon hit all those points on the head.
Agreed, but there are instances where it takes some blood to catch up. Is this instance the hundreds of years where flintlock rifles overtook bows? No. Muskets were quickly viewed as better, and economics were the main limiting factor overall.
Yes, this is very ignorant... you think Europe comprises the whole world. Bows and guns went on in parallel up until the 19th century, outside of Europe. The Samurai and Chinese had fine guns (the latter having invented them), but still considered archery quite useful. And as you said, they weren't idiots. They just had a culture that maintained some warrior traditions, where people spent their free time training with bows or the like, unlike Western Europe who destroyed their lower and middle classes and reduced them factory workers dying of cholera.
"Don't you think if ANY advantage on the battlefield was to be gained a nation would adopt it?"
No. Napolion refused to equip his Forces with breach loading rifles(100 years before those became wide spread) despite having the opportunity to do so, Ian McCollum of forgotten weapons made a Video about that
@@vanivanov9571 He never said that Europe was the world. The discussion was regarding Europe specifically. You reached this ignorant conclusion on your own.
@@armelburgess8651 "Duur... he never said Europe was the world," Can we get a prize for Sherlock, over here? Maybe a dictionary, so he can learn what "implication," means.
But OK, he didn't imply Europe was the world...? That would mean he just implied that everyone outside of Europe WAS stupid, since they didn't do what Europe did. Very fitting point for someone with a King Louis XIV profile.
Seriously, what kind of idiocy is it to whine that bow vs gun is a topic SPECIFIC TO EUROPE...? Sounds like you're desperate to keep inside a bubble of Eurocentrism.
A factor you surprisingly didn't mention was that guns in general have a much higher lethality to bows. And just the ability to remove people from the field with each and every skirmish can win wars.
Good point. A longbow hitting you is hardly gonna be fun times, but a musket ball is literally bone-shattering.
Brandon didn't mention buck and ball, which is when you turn your musket into a 10 or 12 gauge shotgun. Imagine a line of infantry firing that at you at close range.
With spherical musket balls vs war arrows you're probably not going to be much use after you take a non-glancing hit from either weapon so I don't think that would have been a deciding factor. Though guns are definitely "messier" and more intimidating.
Umm, you have a source for that? The accounts I've seen of musket and arrow injuries doesn't seem to imply one does a lot better than the other. People have continued on after getting shot many times with modern firearms (more familiar with those), but I don't know of anyone without armour continuing with multiple arrow wounds.
@@LOOY756 Right. It's a fairly insignificant difference. The main advantage to a musket is you can hit more than one person per shot, with luck, due to overpenetration.
Unlike a longbow you don't need to start training with a musket from adolescence to be combat effective with it, the hardest part is making sure they stay in a somewhat cohesive line and don't run away before firing their first shot.
This. Take a recruit, give him a week’s training and he can load and fire a musket. And then he can attach a bayonet and charge with a spear/club.
That’s the thing with crossbow and guns, they are easier to aim and shoot therefore more accurate. It takes far more skill for archer to achieve the same accuracy
@@phuripongphansiri1740 Musket accuracy is advertised at about 45% hit ratio during training situations but in combat it was prone to a lot of human error that dropped the accuracy to literally 1%. In Napoleonic war records, commanders would estimate about 400 shots per 1 casualty and that was the norm throughout France, British and Prussian armies. Guns are definitely easier to train, but their biggest advantage is fear factor rather than actual casualty production.
One of the most recent sources depicting human error in musketry is during the US civil war, after the battle of Gettysburg, they collected 27,000 muskets from both sides. 24,000 of those muskets were still loaded and over half of them were loaded incorrectly. Some muskets had double the amount of gunpowder, some had too little and some even accidentally put 2-3 balls inside. It's because the extreme fear of the battle made the soldiers completely unaware of all the mistakes they were doing.
To put things in perspective, if a line of 300 musketeers fired, 2/3 of them would miss have shot too high or too low. Some muskets would've failed to ignite, and majority of remaining the men who loaded their guns properly would've still missed due to smoke and recoil+exhaustion or miscalculated the enemy's distance.
@@Jake-dh9qk as much as I believe you. This would apply to all warfare, and therefore… some humans are naturally suited for combat.
Otherwise… Roman Legions wouldn’t be as known as today.
@@Jake-dh9qk well battle back then less casualties were from the actual combat most casualties came from them routing and being cut down in the process and even more died from campaign situations than actual battle such as disease, starvation and other beautiful stuff of 18th century warfare
I imagine firearms were especially useful for colonial warfare, where your soldiers were constantly catching exciting exotic diseases.
An archer needs to be in good health to use his bow effectively (imagine trying to draw a longbow with joint pain from the flu). A musketeer just needs the strength to lift and aim his gun.
Great point! Not only diseases, climate factor could have even greater meaning
Large camps would make for diseases without having to go anywhere exotic. Armies often were not fed as well or reliably as, say, farmers or townspeople in peacetime, so you can expect poorer physical condition that way too. And simply naturally shorter, weaker, etc. men were available to draft and train as adequate musketeers when they would never be adequate longbowmen.
EXACTLY
Donald Featherstone in his book _The Bowmen of England_ sums it up wells: the firearm is a perfectible weapon. The bow is tied to the ability and capacity of archer, whose shot will slacken as they are diseased, fatigued, etc. A firearm will always shoot as long as its user can hold it. As history has no doubt shown, the firearm was a platform that could be improved; the bow remained almost untouched for thousands of years. No nation that had access to firearms chose to use bows over the more economical choice. People may romanticise older weapons, but practicality and effectiveness are the judges.
Curiously enough for those nerds at gaming discussions, there is a recorded skirmish between Napoleonic musketmen and archers, recorded in the Memoirs of Baron de Marbot when his infantry fought against irregular Baskirs at Plinitz, who were mounted archers. Marbot was very dismissive: "Our soldiers were not in the least alarmed at the sight of these semi-barbarous Asiatics, whom they nicknamed cupids, because of their bows and arrows...I had these [prisoners] brought to the Emperor, who, after examining them expressed his surprise at the spectacle of these wretched horsemen who were sent, with no other arms than bows and arrows, to fight European soldiers armed with sabres, lances, guns, and pistols!…"
While Marbot himself was hit in the thigh by an arrow, he judged these Baskirs as crudely ineffective, with only 1 in 10 arrows hitting something. While these Baskirs were far from elite archers, the in ability for a mobile unit of horse archers to shred apart a tightly packed formation of unarmoured infantry tells us something about why bows are not the fearful weapon that modern enthusiasts might want to believe.
On a side-note, the demonstration of the weapon switching by the editor (17:37) is a bit of a weak argument. While Asiatic mounted archers might have stowed their bows into a special bow quiver, there's no evidence that foot archers would have attempted to retain their bows by wearing it over their torso. The logical thing if a quick weapon switch was needed was to simply drop the bow. If the fight required an archer to enter the melee, it's unlikely they would have needed to switch back to their bow. Either they were fighting to the death or they were out of arrows. There's no evidence of archers actually losing clashes because of slow weapon switching. It's also worth noting that the bow being used in the demonstration is a light, short modern bow with a larger brace height, not the longer bows with heavier draws used historically. Carrying a bow like that would be quite impractical, let alone fighting with one.
Clean slate seems a good idea. As we agreed elsewhere, that gives a misleading impression. Many nations outside of Europe did maintain their bows, well into the 19th century; and all the major ones demonstrated the ability to make firearms, or did produce many firearms as well as bows. Even in Europe, the Ottoman Empire continued to use bows until the 18th century. While the bow might appear untouched, it actually improved immensely over the span of millennia, where it used to be considered equal or lesser to the sling and the pilum.
I also mentioned the Kalmyks, another group of horsearchers who did defeat squares of the Grande Armee, taking over a thousand prisoners, so that anecdote can be put down to French arrogance; considering 40,000 men were minced at Borodino, and half a million died on the march to Russia, they're not going to be impressed by some minor losses to guerilla warfare. Even so, Musketeers had about a 5 to 7% rate of accuracy in the Napoleonic wars, so ~10% is actually very good with the archers.
Overall, the fact musketeers only got 6 rounds to practice with in most armies, and bowmen train from boyhood... I'd say it's no contest as to who wins. We've established better accuracy and rate of fire for the bow, so it was only later on and with better training that the gun really eclipsed it. That's why so many nation didn't swap earlier.
And good point about melee. The longbow is considerably lighter, and the weight of a musket is actually the same as about ~60 160# longbow arrows. The weight of a musket cartridge is also ~56% of that, 45g vs 80g. So, a longbowmen has to carry a lot less, and so can easily carry a serious melee weapon like a bardiche, longsword, spear, etc., if you really want to use your ranged troops in melee.
@@vanivanov9571 mate just accept it the musket is the superior weapon in an realistic scenario, if only because you get tired shooting a bow also yeah, all those other nations didn't focus on modern weapons like muskets and preferred their tratitonal weapons and that's exactly one of the reasons how western Europe managed to conquer basically the entire world with a far smaller population
@@baleriontheblackdread6679 Well, I think you should consider the facts I've presented, and tell me why they don't seem correct. To me, they seem quite compelling.
Additionally, contemporary studies show that even trained Prussian soldiers could only hit a 30x2m wall at a range of 75m HALF the time, using 18th century rifled muskets. Meanwhile, bowmen can hit individual men at that range.
As for getting tired, Crecy was fought after a forced march, after much of the army suffered debilitating sickness and many were sent home, and with low provisions, IIRC, winning one of the greatest victories in history. Tiredness and illness have always been part of warfare, but people continued to use bows until the 19th century, so there's no reason to assume this was a major setback.
As I said, the other nations did mass-produce guns, from the 16th century onwards. Many of them were better marksman than the Europeans, from what details I can find, so the gap between bow and gun should have been larger. And yet, they didn't all mass-produce guns and replace all bows. In fact, the Ming who did use a modern-style musketeer army lost to the Manchus, who were primarily horse-archers. That's how the Qing Dynasty was formed, with the greatest territorial extent in Chinese history.
So the idea Europe was superior and won due to guns is an incredibly simplistic fiction, which ignores all other factors.
@@vanivanov9571
I just really have to call out how you cherry pick history in a lot of places, since everything you said about the Ming-Qing transition is dynasty is frankly wrong. The Ming lost because they were riven with internal division and multiple armed revolts (Beijing, the Ming capital, had already been captured by a rebel warlord when the Manchus arrived), and practically bankrupt... they were an empire teetering on a brink, the Jurchens were just the ones to pushed them over the edge. There was no true uniformity in it's army, or the funds to field a western-style gun-based army. It had some modern formations, it also had a lot formations of literal peasants with bamboo spears... the Jurchens who became the Manchu won because they were better unified and in a large part by simply buying generals away from the Ming with promises of rank and riches in the new administration. Most (over 70% by most credible historians) of the Qing armies at the time of victory were chinese defectors (many with guns and cannons), not horse archers. The weapon that won that war was frankly better PR.
You really need citations for the Kalmyk thing... when and where that happened is critically important because the Grande Armee that marched on Moscow is not the one that retreated from it, so actual dates and battle reports are critically important for that anecdote to have any comparative value in this conversation
You're also seriously over-estimating the effectiveness of the average bowman compared to the average musketman. The bow itself is a weapon that requires years of physical training to use with any level of competence with a draw weight large enough to kill a man. A musket can give a user that ability in ten minutes of instruction. If you have to field an army in the tens or hundreds of thousands on short notice, then replace casualties during a war... that right there is why the use of bows died so rapidly in a military sense.
Did armies still use bows occasionally? if they had them already, sure. Armies that still had trained bowmen used them until they died or retired, nations like Russia in times of desperation made use of whatever peasant militias came equipped with. Is that an argument in favor of the bow? no, not really... because they're isolated incidents that require loads of context.Truth is basically everybody who could afford large numbers of guns chose guns every time.
most of the arguments you use lack any substantial depth, really.
1. IMO war bow is superior *ranged weapon,* but musket is superior *weapon system,* suitable for mass deployment.
15th century master archer could shot 18th century marksman dead before he could load his musket, but while you could train 30,000 musketeers in weeks, you will never be able to find 1,000 master archers in your lifetime.
2. While musket/firearm is indeed a "perfectible" weapon, it requires massive industry/industrial capacity, and centralized administration/organization for any society/nation to be able to field a large number of soldiers equipped with standardized weapon. I mean poorly made arrow and shoddy bow could still work, but bad ammo and poorly made firearm could be dangerous to the user.
Many nations (including China, the birthplace of gunpowder) choose to retain traditional bow/crossbow despite their exposure to matchlock musket.
3. As for "Baskhir mounted archers", they might not be able to beat French cuirassier/lancer in one-on-one fight, but they have no problem overwhelm French patrol and ambush French supply convoy. They were not shock cavalry, but raiders that use hit and run tactics. Baron de Marbot was a fool to be that dismissive of them.
Remember that Ming/Korean crossbow/halberd combination was good enough to beat Japanese musket wielding soldiers during the Imjin war.
Also Timur (Tamerlane) crushed the Ottoman army with well-executed Mongol tactics with mounted archers and heavy cavalry combination at the battle of Ankara.
About armor penetration: The longbow was used during the era of plate armor. It did not obsolete plate armor. Once the arquebus came around, armor started to evolve: forget the legs, arms, helmet. The chest plate doubled in thickness instead. The thin plates were no longer enough to stop musketballs. Eventually even cavalry dropped the armor in the late musket era.
I think that speaks for itself. If the longbow was this powerful, why is it that the thinner full body plate became MORE popular during the era of the longbow?
Thinner plate tends to come about because the technique in forging improves. A well rounded plate can better deflect arrows. And of course reduces the weight the bearer deals with. I hope I'm not coming across as condescending.
That's an interesting point, but there are some problems with it. If you have ever seen a helmet from the 13th century, it is very, VERY thin. Armor on the large gets thicker throughout it's use in history. The thing is, in the 15th century, a technique was used called fluting that allowed for less metal to be used in the piece, but also for it to have equal strength. Just look at 16th century Gothic armor, the bumps on it are what make it strong, but on the whole it is rather thin. But, about the forget the helmet thing, if you look at colonial armor, they did wear helmets, but on the whole the visor was dropped because it needed to be thin and was difficult to flute, so it was almost pointless. You can't put heavy armor on your limbs in battle or you'll get tired and weighed down. And limbs are difficult to hit as it is, however, it is said that field marshal Tilly was killed with an arquebus bullet to the leg. So fluting is why the armor was thinner, it's not like they slimmed down the armor just because a longbow couldn't cut it. But yeah, muskets are the best.
@@herrmannvonsalza5228 I think you missed his point. His is not saying that after longbows entered the game everyone started using thiner armor, he is saying that compared to musket era armor, longbow era armor was thiner (But not thinner than before)
@@herrmannvonsalza5228 fluting increasing the strength of armor was most likely a pleasant side effect of decoration rather than an intentional attempt to increase the strength of the armor. It was done to mimic the look of the puffy, high end clothing. You can tell by looking at the greaves. The greaves on armor was basically never fluted, since the clothing they mimicked were tight fitting stocking. If the additional strength was what they were looking for, they would’ve fluted the greaves as well.
@@spitandfire His point still stands.
How has the algorithm not recommended this to me earlier? Well argued and well presented!
Well thank you! And hey, at least it brought you here eventually!
Ummm... this was not well argued, and was presented as an aimless rant. He used barely any sources, and, incredibly, intentionally skipped over the subject of accuracy altogether. This will be because contemporary accounts and statistics on musketeers' accuracy showed it was very, very poor, and data suggests skilled bowmen would be a lot more accurate.
The accuracy of the English longbow can only be estimated from them practicing at hundreds of yards, against relatively small targets, and being praised for hitting a "barge" at about 200yds, supposedly the size of an infantry formation. Modern archery and Eastern archery can give some indication, however, like the Qing originally practicing against man sized targets at 135 yards (this was reduced as their bow culture declined). Kenneth Chase reckons that a Mamluk archer was expected to hit a man sized target at about 70m, 5 out of 5 times (citing Saracen Archery).
To compare, contemporary statistics reckon that a musket can only hit an infantry block sized target at about 70m about half the time, and most musketeers were given two to six rounds to practice with (the British received 30).
So, mathematically, it's not really possible for the weapon wielded with greater accuracy, with a higher rate of fire, and similar range, to inflict less casualties and be bested.
If you were comparing the Japanese arquebusiers of the Imjinwaeran to English bowmen, then they would probably carry the day since they could shoot straight and were similarly well-trained and veteran troops. But the 100 years war veteran English bowmen against typical European or British musketeers of the 18th century...? It wouldn't be any contest, unless you put many factors in favour of the musketeers.
Honestly, you could cover this topic a lot better than Brandon did.
@@vanivanov9571 Man, you've been spending a lot of time in this comments section. I'd recommend you look at the article I referenced in the video and linked in the description to read more about the accuracy and range of musketry.
@@BrandonF Interesting to start with a personal comment. You reference a blog that says basically nothing about accuracy, as a way to contradict contemporary statistics in my comment to Sand?
It gives the vaguest possible impression of accuracy, stating the obvious that troops tend to start fighting well outside of effective range, for fear of dying, and by the time they're close enough to be within effective range they're resorting to a bayonet charge. And of course, it makes no comparison with the bow... so the subject of accuracy was only hinted at, not covered in any fitting manner. And this is weird since you should be knowledgeable about the subject, as data on musket accuracy is not that hard to find.
Elements of the Science of War from 1811, for instance, found that "well trained" men could shoot a block of cavalry at 100yds 53% of the time, and "ordinary" men could hit it 40% of the time.
The French found their musket technically could hit an infantry-block sized target at 300m 20% of the time.. if the musket was fixed in place and so had perfect aim. Clearly, their loading/patching or their guns were not very good. Weirdly, it only had 60% accuracy at 75m on the same target, so it's no wonder muskets have such a bad reputation in Europe, where even George Hanger considered hitting a man intentionally at >=150yds was ludicrous.
So, what data exists suggests European musketeers would be thoroughly outmatched by the original Qing archers, practicing against single man-sized targets at 135yds. And it seems the elite bowmen of England were similar. To not cover the most basic point of musket v bow of ranged weapon effectiveness renders the video a pointless exercise.
@@vanivanov9571 This is just a bizarre comparison, so you're saying that because a conscript regiment of line infantry couldn't beat a veteran unit of English longbowmen the longbow is superior? Even if this claim is true (and I'll get to that) it doesn't prove your point because it literally just comes down to one unit being more experienced than the other. But also there's no world in which this claim is true, there's simply no way that a single company of English longbowmen could actually carry enough arrows to make use of their theoretically higher fire rate. At the same time the muskets have a much more effective weapon which has a huge morale shock effect and they are able to fix bayonets and charge. If we just assume that the line infantry fight competently there's no reason why they couldn't just fan out and surround the longbows, making their volley fire fairly useless and eventually find some sort of angle to charge them at.
*Reads title*
Well, yeah. Obviously. Guess I don't need to watch this video.
*Watches video anyway*
I probably would be like "duh" if I didn't play too much musket-involving Warband mods back in the day. Remembering the machine-gun native american archers makes me wanna hear why precisely that would be just video game bullshit.
Haven't seen the archers in Warband, so I can't comment. Overall though, you can expect a rate of fire of 1 arrow every 5 seconds or less, compared to 1 about every 20; so rate of fire is a legitimate concern.
@@vanivanov9571 well, the rate of fire does not exist in a vaccuum (not literally). I actually somewhat disagree with Brandon's point about archers getting tired because you don't need a very powerful bow or heavy arrows when your opponent only wears clothing (I do understand he's talking about the English longbow specifically though). Still, you can only have so many arrows on one person, not to mention that producing arrows is an economical nightmare compared to some lead beads and dried dung extract. Native americans swapped bows for guns pretty quickly and for a good reason.
@@Loromir17 Yeah, Joe Gibbs can shoot something like a 160# bow all day, IIRC. The Qing specifically got people to use bows under their maximum draw weight for faster firing. Meanwhile, muskets need to be periodically cleaned of powder-residue, or it gets really awkward.
As for arrows... 60x 80g arrows is about the weight of a Brown Bess, and the bow weighs almost nothing, so it's either the same or better for the archers. At Carrhae, they just put most of the arrows with the baggage animals, and it was no trouble to keep restocking the archers all day long.
Black powder was actually fairly expensive, along with lead. Enough that many armies didn't give their troops much ammo to practice with, whereas you could practice cheaply with a bow. And the American Indians could actually shoot straight, so that made a big difference, but they didn't really fully change over to guns until rifles were part of American culture, IIRC.
@@vanivanov9571 The question is would you prefer 1000 men that have 10 shots each or 100 men with 30 shots each?
I totally agree. I cannot think of a culture that chose bows over even matchlock arquebuses given the option. Look at the Japanese. They had bows roughly similar in power to the longbow (probably a bit less) yet they still seemed to believe matchlocks are far superior weapons. The arquebus is also one of the reasons why Toyotomi Hideyoshi had success on land against the Koreans who were still using bows. Yes, they had some gunpowder weaponry but not to the same extent Toyotomi's army did.
The Native Americans in North America weren't very impressed by matchlocks, being unreliable and hard to supply: it was only with the flintlock that they gave up bows more-or-less en masse.
@@bubbasbigblast8563 I think supply was the bigger issue there especially early on when the colonies were small.
Some ottoman soldiers still used bows in the late 17th century, although it was primarily cavalry weapon by that time I believe... But you are right firearms are superior.
@@Subutai_Khan If that were the case, Flintlocks wouldn't change all that much: in point of fact, many of the natives pushed against gunpowder weapons for exactly the reason of supply and repair difficulties, but their protests had no real effect, as the Flintlock proved too useful.
The difference between a matchlock and a flintlock is that a flintlock after being loaded can be picked up and shot.
A matchlock requires you to always carry a burning line of match cord and you still need to manually open the hatch over the powder.
10 hours of practice with a musket, and you're useful for soldiering. 10 hours practice with a longbow, and you're useful for handing the bow to someone who knows what he is doing.
You have it backwards. 10 hours of practice with a musket and you're liable to kill yourself and wound several of your colleagues. 10 hours of practice with a longbow and you can shoot an arrow into a mass of men almost as well as a master. The vaunted training time of bows is almost entirely about physical conditioning. But back when 90+% of the population were manual laborers of some kind, you could hand pretty much anyone a decently powerful bow and they'd have the strength to draw it. Not the absolute most powerful English longbows, sure. But those still couldn't penetrate contemporary armor so what is that extra draw weight actually doing for you?
Towards the end of the gun vs bow debate in England when pretty much everyone had finally agreed guns were superior and had already almost completely replaced bows, the proponents of bows still argued that bows should be retained in case there was a need to equip untrained conscripts in a hurry. On the other hand, during the adoption of firearms, not a single proponent of them ever argued that they should be adopted because they are easier to train men on.
@@Kidneyjoe42uh yeah no who tf typed this stupid drivel this isn’t even close to true or even semi accurate you have no idea what you’re talking about lmaoooo yeah just anyone could pick up a bow and shoot an arrow almost as well as a “master” you’ve never fired a bow or gun in your life
@@Kidneyjoe42 this is just objectively wrong😂
@@Kidneyjoe42what?
@@Kidneyjoe42Ehm ok musket hater
The simple fact that the matchlock had almost entirely replaced the bow in military use within around a fifty year period should tell one that, yes, guns are superior to bows.
Two Tudor ships were sent from England to France with supplies. One was the Mary Rose in 1560''s it sank in the Solent it had hundreds of Longbows and thousands of arrows amongst its cargo. 50 years later a ship was sent with supplies for an English Army in France, it sank off he coast of the Channel Islands. It had no longbows on board only firearms and gunpowder.
Not really the main reason was training. To train a longbowman it would’ve taken years and you’d have to start from childhood to be able to be really good. muskets take little training in short time making it easier to get large armies. Same for armour you couldn’t afford to give every infantry man armour in that time period it would be too expensive and their soldiers usually didn’t buy their equipment in those days unlike medieval times.
@@longbowenjoyer2154 don’t forget that a gunshot is much more deadly than any bow or crossbow.
@@TitusCastiglione1503 true but longbowmen could easily put their arrows where humans die quickest
@@longbowenjoyer2154 I’m not convinced that’s as much of a factor as is sometimes claimed. The rapid rate of fire will begin to die off fairly quickly, as the men tire. A gun doesn’t tire you out; it shoots the same no matter how tired you are.
To be sure the longbow’s higher fire rate is an advantage over the firearm, but it’s the only real advantage it has. And, not for very long.
Commenter: Noo!!! The Long bow is better than a flintlock!
Chad fusiliers & musketeers: haha line goes brrr
I don't know why but this comment tickled me lol but yeah...no ... being on the receiving end of anything going brrr ...un-fun
more like BOOM
"The warrior will always yield to the quartermaster."
Only one point you did not mention in your video. While England utilized the long bow, most of Europe relied more on the crossbow. To get a truly powerful crossbow you would need a windlass to cock it, giving you a rate of fire of about 3 shots a minute. Just wanted to mention this because any discussion of bow vs musket always mentions rate of fire, but for most of Europe a musket was no slower than normal nullifying that point slightly.
Good point. Before muskets, the crossbow was chosen over the longbow for some of the same reasons. Less strength required and easier/quicker to train.
@@gibbousmoon35yep, and in that case the longbow was definitely superior, in the hands of someone who could use it as proficiently as a typical crossbow wielding soldier. This was why it was mandated in England that every man had to practice with the longbow for several centuries. The advantage of a crossbow was in the relative ease with which someone could be trained to use one. At the Battle of Crécy particularly the English longbows famously had a higher rate of fire, longer range and more stopping power than the French and Genoese crossbows
the longbow is prob better because just in rain the crosbow is usless because you dont pull the strings back and let go a trigger does and if the strings are wet they are less efective so eaven if lonbow strings are wet they could still be mildly effective against a crosbow
I find it interesting that the water risk to muskets is brought up so soften when the same thing happens to bows.
At Crecy, one of THE battles for longbow fame, the English archers had to destring their bows to protect them from the rain to avoid them stretching.
I'm not saying that bows are necessarily as or more sensitive to water than muskets because that'd take specific testing that i havent done, but they're not immune to the problem of rain and water either
I believe this is also an issue for bows of composite construction, which could have the glues used at the time degrade if they absorbed water. Even simple wood bows can face serious problems if they dry out or absorb water.
It may very well be that guns were much more rugged weapons that are much less likely to fail from damage &/or have longer usable life.
That's one of THE main advantages of a longbow over a crossbow or musket. You can have it unstrung (keeping the string under your hat to stay dry) until the moment of battle, thus keeping it effective.
@@JohnyG29 In this case though they're comparing 18th century muskets. Which had a closed and ideally watertight pan, greased cartridges, and a cow's knee (a piece of leather that covered the weapon until firing). All of which added a degree of water resistance. I'm not saying that rainy weather couldn't be an issue- but by this period great efforts had been taken to reduce the impact of said weather.
@@JohnyG29 yet as an archer just how many arrows are you gonna be able to carry with you? How mobile can you be?
Are you able to maneuver and skirmish the enemy effectively compared to the light infantry skirmshers with muskets? Who can lay down and move around as they like. Take cover behind trees and crouch and fire accurately.
Note that archers during medieval period never won most of the battles it was the knights.
The archers task was mainly to suppress the enemy and harass them with arrows.
The muskets can pin you down considering they have ammo pouches and bayonets. How often do you see an archer gonna go into melee?
Plus the muskets can fix bayonets and get very close and fire volleys and charge.
How much weight you wanna carry as an archer? Also archers can't form square let alone be able to keep cohesive formations as they would usually get run downed.
And that the muskets era they have rifled muskets and rifles that can be just as effective at long distances.
You forgot the elephant in the room, that gunpowder weapons rose as a complement and an improvement over crossbows, in an era where wars were increasingly being dominated by sieges.
Nice one, but people that bring the argument often don’t think about loistics etc. and don‘t want to hear it, most, as far as I know, just wanna be right and will change up the fictional battle scenario in favor of the longbow… facts sadly don‘t help to change their minds, because, remember, all people back then were just stupid!!
What was it that Napoleon said? Amateurs study tactics, experts study logistics?
Why did they even use longbows? They should have just climbed trees, wore armour, and used machineguns.
Bows and guns went on in parallel up until the 19th century, outside of Europe. The Samurai and Chinese had fine guns (the latter having invented them), but still considered archery quite useful. And as you implied, they weren't idiots. They just had a culture that maintained some warrior traditions, where people spent their free time training with bows or the like, unlike Western Europe who destroyed their lower and middle classes and reduced them factory workers dying of cholera.
It's the same when comparing tanks.
Yup, the tank with superior gun and armor will win the fight while they are standing a few hundred yards from each other one day a month, but the tank that wins the war is usually the one that is the best on the other 29 days of the month.
@@watchface6836 *proceeds to have all his horses die in russia*
I remember this debate in a novel I read once. Set in 1520 at the Field of Cloth of Gold. An English noble waxes lyrical about their bows and a French Noble issues a challenge between an archer from the Englishman's retinue against an arquebusier from his (the arquebus being the musket's grandfather so to speak). In the challenge the English outshoot the French arquebusier and full a hay bale full of arrows in the same time the Frenchman gets off one shot that only just clips the edge.
The English see this as proof of the superiority of their weapon of choice and condescendingly tell the French that they'd better train their arquebusiers better if they ever hope to succeed. The Frenchman asks how long it took to train the archer and are told it takes 10-12 years to train a good archer.
The Frenchman points out that his candidate is actually his cook and that this was the first time he'd ever picked up the weapon.
Needless to say, the significance is not lost on the English.
Do you remember the title of the book? I really want to read it
@@Raleyg 'Knave of Swords' by Nicholas Carter. The bow versus gun scene is only a small part of it but it stood out as a powerful reason why bows were supplanted by guns.
How the French roasted the English!
i think the training time of bowmen as a significant factor is highly over rated. especially when it comes to military application.
the gunpowder age was actually a time of somewhat standing armies. and most of that time for bowmen is just in regards to the particular strength requirements of the heaviest long bows. I would t be surprised, that given the physical ability, someone could adequately be trained to fire for military use of a bow within a few week.
The English archer after riddling a hay bale with arrows: I trained since I was 10 to do that.
The French arquebusier after blowing a hole through the hay bale: I just learned to do that.
25:31 You missed the flip-side: strong winds hinder arrow speed and accuracy far more than they do musket ball speed and accuracy.
The development of the ring bayonet to replace the plug bayonet was the reason firearms replaced all other infantry arms. The plug bayonet was jammed down the muzzle and prevented further firing. With the advent of a ring that fit around the muzzle you could fire right until the enemy was upon you.
Well, no. Because muskets took over from bows while the plug bayonet was still standard.
@@TheGreatAmphibian yes but you had pike and musket squares. My point is once the ring bayonet came about you no longer needed pikemen to protect the musketmen.
Longbow training took months if not years and require massive upper body strength.
You can teach anyone to load and fire a musket in a few days.
Archery itself is actually much easier to learn than musketry, so the only issue is building strength for more powerful bows (Though lower end warbows in the 70-90 lb range aren't too difficult to draw if you aren't a couch potato). Learning how to draw a bow and loose an arrow is quite easy, and can be done in just a few moments. The basics of loading a musket however are quite complicated with a lot of steps to master. With a bow you can recycle ammunition, watch it fly and impact your target and see what adjustments you need to make. With a musket you cannot recycle ammunition, you cannot watch the projectile fly, and you cannot tell where the shot landed easily meaning it is much more difficult to make adjustments. I also would argue that the basics of bow marksmanship are far simpler than the basics of firearm marksmanship, as there are a lot of little things that can have a tremendous impact on your accuracy with a firearm.
@@demomanchaos bruh. Did you even watch the video? Learning how to pour powder down a barrel, ram a ball down, and prime the pan is probably easier to learn than a bow. Plus with a bow you need angling.. not really with a musket with their flatter trajectory.
@@demomanchaos Recycling arrows is possible, but not a guarantee. It would depend greatly on what you hit with it. As seen in the clip from Tod's Workshop, a longbow arrow hitting a hardened steel breastplate results in 0 penetration and an arrow without a head. Even if the arrow doesn't effectively shatter you still have the distinct possibility of blunting the head or having it lodged in your target.
As far as adjusting your aim, you can adjust your aim with a musket, or any firearm in the same manner. You aim, fire, watch for the impact, and adjust your aim accordingly.
@@demomanchaos you point and fire a firearm.. you have to know angling of a rifle..
As someone who is "decent enough" in both archery and musketry I will say archery is MUCH harder to master.
Point on training:
Bows: years of training
Musket: stick go boom
Point on intimidation:
Bows: low volume precision
Musket: stick go boom
Give a monkey a bow, it’ll take a while to learn with mild excitement when shot. Give it a musket, it’ll learn quickly and be scared.
Stick go boom
Stovepipe goes *boom! Whoosh BOOM!* ^^
/This comment was brought to you by The *Heavy* Mortar gang.
Arrow: punctures clean little hole in target. Diagnosis, pull arrow out, wrap bandage on wound, and give 2 to 3 weeks bed rest.
Musket ball: punches big ugly hole in target hard enough to pulp soft tissue, and turn bone into shrapnel. Diagnosis, amputate, cauterize, permanently outta the fight.
@@kyriss12 meanwhile one is more accurate than the other. The musket has more stopping power at the cost of being horrendously (and comically) inaccurate while the other could turn someone’s head into a pinhead. Also having a misfire just plain sucks. It hurts the kill rate. A line of longbows/crossbows could decimate a musket line.
The only two chief advantages of using the musket is for its superior armor penetration and the bayonet. The bayonet turns the musket into a weapon capable of shooting and stabbing but on top of that a mixture of marching, horrifying and wounds that cannot be stitched back up, and chemicals would make getting stabbed by someone with a bayonet an immediate death sentence. No one is going to be scared of getting shot at by an opposing line unless their own line has taken severe casualties, the more of the opposing side they are able to kill the less likely they were going to get bayoneted. However if a line begins to buckle under the pressure, a bayonet charge is incredibly intimidating that the opposing line will break and run.
Now rifles on the other hand are something else entirely. Just like the crossbow (just using the more accurate of the different bows) they are pin point accurate. Unlike the crossbow not only does it superior range and armor penetration (because rifles are very accurate) they can also tear a entire line apart. The major problem with the rifle (at the time) is they were expensive. Muskets were much cheaper in comparison and this is one of the reasons why you don’t see rifles being used often. The other reason is rifles required more time to load/reload in comparison to the musket and were often relegated to skirmishers until the minie ball was made which then outdated and outclassed the musket in every imaginable way.
While I like a lot of what you're saying, you must consider that while modern people may consider muskets "inaccurate", that's simply because they have very high expectations after so long of being spoiled by the wonders of modern guns, which unlike handmade muskets, are usually made with computer guided accuracy to ensure quality.
A forum that I frequent used to discuss this subject quite often, with the occasional proponent of the bow popping up. One poster -- a veteran of the Canadian Army and an amateur military historian -- discussed the subject of bows vs. early firearms in a fairly in-depth and intriguing manner. I'll post his words here for those who are interested:
"In any event in the late 16th century all these points of this thread were specifically brought up in England during the firearms debate. In 1590 Sir John Smythe, a proponent of the bow, published a book arguing for archery, stating the bow had a rate of fire four times greater, was more reliable (matchlocks of the time were hideously finicky) and that that although the bow might be weaker, it was more effective at terrifying the enemy with flights of arrows and wounded soldiers.
In 1594 Captain Humphrey Barwick responded, stating that rate of fire on the battlefield was not as important as Smythe thought. Against charging cavalry neither archers nor muskets would get many shots, and against infantry both would have multiple chances to fire. And then the far greater lethality of the musket would be telling - Barwick considered Smythe's argument about the "terror" of the bow nonsense. Barwick also pointed out that while the musket was less reliable, it demanded little of the firer. The bow however required the archer to be in top physical condition for best performance. Given the condition of soldiers on military campaigns in the 16th century, Barwick pointed out that it was better to rely on the weapon than on the health of the soldier. Barwick finished by pointing out that muskets were the way of the future with many opportunities for improving the weapon, training and tactics - bows had peaked, but muskets were only going to get better.
Barwick and his fellows won the debate, and the English abandoned archery, with the musket and pike ruling the battlefields of the English Civil War half a century later.
The argument for the Natives converting from bows to muskets comes to us from the Europeans rather than the Natives themselves. The Europeans (who acknowledged the limitations of their weapons and still held a sort of romantic fascination for the bow) wondered why the Natives were so quick to adopt muskets when they were skilled archers, and muskets were loud, noisy, slow firing, harder to acquire ammunition for, and somewhat incompatible with their traditional "skulking." They felt it largely came down to a matter of firepower. An arrow could be deflected by leaves, scrub and bush, and could even be dodged by an alert warrior. In the skirmish warfare of the North American bush, being able to fire repeatedly didn't mean a great deal if your opponent had already sought cover - you had your best chance to kill with the first shot. And a musket would go right through the foliage, and would ensure a nasty wound on impact. Although a bow could be fired faster, a good musket shot or salvo would deliver a much more devastating blow.
For warriors skilled in bounding overwatch (which they called fighting "blackbird fashion") and fire and maneuver (Native tactics more closely resembled those of modern infantry than the Europeans, and calling them merely 'hit-and-run' is simplistic) that ability to make the attack count was crucial, and provided a key military advantage that all the benefits of the bow could not overcome.
On brief reflection, I see some parallels with what we saw in Afghanistan from the Taliban. The RPG-7 is less accurate, harder to carry and conceal, with less ammo and a lower rate of fire than the AK-47, and with old PG-7 warheads it's not even all that effective against even our lightest armoured vehicles - but what it has is much higher lethality against infantry. The rate of fire of the AK-47 gives it a higher potential kill rate, but in practice (save in the hands of a handful of marksmen) all it did was make lots of noise: once a firefight began, everyone sought cover and all that rapid fire just kicked up dust. After the opening shots, almost no one ever died to direct fire. Casualties were almost always suffered in the opening salvos, and there the RPG had a massive advantage.
So the Europeans and Natives fought very differently in their wars, but both found reasons to consider the musket (and we're talking the deeply flawed matchlocks here too) superior."
------------
Not directly related to the subject of flintlock vs. English longbow, but I figure it's still tangentially relevant. If the comparatively crude arquebus still managed to dethrone the bow at a time when the latter had tons of institutional & cultural inertia behind it in both England and North American indigenous tribes... that says a lot about the premise of "those guys were so silly, they should have raised a corps of longbowmen out of thin air for Wellington!" (even putting aside the fact that that supposed request is almost certainly apocryphal).
Ben Franklin once proposed making and issuing longbows to continental troops. He was resoundingly shot down. Even if muskets, powder and lead are in short supply, they are still far better than bows.
I bet the "warriors" in the Continental Congress who turned down the idea....never fired a "shot in anger" or participated in a battle standing in line in front of enemy ranks.
@@badguy5554 I don't think that's really as true as you're assuming. Times were different, then. The further back you go, the more you tend to see members of the aristocracy having a martial background. There were quite a few people in the continental congress who had either previously served in the military during the French and Indian war or who were _actively_ taking part in the revolution as part of a militia or the continental army. This is more about Ben Franklin being a bit of an eccentric nut who was out of touch with how the military worked. (BTW, I fucking _adore_ Ben Franklin precisely _because_ he was an eccentric nut.)
I think the most vital reason is the availability.
yes, bows are better in any regard, considering unarmored range fight, but it's simply not possible to hire 50 000 - 100 000 bowman, because they simply do not exist. u can hire 5000, but when enemy can hire 50 000 musketeers, ur bowman's advantage becomes irrelevant. ancient warbow is labor intensive weapon which requires to much skill and strength to operate. skeletons of bowman are altered, because of warbow usage. u can hire a musketeer almost any adult man and woman. pool availability is way bigger.
and in war, number count.1 bowman defeats 1 musketeer. 5000 bowman can defeat 5000 musketeers, but 5000 bowman can't defeat 50 000 musketeers.
@@olexandrs6639 what about 5000 bowmen and 45000 musketeers, though?
@@yjlom bad day for bowmen.
The crucial argument, imho, is that the best archer using the best longbow will be limited by his muscle power while a mediocre musketeer will have virtualy unlimited energy stored into the "villainous saltpeter". You can change wet powder and replace a dull flint but you can not scale up the amount of energy that a set of human muscles can deliver (that's also why the winner was the musket, not the crossbow). And I think they somehow foresaw that the firelocks had a long way of improvement ahead, but not so much the longbows.
A crossbow stores energy
Just not enough
@@justarandomtechpriest1578 Also where does it get the energy from?
@@jakobinobles3263 where does the energy to wind up the mechanism come from?
@@sjakierulez from a pre-tentioned steel flat spring that is cogged via various devices offering mechanical advantage.
leavers or winches.
crossbows are inferior in design to firearms when it comes to scaling while competing for the same role.
(higher poundage crossbow == reduction on gearset of winch == slower cocking. also more stress on the material - more risky - hence more material is used- hence is heavier - hence has its limits.)
@@veemie8148 mechanical advantage is a thing. Gear Reduction rates can be tailored to allow toddlers to crank a 1250 pound crossbow (theoretically. DON'T LET TODDLERS play with crossbows) .
Brandon F.
As someone who has studied this in depth, you forgot about the most important point. The main reason for why the English (and French, Germans and Scots) didn't continue to use bowmen was because they had cut down every single yew tree in Europe. The price of bowstaves reached such an outrages price, even with regulations, that people couldn't continue the practice. A new act in 1566 in England allowed bowyers to charge 6s 8d for the best bows. That is about 20 days worth of pay for a skilled worker. In the mid 14th Century they only cost around 16d, or or 4 days worth of pay. That's 5 times more. And they had to buy new bows regularly for themselves and their sons.
In England we have a few sources telling us that about 50 % of the male population in the middle of the 15th Century actually trained with the bow. English kings probably recruited only around 10-20 % of the best and strongest men of this entire group. In other words, they only wanted the best, and we have over a dozen sources stating this fact. The biggest assembly of bowmen ever accomplished was probably at the battle of Towton in 1461. Here probably about half the force consisted of bowmen. The rest were men-at-arms and billmen. It's estimated that there was around 50,000-65,000 men on the battlefield. That's around 25,000 to 32,500 archers. One source said that England had 150,000 archers as a reserve, but that would be everyone, not just the best. English Kings only had about 12,000 to 15,000 archers in their service at any time. They, like modern soldiers had to have downtime at home to maintain the morale. These numbers would never have been sufficient in the 18th Century.
A few additional points.
08:40 There were no such minimum practice range at the marks with a military arrow. This was with a prick shaft, and you can reach 220 yards with a 80lb bow and a prick shaft. This law does not say anything about the power of the bow, it's about aiming, and more important, forcing men to rather participate in roving instead of cloth shooting, which varied from close to long range on uneven ground. The reason for why those who were older than 22 years old couldn't shoot at marks closer was because at that age it was expected of the men to be accurate enough to participate in roving to hone instinctive shooting or long range cloth shooting to practice aim. However, we do have written sources saying that archers were expected to reach 240-280 yards with military arrows. That is about what we get with a 100 gram arrow and a 75 gram arrow shot out of a 140-150 lb bow, respectively.
11:35 There is no evidence for 12 arrows per min. Most heavy bow archers, as you said, shoot about 6 a min.
13:45 Archers had to show up at muster with 24 arrows. The Crown on average supplied them with 48 arrows each. That's 72 arrows. Sometimes the Lord or knight leading the indentured men provided a few arrows. One such retinue during the Agincourt campaign had 12 arrows on average per archers. At the battle of Poitiers in 1356 one source said that some of the archers shot over one hundred arrows, but in order to do this they had to recover arrows from half dead wretches.
17:40 Bowmen didn't swap weapons. They simply dropped their bows on the ground and picked up the 5ft long mallet or a halberd/bill/pike/spear, or drew the sword + buckler. As protection against cavalry they used prefabricated stakes.
Age of empires 4 has the stakes! It's so goddamn obvious that I'm not surprised people just don't think about them nowadays
Good points. Might have something of interest to add:
*Trees:*
Good point about the Yew. I heard those forests had been reduced, but had no idea it was as bad as that.
*Population:*
Looking it up, the population during the 16th century was only about 3 million, and doubled by the 18th century, then jumped up to about 16 million by the Napoleonic wars, it seems. So, in an example of the Napoleonic wars, by your estimates there'd be a body of about a million archers to choose from, and since the British standing army was about 200K, IIRC, they'd be able to select the 20% who are best. Of course, it'd be more logical to use a mixture of musketeers and archers, as everyone did outside of Europe.
Overall, I don't recall armies in the 18th and 19th century becoming a much larger percentage of the population, so I wouldn't expect this to be a concern for any era.
*Shooting Speed:*
I recall several citations from Eastern archery manuals and writings, about men being able to shoot multiple arrows before the first hit the ground, and other such techniques.
I'd have to dig up the examples, but I do know in modern examples Justin Ma managed a rate of 10 arrows a minute (6 arrows in 35.4 seconds), and Peter Bogar managed a rate of 20 arrows per minute (9 arrows in 27 seconds), each using a 100# bow. So, I don't see a reason to deny the possibility, as I'd expect there to be archers of even greater skill at the time.
*Arrows:*
Fun bit of trivia, I found that if you subtract he weight of the musket and cartridges (assuming a brown bess with 60 cartridges, per one account I found), you can easily carry 86x 80g arrows for that weight. You can also carry a superior melee weapon and less arrows, of course.
Arrows cost significantly less as well, it seems, where an arrow apparently cost less than a hapenny back in 1353 (not sure how de/inflation affects that).
Something I'd really like to know, though, is how many arrows there were at Carrhae.
@@vanivanov9571 You made me think, aren't muskets easier to mass produce aswell? Gunpowder and musket balls are definitely easier than arrows. The musket itself may be harder but it doesn't suffer from having to be of a specific material
@@migueeeelet Not sure I'd call mixing gunpowder easy... you do it poorly, and you get low quality powder, or you blow up. Arrows seemingly were cheaper, in any case, so they were "easier" in terms of materials and labour, apparently.
Muskets were pretty complex weapon systems for the time, so they definitely weren't easier to produce compared to bows, at least if you don't factor in yew scarcity.
But yeah, if you've run out of materials... what's easy changes.
@@vanivanov9571 Well I mean, I don't know much about gunpowder, but surely you could make larger batches of it while with arrows you have to work one at a time.
Then again, wouldn't be hard to simply hire more people to work on arrows
Don’t forget that longbows didn’t disappear overnight. There are plenty examples of armies that carried bows and men with firearms while this transition took place over years. Once the muskets became less cannon like and more musket like the general advantages of the musket were apparent and the switch finally happened at scale in European armies. But plenty of tribal armies took on rifle armed armies and won (not most of the time but history has lots of examples) even into the 19th century.
I've often wondered this. Just based on the fact that you can fire arrows so much faster, it has always seemed to me like a bow and arrow would best a musket. But I also know that the bow was not a better weapon. If it were, I'm sure it would have remained in use. But I still have never been able to shake the thought from my mind. This video is one I've been waiting on for years lol. Thanks.
All I'm getting from this is that we need more musket-wielding YA protagonists.
What's YA?
True, bows are almost as dumb as the dual wield trope.
@@haraldisdead young adult fiction books
@@Dogirot thanks
Yes, but you see:
Musket = Industrial = BAD
Bow = Classical = Good
And everyone knows that Industrialization was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity... (**Rolls Eyes**)
" When the War Chief had viewed us all it was found between us and the Stone Indians we had ten guns and each of us about thirty balls, and powder for the war, and we were considered the strength of the battle. After a few days march our scouts brought us word that the enemy was near in a large war party, but had no Horses with them, for at that time they had very few of them. When we came to meet each other, as usual, each displayed their numbers, weapons and shields, in which they were superior to us, except our guns which were not shown, but kept in their leathern cases, and if we had shown[them], they would have taken them for long clubs. For a long time they held us in suspense ; a Chief was forming a strong party to make an attack on our centre, and the others to enter into combat with those opposite to them.
We prepared for the battle the best we could. Those of us who had guns stood in the front line, and each of us had two balls in his mouth, and a load of powder in his left hand to reload.
We noticed they had a great many short stone clubs for close combat, which is a dangerous weapon, and had they made a bold attack on us, we must have been defeated as they were more numerous and better armed than we were, for we could have fired our guns no more than twice ; and were at a loss what to do on the wide plain, and each Chief encouraged his men to stand firm. Our eyes were all on the tall Chief and his motions, which appeared to be contrary to the advice of several old Chiefs, all this time we were about the strong flight of an arrow from each other. At length the tall chief retired and they formed their long usual line by placing their shields on the ground to touch each other, the shield having a breadth of full three feet or more. We sat down opposite to them and most of us waited for the night to make a hasty retreat. The War Chief was close to us, anxious to see the effect of our guns. The lines were too far asunder for us to make a sure shot, and we requested him to close the line to about sixty yards, which was gradually done, and lying flat on the ground behind the shields, we watched our opportunity when they drew their bows to shoot at us, their bodies were then exposed and each of us, as opportunity offered, fired with deadly aim, and either killed, or severely wounded, every one we aimed at.
The War Chief was highly pleased, and the Snake Indians finding so many killed and wounded kept themselves behind their shields ; the War Chief then desired we would spread ourselves by two’s throughout the line, which we did, and our shots caused consternation and dismay along their whole line. The battle had begun about Noon, and the Sun was not yet half down, when we perceived some of them had crawled away from their shields, and were taking to flight."-Saukamappee, Peigan Nation, describing a late 18th century battle when Firearms reached the Plains Cree.
" and each of us had two balls in his mouth"
I am resisting the urge to utter a Deez nuts joke at this line
thats a really awesome description, especially since it backs up the whole idea that native Americans fought in lines with shields....something Samuel de Champlain also recorded when he witnessed a battle between Canadian warriors and the Mohawk, and the only firearm to be seen on the field was his. This leads to a very interesting understanding of the encounter between the Vikings in Newfoundland and their Miqmaq enemies. The battle would have been far more familiar to both sides then w might think.
@@Winaska Absolutely. The Norse had better armor and swords but they fought in very similar ways. There's European records of native Americans in wooden army and using longbows, war picks and lances.
Fantastic video, fantastic amount of research! I'm no expert, just an armchair historian but I do want to add another advantage of the musket that wasn't addressed. The flatter trajectory leading to a much larger kill zone. Compare the archer having to aim more vertically leading to hitting his opponent with downward plunging fire to that of a musketeer with a far flatter trajectory. The killing field for the musket is much much bigger.
Well said. I've always wondered but never put so much thought into it. Thank you!
I’ll never forget my work friend who once insisted a modern rifle wasn’t the equal of a bow in the right hands. No joke, he told me he carried a pistol crossbow in his car because “A gun would just be too pedestrian.” After talking to him for a couple of years, he finally broke down, got an old SKS, and he’s never looked back lmao.
@@HelghastStalker Backwards? Didn't they like, make a sun or something?
@HoboMaster Uh what? No they don't, they either would use sub-sonic ammo or something low calibre with a really good surpressor. Granted the most common is a surpressor plus sub-sonic ammo.
@HoboMaster Show me an article, video, picture, or document of that happening.
@@HelghastStalker A 85lb hunting bow will drop a 200lb sow dead with one loose. There are plenty of cases of guns failing to do the same with modern smokeless powder, let alone the drastically inferior black powder guns.
Why I bring this up? A 150lb war bow will punch through a bulls skull with ease and you are drastically underestimating bows.
@HoboMaster No nation uses crossbows for any regiment. Only people who use any bows are specific spectial forces and only if the individual chooses it.
Airguns are exclusively used over bows because they are far more efficient.
honestly, this is the best edited video that his editor did. i found myself chuckling to a few. the 3 best parts of this for me where the Spanish Gorilla, the stone wall, and the kidnaping. don't ask bout the last one, or you'll go with him...
Indeed.
I missed hearing your outro line, which was cut off at “I shall remain.” I think many of your points for muskets vs. longbows also apply to crossbows vs. longbows, though I’ve never seen a bayonet affixed to a crossbow.
One thing bows could do better was indirect fire arching over an obstacle, yet I’ve heard that longbows tended to be used in a direct line of fire more than the arching fire commonly depicted in movies. In any case, history has decided the winner, and your video helped clarify why.
I need a video on cavalry charging into squares
"Until the next time, my dear viewer, I am and I shall remain"
well, that's a relief
The musket is much like an imperial lasgun (other than the fact that a musket can pretty much kill anything it hits)
It's easy to produce, versatile, easy to use, and while in pre industrial times reliability wasn't a thing to rely on, it's more reliable than a literal slab of wood.
This comment meets the approval of the Arbites
@@BrandonF O:
AND YOU GET A BAYONET!
To be fair, a lasgun is a seriously powerful infantry weapon easily capable of dismembering a human sized adversary...
They only seem weak in comparison to the xenos and Astartes
@@SonsOfLorgar Also the power of it's hit technically depends on the power soirce or setting and not the weapon itself depending on the pattern.
Also, last ditch grenade function is pretty nifty.
Really nice you talk about the most important point when comparing weapons: economy!
Brandon, you silly billy. Here's your primary source right here:
Dear military high command, can I have a company of elite longbowman
-The Duke of Wellington.
Oh man, you're right! What a fool I have been.
Something i'm surprised Brandon didn't bring up, is that the Bowaboos say that bows are stealthier than muskets, but you cannot fire an English longbow while being prone, and it would probably quite difficult to do it crouched, meaning that to fire the supposedly "Stealthy" longbow you would have to stand straight. And make a large target of yourself.
And one a sidenote, by the Mid/Late 18th/Early 19th Century, the use of bows had greatly decreased to a point where there were probably less than 1000 people who could effectively use an English longbow. Meaning that a bow Battalion, or regiment, would have to be trained from scratch. Which could take years to train, a battalion mustered to fight at Rolica, would see its first engagement at Waterloo.
And the reason I make the comparison with a longbow in mind, and not a yumi, a daikyū, or a Mongolian composite bow, is the fact, that Brandon used the longbow as a comparison in the video.
I think it's a confusion with native american tactics. Archery was used for surprise attacks FROM COVER as you didn't know where the arrow came from without a flash or noise. Of course, you can't do that on most battlefields, and the effectiveness goes away the longer the fight goes on.
Brandon only used longbows in comparison because he doesn't want to bring other bows from Asia which are known to be far superior to longbow and smaller as well. This would break his logic in the video
@@Jake-dh9qk That's nice but they're even worse in terms of production (they take months to make), more delicate (they will literally fall apart) have the same firepower as a longbow (still not as lethal as a musket) and still require a lifetime of training to be more effective than a musketeer trainee.
@@Tareltonlives What do you mean by composite bows falling apart?
And the composite bows have same firepower as longbow but it takes less strength to wield them due to better energy efficiency.
A 120lb composite bow is more or less equal to a 150lb warbow. Thats due to the longbow's inefficient design.
@@Tareltonlives I thought I told you yesterday that composites being "delicate" is a myth...? Please stop spreading it.
And ask any big-game hunter how long you'll last after taking an arrow... you'll go down inside of a minute.
But good point on bows using cover for ambush. All ambushes use cover, honestly... so the idea you need to lie prone is special pleading. Musketeers have to stand up to reload anyway, whereas a bowman can nock arrows while crouching.
“I am and I shall remain -”
Brandon
Remain what!
@@tsk9277 Brandon
@@tsk9277 we will never know
That's it. He is, and he will continue to be.
Let's go Brandon
This is your best editing yet. This was gold
A great job in the delivery of the bow vrs musket argument. I always preferred the musket because of the ease of training to use it effectively.
Longbows take many years to practice and hone to an effective nature, a matchlock can be trained in groups of dozens of men for 7 hours a day per month and they're masters at the weapon by the end. There's a reason guns became dominant, and that's because they were dominantly simpler and cheaper, which allowed the faith to be put in them enough to improve them to the god pieces we have now.
A matchlock has plenty of accounts where 1 shot didn't penetrate decently made plate armor, but it takes 18 years + a bunch of wealth to create one knight, and it takes 5 peasants with boom sticks that only had a month training to blow that away.
A troop of longbowmen take 20 or more years to effectively produce, and they are just as easily overwhelmed and blown away by the surge of peasants with boom sticks that only had a month training.
I also want to mention that these examples above are with matchlocks. A flintlock, especially a gun from the Napoleonic era, would blow a longbow out of the water.
And remember that longbows were made from a specific type of wood, which makes producing them even harder.
@@retrowave762 And early gun barrels were not even steel. Copper was used too.
Not sure about individual muskets themselves being cheaper than individual bows. You have any sources showing that? It does make for an ecological and long-term concern, if you just don't have enough wood for the bows, of course.
Someone mentioned copper guns... but I don't think anyone made copper muskets or harquebusses? They'd be bronze, surely. That was generally saved for cannon, and was generally more expensive, not cheaper.
But as I pointed out to Brendon: *Economics:* Problem, army size is dictated by the quality of your supply chain and forage in the theatre of war. So while longbows are a bigger upfront investment, like any warrior society, the supply costs and limitations are about the same. You can't supply ten times as many troops because you saved some money ten years ago.
@@vanivanov9571 To my knowledge most matchlocks were made with a cast steel barrel, I don't know where the copper/brass came from.
I'm sorry I didn't present my economics point the way I meant to. One on one by themselves a musket would probably cost just a bit more, and by being cheaper I mean that its a lot cheaper to train some line infantry for a month then it is to train longbowmen for however many years necessary for them to be physically fit enough to effectively perform. Sure if you have plenty of longbowmen this advantage doesn't really come into play, and sure enough historically, it didn't until the late 16th century. Records indicate guns in Europe have been around for a fairly long time, even early forms of barrel rifling having been made in 1498, and by the time. It's very clear that it took time for guns to take over, but they certainly did.
None of that, however, speaks to the simplicity of even a matchlock; and a good matchlock is infinitely more simplistic than swordplay or the longbow. All you need to do is know how to load one, build up decent endurance to march somewhere, and know how to fire it.
@@vanivanov9571 No, I meant actual copper, not copper alloy. But we are not talking 18th century muskets there but some early matchlocks. I assume that at that early stage this was often easier to produce and more consistent than wrought iron.
This video was a lot of fun to edit. Took a while but I think it paid off in the end :)
yep! Enjoyed the edits thanks!!!!!!!
@@power2ix605 Glad you enjoyed it :)
@@jarongreen5480 the edits were the best i had ever seen on any of Brandon's videos
The comments just above this were saying you did an amazing job.
Very thorough treatment and I think exhausts the objections to the musket in it's time. Well done!
So as someone who currently shoots a 85lbs warbow. May I give my two cents on this and bring up another point on why Brandon F is correct.
While the musket maybe prone to miss firing or having wet powder. The archer is also prone to being, sick, hurt, or just in bad shape. I had a medical reaction a couple months ago that kept me from being able to fully draw my bow for a while. My body needs to be near top shape for me to be able to use my bow. You don’t need that for a musket, you can give it to the sick, the old, or young and they’ll always be able to use it.
I think this is the most important factor.
...The elderly, children, and the sick? No, you can't have those people marching with you on campaign, they can't even carry their own gear. So if someone is made so sick he can't use his bow, he's barely in a state to march with a heavy pack and perform construction.
@@vanivanov9571 who said anything about marching with heavy packs?
Anyone fit enough to reload, lift and aim a firearm can still participate in defending a village, an outpost, a city or a fort unlike a bow, pike, spear or swordsman too weak to draw a bow or keep up in a melee.
@@vanivanov9571 Debilitating illnesses were not uncommon on the pre-20th century battlefield. It is more likely that the casualty figures from disease are higher than those from the battlefield in historical military campaigns. Even high ranking individuals were prone to this issue, Edward the Black Prince of England died of dysentery while on campaign in Spain. The Siege of Harfluer in 1415 left many of the besiegers and besieged with the same issue. Basically my point is, it was quite common for soldiers to get sick or injured(obviously) while doing their job.
@@colbunkmust ...Ummm... it's utterly obvious that disease casualties are higher than casualties from wounds in most wars in history, yes. There should be no question about that. And what's your point?
If someone gets smallpox, you don't give them a gun, you get them as far away from the rest of your army as you can. They're called, "DEBILITATING" illness for a reason, you can't just ignore it and fight at 50% HP.
If you figure this is so common, get me a case where they say the archers were too weak to draw their bows, but apparently perfectly fit to fight in other capacities.
At a US frontier reenactment event I watched a Brown Bess musket user closely compete with riflemen very closely accuracy wise .very good points!
3:12 Well, my know jerk response is that they were much, much easier to learn to use at a basic level of competency, and orders of magnitude easier to master, but I'm sure you'll give a more detailed answer than that.
3:40 Also, I think the English were pretty much the only ones in western Europe using them (longbows) in large numbers anyway. Crossbows were preferred by the late Medieval period pretty much everywhere else.
That's definitely one of the reasons! Though there are many more!
Another potential reason is that longbows were, by this time, near the apex they could reach for war without advances in material sciences, where muskets were new, and had a long way they could still improve, but that's more of a reason why guns in general overtook bows, rather than specifically muskets and longbows.
And archers typically fought in a similar way to musketeers. In battlefield conditions volley fire is just the most efficient way to use ranged weapons.
Yeah, there's a good reason why archers were most frequently used as a defensive weapon rather than offensive. You needed to have a good supply of arrows, and they weren't easy to carry in a convenient to use way. You could carry plenty of them, but they'd have to have time to set up positions where they could be unleaded.
I don't know what kind of bayonet you're referring to at around 19 minutes, but didn't they start out with only plug bayonets? You do have to attach those during combat, which would take about as much time as reloading. I was pretty sure ring bayonets were a fairly late invention, so not something that would be relevant to their immediate adoption over bows, more of just one more step giving guns an edge over them.
I imagine that at least a portion of the reason why armor began to fall out of favor more once the gun prevailed was that guns were starting to be considered a better use for the metal than armor was, which could never have happened with bows being made of wood.
Archery is actually much easier to learn than musketry, the only issue is building strength for more powerful bows. Learning how to draw a bow and loose an arrow is quite easy, and can be done in just a few moments. The basics of loading a musket however are quite complicated with a lot of steps to master. With a bow you can recycle ammunition, watch it fly and impact your target and see what adjustments you need to make. With a musket you cannot recycle ammunition, you cannot watch the projectile fly, and you cannot tell where the shot landed easily meaning it is much more difficult to make adjustments. I also would argue that the basics of bow marksmanship are far simpler than the basics of firearm marksmanship, as there are a lot of little things that can have a tremendous impact on your accuracy with a firearm.
All the points raised were excellent. There's also the matter of the musket being far more powerful than the bow. An individual musket shot is not only better at penetrating armour but will also deliver a more devastating wound.In addition you can create tighter formations of muskets and thus concentrate greater firepower in a smaller area-Even with a lower rate of fire vs a bow. Muskets then are cheaper, easier to mass produce, cheaper and easier to supply and much easier to use effectivively. They are also more powerful on the battlefield.
Have a source for that? The accounts I've seen of musket and arrow injuries doesn't seem to imply one does a lot better than the other. People have continued on after getting shot many times with modern firearms (more familiar with those), but I don't know of anyone without armour continuing with multiple arrow wounds.
@@vanivanov9571 bruh… it’s a .70 Caliber bullet.
You do the math.
(Edit: I’m sure King Henry V would’ve enjoyed being shot by a .70cal musket instead of that devastating arrow he had embedded in his skull.)
@@PaladinPoppie Certainly, we can't rely on you to do the math.... The US military made a video about the bow, showing it could penetrate better than a rifle, so judging a weapon based purely off energy, or worse purely off calibre, is ridiculous. Knight and the Blast Furnace found the same, that an arrow needs a fraction of the energy to penetrate armoured plates.
And this is why a 20# bow used by children is still a deadly weapon, because it only takes a kg of pressure to put a sharp blade deep into a human body.
Except your notional individual musket is unlikely to hit a barn door at much more than 100yds, and fires three times a minute tops, while a useful range for "pro" longbowmen is 2-300 yds, individual marklsmanship is possible, and not all your targets are wearing armour anyway. For a limited time you can also double or treble musket rate of fire (then you are exhausted and have run out of ammo). Muskets made longbows redundant because they were a logical choice for mass armies, as opposed to the small armies of the Middle Ages. Bayonets made pikes redundant because a musketeer could combine both functions in one weapon. Armies evolved , and weapons and tactics obligingly conformed to their greater size.
@@Fahadalbassam07 ...Then, why didn't you reference it even in passing? Didn't notice any substantial evidence for muskets being more injurious. I think he may've speculated about that at some point, but there was so much directionless prattle I may've missed it.
Hey man! This was awesome I was thinking of D'n'D (...like) implications of the musket and BANG this video is all I need for caracteristicks. Thank you! 😃
Hey at 2:32 you featured my reenacting group the 41st regiment at fort george Ontario. I know it was completely unintentional but thanks for the shoutout i guess, although you do seem to be using us as an example of slow loading.....
Whilst the longbow was an important factor in English ascendancy during the early 100 Years’ War, it wasn’t the be all and end all. By the end of that conflict, French commanders had learned to adapt and counter the threat posed by the longbow and achieved key victories at Formigny (1450) and Castillon (1453) which decided the war in France’s favour.
Both battles exposed the shortcomings of the longbow in the face of arquebuses and artillery.
I think the simplest and yet most conclusive argument is:
If bows presented a significant advantage over muskets in an 18th century military, someone would have used them in a large scale.
Don't completely discount the conservatism of military leaders. It sometimes took extended series of disasters before long overdue switches were made.
Bows and firearms were used in parallel for quite some time and bows were gradually faded out when it became more and more difficult to procure and maintain them and their users while the firearms slowly improved and dropped in price.
I've seen so many people making this same disappointingly narrow-minded comment. There's a lot of world beyond Western Europe, you know. Bows and guns went on in parallel up until the 19th century, outside of Europe. The Samurai and Chinese had fine guns (the latter having invented them), but still considered archery quite useful. And as you implied, they weren't idiots. They just had a culture that maintained some warrior traditions, where people spent their free time training with bows or the like, unlike Western Europe who destroyed their lower and middle classes and reduced them factory workers dying of cholera.
@@vanivanov9571 Note that this video does NOT try to assert that all firearms are better than bows. It argues that 18th century European flintlocks (importantly including the socket bayonet) were.
As such weapons became available in quantity they displaced bows pretty much everywhere. Which you can also see in England, the longbow served alongside early firearms for centuries but as the flintlock emerged as a practical weapon for mass adoption the military bows disappeared.
@@88porpoise You figure the Qing lacked mass production capabilities? The flintlock is more convenient than a matchlock, but it isn't actually superior in effect. You can shoot a matchlock faster than most can shoot a flintlock, with skill. So hesitance to upgrade their armoury was likely for that reason, and presuming the flintlock is a game-changer seems special pleading.
And the socket bayonet is a compromise on the fact soldiers were already carrying a 5 to 7kg weapon, so couldn't be expected to carry a decent melee weapon as well.
@@vanivanov9571 Also in East Asia there was less of an objection to poison bolts and arrows (e.g. the standard size Chinese repeating crossbow was so underpowered that it is highly likely that the bolts were tipped into poison to make them effective). Poisoned musketballs never caught on, although to my knowledge it has been attempted (or wound infections caused by cloth taken into the wound canal by the ball were mistaken for such).
@Brandon F. I really enjoyed this video. I honestly don't remember how long I've followed your channel. I am impressed by your knowledge on the subjects you discuss. Your delivery has improved greatly over the time I've watched you as well. I am as always your humble subject.
Well thank you!
I was very impressed by your video recommendations, not one, but two lindybeige videos!
We saw the bow give way to the musket again and again: China, Turkey, India, Britain, Japan, the Americas. Bows still held out in some regions like Central Asia, the Western US and Korea, but that's because they're more useful on horseback.
The Turks held onto their Sipahi archer units up to the 18th century, they were the last major European power to retire archery.
Not quite... It depends on the type of musket.
Umm... Asia continued using the bow up till the 19th century. So I'm not sure what you mean.
@@vanivanov9571 yes Qing China was a particularly good example of this.
While in 18th century China, Chinese peasants had used guns for hunting and such, the army, which can easily purchase guns, used bows.
@@LOL-zu1zr Indeed. China INVENTED guns, but still considered bows worth having. It's because they didn't crush their rural and warrior populace like Western Europe did, with their brutal urbanization, so Asia and Africa still had martial and rural culture to wield bows.
I would really like to see your video on if horses would charge a square of pikes/bayonets or not. I was surprised you said they would.
On a sidenote. Mount & Blade Warband, is a great game.
It was rare but it could happen. I wish I could remember the precise instances, but it happen at least once in the Napoleonic Wars.
Some medieval examples: Falkirk-the Welsh archers slaughtered the Scottish pikes until Edward I thought it was thin enough to drive in a charge and chase Wallace off the field. Renaud de Dammartin's Brabançons at Bouvines held off the French horsemen until they came in with infantry support. And of course Hastings with the shield wall disintegrating after king Harold fell.
They will if you train them well enough, as a rider you just don't want to if you can avoid it.
The horse, if trained to follow commands, won't inherently shy away from a pike or bayonet. The horse has to learn to do that, if it doesn't know any better it doesn't care.
The thing about pike and later square formations is that if you're a rider, you don't want to charge into a solid mass like that. Your horse will get slowed to the point where you're just surrounded and an easy target, thus losing your advantage as a rider and rapidly becoming... well, dead, probably. To break a square formation takes a lot of suicidal mass on the part of the riders to break it up enough that you can still ride out through the other side... or break the morale of the square and put them to flight. This is why it usually wasn't done.
so short answer : it's usually the rider and not that horse that doesn't wanna commit to it
Amazing video Brandon, very well done and filled with epic facts and reasoning! Despite the fact that the longbow is my favourite weapon of all time, I do have to admit that the musket is superior- especially after this video. Also as a medievalist, it made me very happy to see Shad and Tod in your video!
Love this video and the memes. This was awesome and the editing was fantastic
What's amusing is that even in the late medieval period you already has a similar disparity between long bows and crossbows.
More medieval armies fielded crossbows despite being more expensive and complicated weapons for many of the same reasons you've given for the musket
Which is why guns replaced crossbows and not longbows. Longbows were never the conventional weapon of levied missle troops, that was always held by the sling and later the crossbow.
And crossbows are wonderful vs armour. Quicker to learn, and for a time the pope tried to outlaw them because of their capability to kill so many well dressed princelings.
@@scott3462
A crossbow could Not Pierce Plate Armour
I think one thing people overlook is that longbows, while not the worst kind of bow for long range combat don't have nearly the range of a musket, yes we all know that muskets are by design inaccurate, but it doesn't matter how accurate your arrows are if the laws of physics tell you that you can't reach your target no matter what you do, typical late medieval longbow arrows are also rather heavy, a weapon like that is much more well suited to be fired at much closer ranges than a musket. A unit of musketeers is always going to outrange a unit of longbowmen, or bowmen with recurve bows, or crossbows etc.
I somewhat doubt validity of the claim that they trained at 200 meters, they certainly didn't open up at 200 meters in Agincourt from what we know, they were firing at flat trajectories at fairly close ranges, so why train for something you're not going to do on the battlefield? The only reason I could come up with is that maybe they just wanted them to be as good as they could get whether or not they're actually going to be shooting at frenchmen 200 meters away, after all, it is something that gets mentioned about some of the more modern conflicts, that often soldiers carried rifles made to shoot further, and were trained to shoot further than the actual typical ranges of engagement in an actual combat situation, but again this just means that the numbers don't mean anything, they might well train for 200 meters but that isn't the effective range of the weapon, a model 1886 Lebel might have sights that go up to 2400 meters but you'll be extremely lucky to shoot anyone past a few hundred meters, so the ridiculous 2.4km range the sights can reach doesn't really tell you anything about the gun.
Also I would love to know who thought Wellington of all people would have asked for a company of longbowmen, ''The campaign is going too well, I require additional challenges, please send me a unit of troops that I cannot utilize in the same manner as my regular troops, with a weapon that nobody really manufactures in any great numbers anymore making logistics hell, that shoots ammunition that requires a trained specialist to manufacture, as opposed literally anyone with half a brain, access to fire and the right tools, thank you.''
the longer range settings on older guns weren't actually for or expected to be used for any sort of typical combat. My understanding is that those were intended for volley fire done en masse by formations at enemy groups/formations with the intent to break up whatever it is they may be doing.
I can't find much more on the topic unfortunately. It would be interesting to read accounts of it being used.
Long ranges would probably be more useful when dealing with Crossbows, and supporting infantry who are about to charge, or are being charged: the arrows may or may not do much damage, but suppression has a value on its own.
No the bow has superior range to muskets because arrows are more aerodynamic. However the value of ranged weapons are not judged by range alone.
@@LOL-zu1zr no, just no. The arrow has lesser total range due to far larger surface and thus drag coefficient than any bullet on top of it's far slower V⁰.
On top of that, those properties require a lot steeper angles of launch to reach those ranges which in turn drops ranged accuracy even before accounting for windage.
@@LOL-zu1zr Please tell me this is a piss take.
25:05 I think you've actually missed a potential advantage of the musket: The smoke makes it harder for a longbowman to hit. An ideal volley would consist of, from each archer, one direct shot and one angled shot, each timed to land around the same time. But neither is as straight as a musket ball; meaning the moving clouds of thick smoke obscuring enemy lines could significantly hinder the archers' ability to actually hit the enemy.
Archers wouldn't need to aim at particular enemy soldier.
@@BojanPeric-kq9et No, but they do need to be able to see the group they're firing at clearly so that they can judge distance accurately.
@@Swenthorian I find it fascinating that smoke doesn't hinder people with muskets. IR vision?
@@BojanPeric-kq9et Musket balls don't have as much drop as arrows, and their technique is different. You can just aim right at the cloud of smoke with a musket. With a bow, you typically perform volleys such that you have two shots land simultaneously. The way this works, is one shot head-on, and one shot angled. The angled shot would be much harder to pull-off with smoke obscuring the enemy lines, and the direct shot would also likely suffer some, as it would be harder to estimate the amount of drop the archers need to compensate for.
Glad to see you mention the armor penetration in the video.
It's the number one reason I'd give for the switch to firearms, closely followed by the ability to adequately train someone to shoot over the course of a weekend (enough to be dangerous to the enemy), and guns are just simply better for most realistic scenarios. Give a 12-year-old boy a musket, and you can have him killing enemies much sooner than if you handed him a 120 pound war bow, plus he'll be able to defeat armor. That's huge, a major win for firearms. The logistics and cost benefits were something I hadn't considered, and just even further support the awesomeness of firearms.
To be fair with Sharpe, the budget wasn’t enough to portrait (regularly) more than some skirmishing and ambushes.
And in those episodes where he ambushed a French convoy (Sharpe’s gold and Sharpe’s siege) those were supplying or transporting something as described in the video (One had valuables and the other medicines and a medic).
I have not read the books yet, but at least in the series that’s what happen.
This comment is not an angry one, it’s just a matter of defending the fandom’s honor xd
Once again I find myself pleasantly surprised that another Brandon F. video showed up for me to watch, this was a very enjoyable and educational video.
reminded me of the great saying~
"Faith, Steel, and Gunpowder"
Another couple of musket advantages:
1. More damage on impact from hydrostatic shock and such: arrows are like being stuck with a big knitting needle. Easily fatal, sometimes even instantly, but without as much shock/smashing effect on tissues.
2. Readiness: you can keep a musket (or pistol) loaded for days and have it immediately ready to shoot. A bow simply can't match that "instant first shot even hours or days later" advantage.
Love the pics👍
Very good presentation. The case for 'logistics' being the deciding factor is very well made and will be difficult to counter. This video was also very entertaining and well as informative.
I love this channel for the colonial historical content. Been submerging myself in various times of history these past couple months and I am really glad to have found this channel
Here after watching shad's video. Great video and channel dude.
I don't know where you found the most army footage of 249 usage ever recorded, but I appreciate it's addition to the video.
Edit: this is the most eloquent description of force multipliers that I've ever heard.
You made a very good point about training in longbows being mandatory for so long in England, it really shows it's not that simple
7:41 In the Spanish army too. Spanish soldiers in the early XIX century trained aiming their muskets for fire at distances of up to 400m.
For the closest conflict of guns vs bows, see the Qing conquest of Ming China and Korea. The Qing won through superior calvary and organization but they quickly incorporated artillery and arquebus into their armies. They maintained their mounted calvary armies into the second half of the 19th century but it was more due to tradition than effectiveness.
why would gunpowder stop cavalry effectiveness in china? it didn't stop them in europe. even in ww2 mounted cavalry proved effective (as long as no tanks with HE were around, they smashed soviet infantry in charges, and Italian cavalry even beat British matildas in east Africa while mounted).
@@matthiuskoenig3378 I meant the Qing Bannermdn calvary lost their effectiveness. Their organization and training was outdated, and their horsemen failed to reach those standards too.
@@JayFLee1 There's also the Japan-Korean war. Japan used Arquebusses for their infantry and Korea mostly used archers.
@@n0rdlys_40 Actually guys, both the Qing and the Japanese both used their bows and arrows along with muskets, Qing frontier cavalry used Qing muskets from afar when the enemy came close enough you'd shoot them with a bow and arrow. Qing muskets were not seen as a primary weapon like European muskets and were long and slow reloading high accuracy skirmishing weapons, doctrinally if the Qing ever decide to turn their muskets into a primary weapon they might develop the bayonet and musket drills like the Europeans. Tbh standardization is probably one of the better reasons for muskets to be used, even tho bows are simple to produce on paper, each person has a different height a built and bows are often custom made rather than mass-produced in factories.
@@JayFLee1 I think u all misunderstand this is a completely different scenario then the wars in Europe. The wars in Europe are pretty much way more advanced warfare then Asia and the Americans at the time. Europe you have armies in a constant state of warfare for centuries with standing armies, mercenaries and big open fields where they killed each other for centuries. In Asia and the America's there are thrown together armies with limited firearms, funds and the specialty to make firearms. Europe advanced them into firearms warfare threw trade and they weren't advanced enough or had the time to completely use them like the Europeans.
this has all been very interesting you have changed my opinion thank you.
now i feel like an idiot for never considering the effects of training time on how many soldiers a nation could field, nor the deficiency in melee combat of the longbow.
Overall a fantastic video and im glad to have my mind changed
You're not the one who should feel like an idiot, on either of those counts. For melee, he cherry picked a guy who was slow to stow his bow... and even then it only takes 5 seconds. Plus, he's not carrying a 5~7kg musket, so he can easily carry a 2kg spear, which outshines the bayonet in every respect.
To quote my response to the video on economics:
""
*Economics:* Problem, army size is dictated by the quality of your supply chain and forage in the theatre of war. So while longbows are a bigger upfront investment, like any warrior society, the supply costs and limitations are about the same. You can't supply ten times as many troops because you saved some money ten years ago.
""
Such an argument must surely come with the snark we love
Why do I see you everywhere? You're like the historical Justin Y.
@@theaman42069 I am that I am
i think the more interesting question is WHY the early muskets and early handcannons startet to replace the longbow is those are answered it gets clear why the napoleonic musket is the standart weapon
Nice channel. Thanks to Shad (and u). greetings from germany
to be fair, a flintlock is probably more accurate per bullet fired than that fellow trying to dual-wield light machine guns from the hip
Idk, historical records said that a musket line of 300 men firing had about 10-15 casualties per volley. That's like a 5% chance of hitting a target per musket fired at around 150 yards.
@@Jake-dh9qk source? In my experiance 150 yards sounds too far away to let go the first volley... (we practice after period target size at 50 yards)
@@erikryen6912 100 yard is probably the average engagement range but muskets get exponentially more accurate the closer you are. At 50 yards or meters the hit ratio is just too much for men to be within that distance unless they are well-trained. Musket warfare is kinda like push of pikes. Musketeers generally avoid getting too close if they could. If armies engaged at 50yards all the time then casualties will be sky-high and regiments would rout within a minute of contact.
Prussian military analysts in 1813 would test the accuracy of muskets from 100yard up to 400yard for the sake of it. But 100-150yard is generally the engagement range. You're not trying to murder the entire army, you're just trying to push them off the field or rout them.
You have certain units and nations inventing doctrines that emphasize on getting up close to enemies and rout them by fear, but those are reserved for specialized and extremely well trained units.
@@Jake-dh9qk Just a thought, if you are in a firing line like that, which guy on the other side are you aiming at? How do you know the other 299 guys don't find him kinda suspicious too?
Loving the editing!
I'm glad you like it! this video was a lot of fun to put together.
And there it is. Glad you mentioned it.
Only at the armor portion of the video, but so far I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the mobilization factor. How long does it take to train a longbowman? A couple years to get them strong enough to draw regularly. How long to train musketeer? 6 months maybe?
I just knew shad would find this video.
I was actually waiting for someone to get it off to shad so i could see his response and wether or not my own reaction was adequate.
Turns out me and shad agree that bowman when charged by melee unite, would just drop his bow and draw his sword.
Shad's vids are always excellent, and it's cool to see him react to your stuff.
Great video, but yes as you said You missed something... aiming. A man using a flintlock can take his time aiming. waiting in a window for his target to show himself. As Shad and Lindybeige has shown, that is impossible to do with a longbow- and that means a lot on a battlefield that often involves sieges.
In sieges, you often just want to supress the enemy, so you can close in
Brandon saying “sneaky beaky” gives me life. Also, I always thought that each weapon was effective in their own time. The arbitrary nature of battle can make any weapon “good” or “bad” at any time. Not to mention the evolution of battle itself and that fact that we are comparing two different time periods. If a weapon wasn’t useful, they wouldn’t be using it for centuries.
A year later this video is still probably one of the best I've seen
Supposedly one feature of muskets is that the wounds inflicted were "dirty" compared to the "clean" cutting/piercing wounds of bladed weapons and arrows. The wounds would not only be big and ragged and expose more of your insides to the outside, but introduce fibers of your own (filthy) uniform, powder residue, bits of wadding, (probably rancid!) animal fats used to grease the cartridges, etc. Even if you survived the trauma of a musket ball hit, you were extremely likely to get a horrible infection that would at the very least disable you for the rest of the war and could very well lead to a long, agonizing death instead of getting stitched up and recuperating for a few weeks.
I have heard modern bullets are sanitized by being heated by the powder and air resistance. Flintlocks fired slow, heavy balls instead of small fast rounds like we use today, so that would probably mean the projectile would be less clean than a modern bullet, but the effect couldn't be ignored. There was also the common practice of leaving bullets in victims because surgeries would increase the chance of infection, so that would imply the bullets were cleaner than surgical equipment at the time. Poison arrows are also historical in South America and India against invading Europeans. The only modern example I know of poison bullets is the Nazi experiment, so I think archery would be a better option for biological warfare.
@@forgottenrights351 the bullets might be sanitized by heat as they are fired, but they pull everything they hit into you. Bullet trauma is massive compared to arrows just because of energy.
@@archersfriend5900 True, stitching up people would be more work and have a greater chance of infection if the wound is bigger. The animal fat thing would be negligible, though, especially because you could dunk your arrows in whatever you want before shooting them.
Isn't this similar to when Forgotten Weapons had to talk about why old Bolt-Actions are obsolete to modern weapons?
Bolt action rifles have a few niche advantages for them. They allow easier retrieval of the brass for reloading, surplus rifles can be bought very cheaply, they can use very underpowered ammo, since they don't need the gun to self cycle, and there's no magazine that could catch a twig.
Niche, and obsolete all the same.
@@VilleKivinen Surplus market hasn't been cheap for a while now.
@@VilleKivinen from a military perspective the only advantage to bolt action is you don't need a recoil mechanism to cycle it. in large caliber weapons that would require a lot of heavy components moving inside the gun, making it all but impossible to use them semi-auto anyway. manual operation in that case is just more preferable, simplifies and lightens the gun with no practical loss of ROF
but yeah, you still get some numpties who talk about how they're slightly more accurate (by milimeters at 300 yards...) as a reason why a lee-enfield is still a viable battlefield weapons...
A M24 is about as accurate as a gucci SR25. This ain't the 70's no more.
@@petriew2018 accuracy of standard rifles hasn't really been relevant in decades though. No soldier can hit fleeting target at 300 meters when they are tired and the target is only partially visible. Whether the rifle can shoot sub minute of angle groups is just irrelevant.
There are always going to be idealized scenarios where a longbow could be superior. What can't be ignored is the larger picture of training and equipping an army.
EDIT: Brandon covered it.
I think I've found the source of that Wellington quote:
It's from an 1800s historical fiction book by George Alfred Henty about the battle of Waterloo. I believe it's called "One of the 28th, a tale of Waterloo".
25:00 sick shot with the slow mo, you can really feel the power
I’d gladly duel someone who’s using a longbow if I get a musket myself.
You do competition smoothbore shooting?
@@vanivanov9571 no, but nevertheless.
I wouldn't try that. Any good longbowman or woman can dodge bullets and shoot more than 60 arrows per minute. I know this because I am a longbow archer myself.
@@sonwig5186 A person who's advocating for the use of longbows against muskets in actual warfare has probably never shot a single bow in their entire life, and thus would probably be a piece of cake. If I was supposed to duel someone who has had some bow experience, I'd probably:
-wouldn't be doing it in the first place,
or
-fucking die lol
Well, this got cringey fast. Apparently, the idiot who has never shot a musket before thinks he can outshoot Joe Gibbs. As it is, we've already seen the duel play out in various videos.
Even USMC who pick up a musket for the first time tend to miss by a mile, or sometimes even proficient musketeers miss targets at less than 50m... so I figure you won't hit anything after ten minutes of trying, and are more likely to blow up your musket when you forget to blow down the barrel between shots, or any other number of mistakes.
Meanwhile, any member of the longbow society can put shots in a 3m circle at about 200m, about one arrow every 5 to 10 seconds. So you're not even a match for their nice little old ladies.
So, we already know the results... you agreed to run around screaming as arrows fall around you, unable to reload. That'd be funny to watch, so do tell me if you decide to back up the e-tough boast.
Actually, the reliability of the bow is also not that great in the same wet conditions where the musket struggles. Both the string and the bow itself are susceptible to water, which could lead to snapping of the string or the bow losing it's power.
I remember reading a book set in the middle ages where when in the rain the protagonist armed with a bow had to keep his string in a dry pouch until he needed to use the bow.
beeswax . . .
@@maryginger4877 not quite the point, as beeswax is a way to waterproof the bow, just as you can try to waterproof the musket. It might be possible to argue that waterproofing a bow is somewhat easier, but it also needs to be done.
@@AlricOfRahls As an archer, I've used beeswax and shot all day in the rain, no problem - apart from drying me and my kit at the end of the day.
@@maryginger4877 Ok, point taken. Probably still a pain during a campaign, but seemingly less of a problem than I thought.
If muskets are so inferior to bows then why even the cultures most rooted in the bow also adopted it? Or why they also adopt combinated arms instead of throwing away their muskets? Some of these nations even produced their own muskets...
It's amazing to see the fanatical defense of bow fanboys still maintaining the myth that Wellington wanted longbows, and even creating a paltry attempt to discredit period accounts like Baron de Marbot or trying to exaggerate his light arrow injuries as if it was lethal.
Also, the hit/battlefield comparison is not a very fair comparison. If it were, the armaments of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan would be wildly inaccurate.