16 ms·

Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire

513 points by StefanBatory 1y ago

jakubmazanec 1y ago
When I was playing Medieval: Total War (both I and II), the bows and crossbows were very effective against an enemy attacking me. Now I wonder if the game modeled the arrow barrage realistically, or to align it with our movie-based perception of medieval archers.
- jayGlow 1y ago
  i remember a history channel show using the total war games in order to determine the best type of bow. I'm not sure how accurate it was
- wffurr 1y ago
  There's a variety of essays on Total War and various infantry types, how well the tactics are modeled, etc.: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.blog+total+war+archer https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.b...
  - jjmarr 1y ago
    Their essay on composite infantry types is interesting as a Crusader Kings II player, because the game has tons of historically accurate mixed units you can recruit that combine archers and heavy infantry/pikes, but virtually all of those units suck because the combat mechanics still enforce a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-infantry-type/ https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-... Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad. The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops. In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.
- kergonath 1y ago
  There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead. Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      > Total War is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series. (It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.) > There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational. That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.
      - frollogaston 1y ago
        You can use archers to kill cavalry or the other way around. It's just that you don't want any kind of melee-capable enemy reaching your archers.
    - StefanBatory 1y ago
      From Rome 2 multiplayer, I remember spearmen absolutely not even with swords :P My server played with swords limit, because then everyone would pick only them! Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Btw, the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for MTW2 is amazing. It turns the game into a more historically accurate and overall better version of Rome TW... but archers still do volleys, which even if they wanted to avoid, is probably part of the game engine. Interestingly, mounted archers don't do volleys in those games.
crazygringo 1y ago
I've read the whole thing and I'm not convinced at all. First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false. But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause. I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion. But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama. Am I missing something here?
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  I think his argument about draw weight is compelling. In order to do a coordinated valley you would have to have everyone draw and hold. Bows have highly variable “lock time”. There is no trigger and you can’t reasonably get an army to draw at the same rate. Reload times are fast enough that the fastest archer may be able to be ready to fire again before the last archer has completed their first shot. In those circumstances, you would simply get orders to start and stop firing.
  - treis 1y ago
    You wouldn't hold the bow drawn. The archers would nock their arrows and at the command would draw and loose the arrow. That would result in them all shooting at roughly the same time. Just a second or so delayed from the command.
  - 1y ago
jjk166 1y ago
What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting. For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
- sandworm101 1y ago
  >> I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.
- detourdog 1y ago
  This was a nice write and it would be nice to hear about the advantages of the long bow.
SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
There is something strange about the way this article was written. Besides that it could have been 25% of its final length, it repeats itself quite a bit. I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.
- ranger207 1y ago
  The name of the blog is "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry". The symptoms you see are caused by Unmitigated Pedantry. It's the author's style
  - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    Cool… except being intentionally lame doesn’t make something less lame.
    - ranger207 1y ago
      "Lame" is subjective. I personally like it, and you might not. That's fine. That's just this guy's style, and you don't have to like it
- psalaun 1y ago
  It annoyed me as well, I eventually stopped reading due to this
- trefoiled 1y ago
  I found the overuse of italics for emphasis fatiguing
ropable 1y ago
The statistics about the draw weight of war bows being 100 to 170 lb (45-77 kg) is striking to me. Imagine getting to the gym, picking up a single 45 kg dumbbell (the lowest end!), and setting out to rep as many single-arm rows as you can before failure. Of course you wouldn't hold that dumbbell at full contraction; that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.
- almostgotcaught 1y ago
  > that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds. I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
  - varelaseb 1y ago
    Why would it ever be impossible/unbelievable? The whole point is it was commonplace for this type of person. It's just surprising that the number's that large.
  - hooloovoo_zoo 1y ago
    Plus a dumbbell is the same weight the whole time while the bow is only the draw weight at full draw.
    - modo_mario 1y ago
      On the other hand as someone noted: you don't bring up a dumbbell by a thin string with 3 fingers. I think when trained and without holding like in the movies you could go a bit longer than you'd expect with dumbbels but goddamn your fingers must hurt after.
  - tmpz22 1y ago
    Yeah but spend your whole life malnourished and march 20 miles THEN do the reps (as peasant archers probably had to do).
tptacek 1y ago
What this article doesn't account for is the proposition that many, many historic armies did war bow volley fire, and we've never heard about it because they all got wiped out because it's such a bad idea.
- eviks 1y ago
  Not really, first, being wiped out doesn't mean literally everyone dying, but also it doesn't prevent the winning side from recording the victory and its cause
  - acjohnson55 1y ago
    Perhaps oral traditions survive from soldiers sold into slavery from lost battles. Like somehow, the folly of volley fire made it into the name of some food dish. Or maybe they would have simply massacred any army so dumb as to try it.
    - eviks 1y ago
      I don't understand the need to come up with some fancy niche (slavery, oral, food name) when you have the more common approach: as is usual, part of the army ran away, and it included people of all ranks, from soldiers to generals, and they recorded it in all the same ways all the other events for recorded in the same sources (including training guides) Then you continue to ignore the other elephant - the soldiers and everyone else who won battles also record history avoiding the slavery/food route And again, "massacre" doesn't mean 100%
- int_19h 1y ago
  Occam's Razor.
  - permo-w 1y ago
    to me Occam's Razor is a fairly unsound thinking strategy, particularly in scenarios like this
- 1y ago
sandworm101 1y ago
Question: What does this author think happened instead of the volley? Does he expect that archers just started randomly firing when they felt like doing so? Of course not. They waited for the order to start firing. So the first shots would, imho, constitute a "volley" in that everyone would be launching in the same few seconds. Subsequent shots would then become less coordinated, but that first wave would be a true volley. Then orders would come to stop/move/start, resulting in other coordinated volleys.
- lolinder 1y ago
  The author has an entire series of posts on how pre-modern generalship did and didn't work, including a post on issuing commands. The tl;dr is that there cannot have been a generalized order to fire on cue because pre-modern armies didn't have that kind of command resolution and speed. Best case you have a few guys who start firing because they're told to and the rest follow suit when they notice that it's started, more likely there's an established doctrine for when firing should happen and archers use their judgement for whether to start. https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-ii-commands/ https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...
  - mcmoor 1y ago
    I don't think a command to start firing is that complicated. A simple flag wave suffices especially for <100 archers that's standing still. There are more complicated commands that a centurion had been able to do.
bandrami 1y ago
Peter H Wilson had an interesting point in his 30 years war book that it's not just the appearance of firearms (musketeers in Spanish terzios fired in their own time), you also had to have a philosophical change to allow seeing a human as a cog in a larger machine; it's fundamentally an Early Modern concept rather than a renaissance one. And so you first see volley fire among the Italian condottieri and the Low Countries' militias, where you were simultaneously seeing the start of mercantile economies based on transactions between individuals.
Asraelite 1y ago
I disagree with the point about the word "fire". How can you criticize the English word used if historically they weren't even speaking English? Scenes are depicted in English instead of the native language of the setting for the benefit of the audience (and budget), and in modern English it's perfectly okay to use "fire" as a translation for the act of loosing a bow, even if "loose" is more commonly used in archery.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  But English-speaking places have bows and arrows. (Even a particularly famous historical one!). So it’s reasonable to expect a translation into English to use the English word for sending an arrow from a bow. If it were some science fiction setting with a weapon very unlike any real historical weapons then sure, the particular etymology of the English word wouldn’t be very relevant.
  - Asraelite 1y ago
    There were no English-speaking places that used bows extensively. The closest would've been Early Modern English, which is still drastically different to Modern English. If the actors were actually speaking Shakespearean English then sure, it would be wrong for them to say "fire"/"fyr", but if they did that then you wouldn't understand half of what they're saying. I'm sure there's a few actual examples of this though, for scenes depicting battles in England after 1800 or so that use bows. I would still say it's debatable whether you could consider this truly modern English but it's close enough.
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      All of which is extraneous to the question, "Did armies use volleys of arrows?". If the French-speaking English commanders at Agincourt told their archer captains to "Laissez-y" instead of "Fire!", what difference does that make? (For context, King Henry V of Agincourt fame is considered to probably have been the first English monarch who spoke English as a mother tongue, and may have been the first who was remotely proficient in it.)
gitroom 1y ago
Tbh, reading all this makes my head spin a little but I def love how deep some folks get into the nitty gritty of old school tactics - you think there's actually any lost technique out there we'll never fully figure out?
- bjackman 1y ago
  I think lost techniques are the rule rather than the exception. There are loads of fundamental questions about how premodern combat took place that will probably never be decided. You can get a feel for lots of them by reading this very blog. Stuff like: did opposing infantry lines actually stay in contact for long periods at a time or did they clash for a couple of brief minutes at a time and then mutually retreat a few paces to recover stamina?
  - dpig_ 1y ago
    In Warhammer we call it Fall Back in Good Order.
- KSteffensen 1y ago
  Lost techniques are the field of experimental archaeology.
- smallwire 1y ago
  We need a chronoscope.
usrusr 1y ago
So basically, what he's saying is that the depictions in Hägar the Horrible of fighters charging on with arrow-studded shields aren't all that unrealistic. File under unexpected.
zurfer 1y ago
in the spirit that you only need one reason to be right, not five: the strongest argument against volley "fire" is indeed that holding a bow is exhausting and so a commander wouldn't tell their archers to "hold" before releasing.
otikik 1y ago
They didn't research the upgrade.
AlexMoffat 1y ago
The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
- codyvoda 1y ago
  it happens on practically every topic. this was technologically not possible 100 years ago and it’ll be fascinating to watch play out. stfu and listen is a legit skill in 2025
  - cwmma 1y ago
    100 years ago the term "armchair general" was already 25 years old.
    - bunderbunder 1y ago
      And 200 years ago cringy dinner table conversations about complex and subtle topics was already an established literary trope.
- kop316 1y ago
  The same author discusses something similar here: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/ https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm... In discussing why in LOTR Saruman's battle campaign is terrible: "Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be."
booleandilemma 1y ago
I don't quite buy it. There's a line in Herodotus' Histories about Persian arrows blocking out the sun, and that implies a volley to me. I don't have time to find a link now but if you google it you'll see. (Incidentally, it's also in the movie 300)
- msl 1y ago
  If you happen to have Randal Munroe's what if? [1] on your bookshelf, look up the chapter titled "Sparta". It should convince you that the story of arrows blocking the sun is probably not true. If you don't have it, you could try to do the math yourself. Munroe assumes that 1) an arrow intercepts 40 cm² of sunlight, 2) an archer looses 8 to 10 arrows a minute and 3) each arrow spends an average of three seconds in flight. You could adjust those numbers to taste, but I would not expect the conclusion to change. [1] https://xkcd.com/what-if/ https://xkcd.com/what-if/
- codydkdc 1y ago
  Herodotus, the famously accurate historian
joe8756438 1y ago
It seems like the archery gets disproportionately more “hollywood doesn’t understand how it works” coverage than other things. Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Well there's also: * Infantry presses vs out-and-out melee * Siege weapons as "artillery" during field battles as though it was WW1 levels of firepower * Cavalry charges as battering rams / tanks So, maybe you can train yourself to see all of those too. Then you'll enjoy nothing :D
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see? Nah, it's everything. You see every specialist community complaining about it.
indymike 1y ago
The bow has a slow rate of fire, you can't hold a longbow in firing position for long (150+lbs of force required hold the drawn back bow), and you are only accurate from 300-800 feet (add 15% if in a high tower). That means charging calvary will reach your archers in 10-15 seconds and moderately paced walking infantry unit will be on top of your archers within 20-30 seconds of entering range. That leaves time for a few arrows. The bunched up, tight formations formed a reasonable defense - your outer troops would take the hits from the archers for the 20 seconds it took to get to the archers. We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...
- cafard 1y ago
  It seems to me that at Agincourt the archers place obstacles in front of their position--sharpened stakes. That would have provided some protection against a cavalry
  - indymike 1y ago
    Agincourt was interesting because mud (a combination of rain and fresh plowed fields) reduced infantry and cavalry mobility. The opening cavalry charge made the muddy battlefield worse, and the combination of mud and stakes on the ground injured the horses. The French were heavily armored, causing men-at-arms to sink up to their knees in mud. English longbowmen were able fire arrows into the french men-at-arms who were literally stuck in the mud until they ran out of arrows. The decisive moment was when English archers ran out of arrows and attacked the exhausted French with the hatchets and mallets they used to make and drive the stakes into their defensive positions.
- hirvi74 1y ago
  To be fair, an arrow released from a bow with a draw weight of over 150 pounds could easily launch an arrow that could pass through multiple people at close range -- depending on how light their armor was. I've seen bows with a third of that draw weight completely pass through a deer. Obviously, certain factors have to be met -- distance being the most important and then shot placement.
salynchnew 1y ago
After that discussion of draw weight, I can now see why English longbowmen are notable in the the archeological record due their noticeable spinal deformities. 110lbs on a traditional bow? Sheesh.
butlike 1y ago
And in the movies you never see any of the arrows collide; ever.
mimd 1y ago
Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.
zombot 1y ago
Our weekly dose of pedantry give us today!

513 points by StefanBatory 1y ago

When I was playing Medieval: Total War (both I and II), the bows and crossbows were very effective against an enemy attacking me. Now I wonder if the game modeled the arrow barrage realistically, or to align it with our movie-based perception of medieval archers.

jayGlow 1y ago
i remember a history channel show using the total war games in order to determine the best type of bow. I'm not sure how accurate it was
wffurr 1y ago
There's a variety of essays on Total War and various infantry types, how well the tactics are modeled, etc.: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.blog+total+war+archer https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.b...
- jjmarr 1y ago
  Their essay on composite infantry types is interesting as a Crusader Kings II player, because the game has tons of historically accurate mixed units you can recruit that combine archers and heavy infantry/pikes, but virtually all of those units suck because the combat mechanics still enforce a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-infantry-type/ https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-... Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad. The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops. In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.
kergonath 1y ago
There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead. Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > Total War is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series. (It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.) > There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational. That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      You can use archers to kill cavalry or the other way around. It's just that you don't want any kind of melee-capable enemy reaching your archers.
  - StefanBatory 1y ago
    From Rome 2 multiplayer, I remember spearmen absolutely not even with swords :P My server played with swords limit, because then everyone would pick only them! Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D
frollogaston 1y ago
Btw, the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for MTW2 is amazing. It turns the game into a more historically accurate and overall better version of Rome TW... but archers still do volleys, which even if they wanted to avoid, is probably part of the game engine. Interestingly, mounted archers don't do volleys in those games.

crazygringo 1y ago

I've read the whole thing and I'm not convinced at all. First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false. But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause. I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion. But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama. Am I missing something here?

kayodelycaon 1y ago
I think his argument about draw weight is compelling. In order to do a coordinated valley you would have to have everyone draw and hold. Bows have highly variable “lock time”. There is no trigger and you can’t reasonably get an army to draw at the same rate. Reload times are fast enough that the fastest archer may be able to be ready to fire again before the last archer has completed their first shot. In those circumstances, you would simply get orders to start and stop firing.
- treis 1y ago
  You wouldn't hold the bow drawn. The archers would nock their arrows and at the command would draw and loose the arrow. That would result in them all shooting at roughly the same time. Just a second or so delayed from the command.
- 1y ago

jjk166 1y ago

What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting. For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.

sandworm101 1y ago
>> I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.
detourdog 1y ago
This was a nice write and it would be nice to hear about the advantages of the long bow.

SV_BubbleTime 1y ago

There is something strange about the way this article was written. Besides that it could have been 25% of its final length, it repeats itself quite a bit. I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.

ranger207 1y ago
The name of the blog is "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry". The symptoms you see are caused by Unmitigated Pedantry. It's the author's style
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  Cool… except being intentionally lame doesn’t make something less lame.
  - ranger207 1y ago
    "Lame" is subjective. I personally like it, and you might not. That's fine. That's just this guy's style, and you don't have to like it
psalaun 1y ago
It annoyed me as well, I eventually stopped reading due to this
trefoiled 1y ago
I found the overuse of italics for emphasis fatiguing

ropable 1y ago

The statistics about the draw weight of war bows being 100 to 170 lb (45-77 kg) is striking to me. Imagine getting to the gym, picking up a single 45 kg dumbbell (the lowest end!), and setting out to rep as many single-arm rows as you can before failure. Of course you wouldn't hold that dumbbell at full contraction; that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.

almostgotcaught 1y ago
> that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds. I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
- varelaseb 1y ago
  Why would it ever be impossible/unbelievable? The whole point is it was commonplace for this type of person. It's just surprising that the number's that large.
- hooloovoo_zoo 1y ago
  Plus a dumbbell is the same weight the whole time while the bow is only the draw weight at full draw.
  - modo_mario 1y ago
    On the other hand as someone noted: you don't bring up a dumbbell by a thin string with 3 fingers. I think when trained and without holding like in the movies you could go a bit longer than you'd expect with dumbbels but goddamn your fingers must hurt after.
- tmpz22 1y ago
  Yeah but spend your whole life malnourished and march 20 miles THEN do the reps (as peasant archers probably had to do).

tptacek 1y ago

What this article doesn't account for is the proposition that many, many historic armies did war bow volley fire, and we've never heard about it because they all got wiped out because it's such a bad idea.

eviks 1y ago
Not really, first, being wiped out doesn't mean literally everyone dying, but also it doesn't prevent the winning side from recording the victory and its cause
- acjohnson55 1y ago
  Perhaps oral traditions survive from soldiers sold into slavery from lost battles. Like somehow, the folly of volley fire made it into the name of some food dish. Or maybe they would have simply massacred any army so dumb as to try it.
  - eviks 1y ago
    I don't understand the need to come up with some fancy niche (slavery, oral, food name) when you have the more common approach: as is usual, part of the army ran away, and it included people of all ranks, from soldiers to generals, and they recorded it in all the same ways all the other events for recorded in the same sources (including training guides) Then you continue to ignore the other elephant - the soldiers and everyone else who won battles also record history avoiding the slavery/food route And again, "massacre" doesn't mean 100%
int_19h 1y ago
Occam's Razor.
- permo-w 1y ago
  to me Occam's Razor is a fairly unsound thinking strategy, particularly in scenarios like this
1y ago

sandworm101 1y ago

Question: What does this author think happened instead of the volley? Does he expect that archers just started randomly firing when they felt like doing so? Of course not. They waited for the order to start firing. So the first shots would, imho, constitute a "volley" in that everyone would be launching in the same few seconds. Subsequent shots would then become less coordinated, but that first wave would be a true volley. Then orders would come to stop/move/start, resulting in other coordinated volleys.

lolinder 1y ago
The author has an entire series of posts on how pre-modern generalship did and didn't work, including a post on issuing commands. The tl;dr is that there cannot have been a generalized order to fire on cue because pre-modern armies didn't have that kind of command resolution and speed. Best case you have a few guys who start firing because they're told to and the rest follow suit when they notice that it's started, more likely there's an established doctrine for when firing should happen and archers use their judgement for whether to start. https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-ii-commands/ https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...
- mcmoor 1y ago
  I don't think a command to start firing is that complicated. A simple flag wave suffices especially for <100 archers that's standing still. There are more complicated commands that a centurion had been able to do.

bandrami 1y ago

Peter H Wilson had an interesting point in his 30 years war book that it's not just the appearance of firearms (musketeers in Spanish terzios fired in their own time), you also had to have a philosophical change to allow seeing a human as a cog in a larger machine; it's fundamentally an Early Modern concept rather than a renaissance one. And so you first see volley fire among the Italian condottieri and the Low Countries' militias, where you were simultaneously seeing the start of mercantile economies based on transactions between individuals.

Asraelite 1y ago

I disagree with the point about the word "fire". How can you criticize the English word used if historically they weren't even speaking English? Scenes are depicted in English instead of the native language of the setting for the benefit of the audience (and budget), and in modern English it's perfectly okay to use "fire" as a translation for the act of loosing a bow, even if "loose" is more commonly used in archery.

tshaddox 1y ago
But English-speaking places have bows and arrows. (Even a particularly famous historical one!). So it’s reasonable to expect a translation into English to use the English word for sending an arrow from a bow. If it were some science fiction setting with a weapon very unlike any real historical weapons then sure, the particular etymology of the English word wouldn’t be very relevant.
- Asraelite 1y ago
  There were no English-speaking places that used bows extensively. The closest would've been Early Modern English, which is still drastically different to Modern English. If the actors were actually speaking Shakespearean English then sure, it would be wrong for them to say "fire"/"fyr", but if they did that then you wouldn't understand half of what they're saying. I'm sure there's a few actual examples of this though, for scenes depicting battles in England after 1800 or so that use bows. I would still say it's debatable whether you could consider this truly modern English but it's close enough.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    All of which is extraneous to the question, "Did armies use volleys of arrows?". If the French-speaking English commanders at Agincourt told their archer captains to "Laissez-y" instead of "Fire!", what difference does that make? (For context, King Henry V of Agincourt fame is considered to probably have been the first English monarch who spoke English as a mother tongue, and may have been the first who was remotely proficient in it.)

gitroom 1y ago

Tbh, reading all this makes my head spin a little but I def love how deep some folks get into the nitty gritty of old school tactics - you think there's actually any lost technique out there we'll never fully figure out?

bjackman 1y ago
I think lost techniques are the rule rather than the exception. There are loads of fundamental questions about how premodern combat took place that will probably never be decided. You can get a feel for lots of them by reading this very blog. Stuff like: did opposing infantry lines actually stay in contact for long periods at a time or did they clash for a couple of brief minutes at a time and then mutually retreat a few paces to recover stamina?
- dpig_ 1y ago
  In Warhammer we call it Fall Back in Good Order.
KSteffensen 1y ago
Lost techniques are the field of experimental archaeology.
smallwire 1y ago
We need a chronoscope.

usrusr 1y ago

So basically, what he's saying is that the depictions in Hägar the Horrible of fighters charging on with arrow-studded shields aren't all that unrealistic. File under unexpected.

zurfer 1y ago

in the spirit that you only need one reason to be right, not five: the strongest argument against volley "fire" is indeed that holding a bow is exhausting and so a commander wouldn't tell their archers to "hold" before releasing.

otikik 1y ago

They didn't research the upgrade.

AlexMoffat 1y ago

The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.

codyvoda 1y ago
it happens on practically every topic. this was technologically not possible 100 years ago and it’ll be fascinating to watch play out. stfu and listen is a legit skill in 2025
- cwmma 1y ago
  100 years ago the term "armchair general" was already 25 years old.
  - bunderbunder 1y ago
    And 200 years ago cringy dinner table conversations about complex and subtle topics was already an established literary trope.
kop316 1y ago
The same author discusses something similar here: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/ https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm... In discussing why in LOTR Saruman's battle campaign is terrible: "Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be."

booleandilemma 1y ago

I don't quite buy it. There's a line in Herodotus' Histories about Persian arrows blocking out the sun, and that implies a volley to me. I don't have time to find a link now but if you google it you'll see. (Incidentally, it's also in the movie 300)

msl 1y ago
If you happen to have Randal Munroe's what if? [1] on your bookshelf, look up the chapter titled "Sparta". It should convince you that the story of arrows blocking the sun is probably not true. If you don't have it, you could try to do the math yourself. Munroe assumes that 1) an arrow intercepts 40 cm² of sunlight, 2) an archer looses 8 to 10 arrows a minute and 3) each arrow spends an average of three seconds in flight. You could adjust those numbers to taste, but I would not expect the conclusion to change. [1] https://xkcd.com/what-if/ https://xkcd.com/what-if/
codydkdc 1y ago
Herodotus, the famously accurate historian

joe8756438 1y ago

It seems like the archery gets disproportionately more “hollywood doesn’t understand how it works” coverage than other things. Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?

jvanderbot 1y ago
Well there's also: * Infantry presses vs out-and-out melee * Siege weapons as "artillery" during field battles as though it was WW1 levels of firepower * Cavalry charges as battering rams / tanks So, maybe you can train yourself to see all of those too. Then you'll enjoy nothing :D
potato3732842 1y ago
>Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see? Nah, it's everything. You see every specialist community complaining about it.

indymike 1y ago

The bow has a slow rate of fire, you can't hold a longbow in firing position for long (150+lbs of force required hold the drawn back bow), and you are only accurate from 300-800 feet (add 15% if in a high tower). That means charging calvary will reach your archers in 10-15 seconds and moderately paced walking infantry unit will be on top of your archers within 20-30 seconds of entering range. That leaves time for a few arrows. The bunched up, tight formations formed a reasonable defense - your outer troops would take the hits from the archers for the 20 seconds it took to get to the archers. We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...

cafard 1y ago
It seems to me that at Agincourt the archers place obstacles in front of their position--sharpened stakes. That would have provided some protection against a cavalry
- indymike 1y ago
  Agincourt was interesting because mud (a combination of rain and fresh plowed fields) reduced infantry and cavalry mobility. The opening cavalry charge made the muddy battlefield worse, and the combination of mud and stakes on the ground injured the horses. The French were heavily armored, causing men-at-arms to sink up to their knees in mud. English longbowmen were able fire arrows into the french men-at-arms who were literally stuck in the mud until they ran out of arrows. The decisive moment was when English archers ran out of arrows and attacked the exhausted French with the hatchets and mallets they used to make and drive the stakes into their defensive positions.
hirvi74 1y ago
To be fair, an arrow released from a bow with a draw weight of over 150 pounds could easily launch an arrow that could pass through multiple people at close range -- depending on how light their armor was. I've seen bows with a third of that draw weight completely pass through a deer. Obviously, certain factors have to be met -- distance being the most important and then shot placement.

salynchnew 1y ago

After that discussion of draw weight, I can now see why English longbowmen are notable in the the archeological record due their noticeable spinal deformities. 110lbs on a traditional bow? Sheesh.

butlike 1y ago

And in the movies you never see any of the arrows collide; ever.

mimd 1y ago

Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.

zombot 1y ago

Our weekly dose of pedantry give us today!