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>There's another major problem: preventing peasants from being a threat whilst still yielding some benefit from the longbow could easily have been achieved by r

>There's another major problem: preventing peasants from being a threat whilst still yielding some benefit from the longbow could easily have been achieved by restricting archery training to nobles and selected privileged guards, who had more time and inclination towards military training than the peasantry anyway. That was pretty small number of people in the middle ages, and they would already have been trained as mounted knights or men-at-arms so retraining them as archers would not be a net gain unless one archer was more valuable than one man-at-arms which I don't think is likely. The advantage of the longbow is that once trained, you could raise a large army quite cheaply but that army only worked as part of a combined arms operation that also had armoured infantry and cavalry. That means that you don't want to sacrifice the other elements of your army in order to build a longbow capability.

notahacker 11y ago
At the very least though, you'd have thought they could have sacrificed crossbowmen to achieve that improved rate of fire from longbows. Presumably the reason they didn't had less to do with fear of better bowmen and more to do with inability to provide the quality of longbows and training that would convince crossbowmen to change their weaponry.
cmdkeen 11y ago
There's also the whole concept of feudalism to throw into the mix. Longbows were cheap so you could require your peasantry to own and practice them - or at least for a community to supply X archers per Y population. Knights are significantly more expensive, and again require years of practice. The principle of feudalism was landholding being tied to military service - you hold the land from your feudal lord and in return this supports your ability to provide military arms. Take away the requirement for you to provide expensive armour and destriers (the war horses knights rode) and you remove the need for you to hold land, which undermines the political settlement of the Kingdom.

notahacker 11y ago

At the very least though, you'd have thought they could have sacrificed crossbowmen to achieve that improved rate of fire from longbows. Presumably the reason they didn't had less to do with fear of better bowmen and more to do with inability to provide the quality of longbows and training that would convince crossbowmen to change their weaponry.

cmdkeen 11y ago

There's also the whole concept of feudalism to throw into the mix. Longbows were cheap so you could require your peasantry to own and practice them - or at least for a community to supply X archers per Y population. Knights are significantly more expensive, and again require years of practice. The principle of feudalism was landholding being tied to military service - you hold the land from your feudal lord and in return this supports your ability to provide military arms. Take away the requirement for you to provide expensive armour and destriers (the war horses knights rode) and you remove the need for you to hold land, which undermines the political settlement of the Kingdom.