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> Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it

> Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it. Be very careful with that assumption. Brett Devereux (author of the blog) himself constantly points out that our historical sources are often very limited because they were written by the nobility who only wrote about their own social class, completely ignoring the majority of people actually involved in a military campaign or civic life. We know a lot more about the generals and cavalry than the foot soldiers, archers, or supply train.

Sniffnoy 1y ago
I think that argument cuts the other way on this one. If there were some higher-rank person, presumably a noble, ordering a volley, as depicted in TV shows, and as happened with firearms, there would be a bias towards mentioning that person doing that, to demonstrate his command, rather than towards omitting him!
- throwup238 1y ago
  I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue. During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics. I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    > I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue. But we do have so much written about musket volleys, and those were done by lower status soldiers as well. It is very strange that much was written about musket volleys but not archer volleys.
    - throwup238 1y ago
      The printing press fundamentally changed everything so our sources get much more socially inclusive starting with the arquebus onwards (but not so much the hand cannon, which predates the press). This cuts across all subfields of history because society no longer depended on expensive scribes to preserve sources and publish new material. More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
      - vlovich123 1y ago
        Indeed, it would make sense that musket volleys evolved from archer volleys than being spontaneously invented as a tactic for a weapon that was competing with the bow.
        Jensson 1y ago
        Musket volleys are much closer to javelin volleys than archer volleys though.
        paleotrope 1y ago
        When was the last recorded javelin volley? I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows. One thing that I don't enjoy from COUP is he often demolishes ideas that approach strawman territory (is a barely coordinated order to start shooting a volley? or does it have to be something else), but I understand that from his perspective as a teacher, he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
  - Sniffnoy 1y ago
    > I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue. While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too. An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all. So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers! Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist. How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
    - notahacker 1y ago
      > What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too. I don't think this follows in practice, particularly since what's missing here is not names of archer captains but descriptions of the mechanics of volley firing (which may have been routine in certain circumstances, or not). Seems like attribution of the outcome to the excellence of the calvalry captains' flank attacks and valor of the Lord's retinue in holding the centre whilst merely noting that a grouping of archers were present without attributing anything to any decisions made by any individual archers at any level is pretty consistent with their low prestige (apart from Agincourt and a possibly apocryphal story about Harold Godwinson, archers don't seem to get much credit at all for being decisive, despite archery being important enough for peasants who wielded blunt instruments and blades in their day job to get compulsory longbow training). Brett's argument that longbow volley firing would be difficult to time and probably not beneficial (especially compared with musket volleys) is compelling, but the argument that battle narratives don't really describe volleys, except in translations of words that may not have meant volley, isn't really in a context where archers rarely get much credit for anything .
  - cafard 1y ago
    Xenophon mentions archers and slingers in the Anabasis.
- bluGill 1y ago
  If archers were effecive thy would win battels and b the hero and in turn the nobels.
  - throwup238 1y ago
    That has causation backwards: nobles weren’t cavalry because cavalry won battles*, but because cavalry was so expensive that only nobles and well funded centralized states with professional armies could afford them. You not only had to train the rider from a relatively young age but feed and support all the horses they’d need - armies rode in with at least three horses per rider on campaign to keep the horses from exhaustion (not including all the ones they’d train on). Supporting cavalry easily cost 5-10 times as much as supporting an equal number of infantry. * Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
    - aetherson 1y ago
      You only went to that effort to support cavalry because it won battles.
      - jltsiren 1y ago
        Cavalry won battles in societies that favored cavalry. If your society was built around elite warriors, your army probably relied on cavalry, because those elite warriors wanted to be individually as effective as possible. But if the state was responsible for raising the army and there was a middle class with sufficient combat skills available, infantry (such as Roman legions or mercenary pikemen) was often more cost-effective. War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
        philwelch 1y ago
        This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully lived and mostly fought in elephant habitats. Likewise, cultures on or close to the steppe had much more of a cavalry focus because cavalry was so much more effective there. When the Romans went east, they didn’t stick to their heavy infantry, they developed cataphracts. And their eventual conquerors, the Turks, replaced most of their traditional cavalry with infantry as they expanded westward into Europe.
pessimizer 1y ago
The nobility were involved in military campaigns. The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. When we talk about our historical sources being limited, it's because they focused on things like battles and military strategy, precisely because it is interesting to the wealthy people who support historians. The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials. edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. Why not?
- philwelch 1y ago
  > The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. It’s not even true for all (or probably even most) of modern times. For instance the upper classes of Britain in WWI suffered much higher casualties than the lower classes.
  - t-3 1y ago
    I don't think WWI can be firmly called "modern times" with regards to warfare. It was a notable event in the transition to modern, but the cavalry charges against machine guns and such are reason enough to exclude it.
    - philwelch 1y ago
      The modern period of history is widely considered to have begun in or around the 15th century. A common epochal event is the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
      - 1y ago
Mbwagava 1y ago
Yea but you'd need some sort of argument why class intersects with how archers are characterized when they are. At best I think you might say "we don't know".
scott_w 1y ago
We do have written records of how to fight battles: Maurice’s Strategikon, for example. You think he may have mentioned it somewhere.

Sniffnoy 1y ago

I think that argument cuts the other way on this one. If there were some higher-rank person, presumably a noble, ordering a volley, as depicted in TV shows, and as happened with firearms, there would be a bias towards mentioning that person doing that, to demonstrate his command, rather than towards omitting him!

throwup238 1y ago
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue. During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics. I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue. But we do have so much written about musket volleys, and those were done by lower status soldiers as well. It is very strange that much was written about musket volleys but not archer volleys.
  - throwup238 1y ago
    The printing press fundamentally changed everything so our sources get much more socially inclusive starting with the arquebus onwards (but not so much the hand cannon, which predates the press). This cuts across all subfields of history because society no longer depended on expensive scribes to preserve sources and publish new material. More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
    - vlovich123 1y ago
      Indeed, it would make sense that musket volleys evolved from archer volleys than being spontaneously invented as a tactic for a weapon that was competing with the bow.
      - Jensson 1y ago
        Musket volleys are much closer to javelin volleys than archer volleys though.
        paleotrope 1y ago
        When was the last recorded javelin volley? I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows. One thing that I don't enjoy from COUP is he often demolishes ideas that approach strawman territory (is a barely coordinated order to start shooting a volley? or does it have to be something else), but I understand that from his perspective as a teacher, he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
- Sniffnoy 1y ago
  > I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue. While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too. An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all. So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers! Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist. How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    > What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too. I don't think this follows in practice, particularly since what's missing here is not names of archer captains but descriptions of the mechanics of volley firing (which may have been routine in certain circumstances, or not). Seems like attribution of the outcome to the excellence of the calvalry captains' flank attacks and valor of the Lord's retinue in holding the centre whilst merely noting that a grouping of archers were present without attributing anything to any decisions made by any individual archers at any level is pretty consistent with their low prestige (apart from Agincourt and a possibly apocryphal story about Harold Godwinson, archers don't seem to get much credit at all for being decisive, despite archery being important enough for peasants who wielded blunt instruments and blades in their day job to get compulsory longbow training). Brett's argument that longbow volley firing would be difficult to time and probably not beneficial (especially compared with musket volleys) is compelling, but the argument that battle narratives don't really describe volleys, except in translations of words that may not have meant volley, isn't really in a context where archers rarely get much credit for anything .
- cafard 1y ago
  Xenophon mentions archers and slingers in the Anabasis.
bluGill 1y ago
If archers were effecive thy would win battels and b the hero and in turn the nobels.
- throwup238 1y ago
  That has causation backwards: nobles weren’t cavalry because cavalry won battles*, but because cavalry was so expensive that only nobles and well funded centralized states with professional armies could afford them. You not only had to train the rider from a relatively young age but feed and support all the horses they’d need - armies rode in with at least three horses per rider on campaign to keep the horses from exhaustion (not including all the ones they’d train on). Supporting cavalry easily cost 5-10 times as much as supporting an equal number of infantry. * Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
  - aetherson 1y ago
    You only went to that effort to support cavalry because it won battles.
    - jltsiren 1y ago
      Cavalry won battles in societies that favored cavalry. If your society was built around elite warriors, your army probably relied on cavalry, because those elite warriors wanted to be individually as effective as possible. But if the state was responsible for raising the army and there was a middle class with sufficient combat skills available, infantry (such as Roman legions or mercenary pikemen) was often more cost-effective. War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
      - philwelch 1y ago
        This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully lived and mostly fought in elephant habitats. Likewise, cultures on or close to the steppe had much more of a cavalry focus because cavalry was so much more effective there. When the Romans went east, they didn’t stick to their heavy infantry, they developed cataphracts. And their eventual conquerors, the Turks, replaced most of their traditional cavalry with infantry as they expanded westward into Europe.

pessimizer 1y ago

The nobility were involved in military campaigns. The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. When we talk about our historical sources being limited, it's because they focused on things like battles and military strategy, precisely because it is interesting to the wealthy people who support historians. The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials. edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.

Jensson 1y ago
> edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. Why not?
philwelch 1y ago
> The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. It’s not even true for all (or probably even most) of modern times. For instance the upper classes of Britain in WWI suffered much higher casualties than the lower classes.
- t-3 1y ago
  I don't think WWI can be firmly called "modern times" with regards to warfare. It was a notable event in the transition to modern, but the cavalry charges against machine guns and such are reason enough to exclude it.
  - philwelch 1y ago
    The modern period of history is widely considered to have begun in or around the 15th century. A common epochal event is the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
    - 1y ago

Mbwagava 1y ago

Yea but you'd need some sort of argument why class intersects with how archers are characterized when they are. At best I think you might say "we don't know".

scott_w 1y ago

We do have written records of how to fight battles: Maurice’s Strategikon, for example. You think he may have mentioned it somewhere.