HYW - Longbows, etc.?

[DeanMoto]

Has anyone played late-Medieval games, like HYW or WotR, with the rules yet? I'm curious to see if anyone has come up with something for English longbows - increased range? The lance is covered in the useful rules section. Pardon my ignorance, but there is that teaser on "The Middle Ages" in the main book, so maybe a later supplement? Thanks for any advice. Dean

[BigMike]

I wouldn't increase range, I'd be tempted to give them the 'marksman' rule so you get to re-roll one of their attack dice.
That'd make them more effective than many others without doing to much to make them super units.

[DeanMoto]

Thanks, Big Mike; didn't think about that option. Appreciate it. Dean

[Cubster]

It bugs me that people shy away from making longbows super weapons. They were super weapons for much of their operational life, with the range and power of a crossbow, but with a far greater rate of fire. I do understand that there must be a limit to how much you can try to duplicate every tiny facet of a weapon in a rule system however. If it was up to me, I would give them increased range and perhaps even a greater chance of penetrating armour at short range compared to a standard self bow.

The reason everyone and their dog didn't use them was simply because they didn't have the tradition of using the heavy bow in hunting and/or a law that forced men to practice the bow weekly. In Britain stag hunting with the bow was a popular sport which required a heavy bow to penetrate to the heart. On the continent hunting on horseback with the lance was more common. Medieval bowmen from England, Wales and Scotland were specialists in their craft with decades of training and experience behind them and although there must have been hunters all over the world with an equivalent weapon, it wasn't widespread enough to be a common weapon of war.

The crossbow was expensive to make, but easy to use and the slow rate of fire was no great disadvantage in sieges - as seen more often on the continent - where someone could duck behind a parapet or pavise and happily crank away until ready to fire again.

To my mind, if you're trying to reproduce the British armies any time from the First Crusade to the Wars of the Roses, you simply have to make special provision for the longbow. It was an unique weapon that was an important part of how British armies fought. If you're worried about having super units scampering around, perhaps you should have restrictions on the numbers available, but remember it was common to have the bowmen outnumber the men at arms by five to one or more!

[BigMike]

It wasn't a super weapon for that long though. The longbow was only used in large numbers from 1333 onwards, before then it had been used by various levy forces and English armies were not 'optimised' to favour massed bowmen - look at the difference in the army composition of Edward I and II's armies at Falkirk or Bannockburn compared to Edward III's army at Hallidon hill. Bannockburn in particular was won by the Scots heavy infantry being better organised than poorly motivated and organised English infantry. Even in 1328 Edward III's armies don't have enough archers to make a difference during the Weardale campaign. The structure of the English armies from 1333 in Scotland and France are revolutionary and that's what sets the scene for battles like Poitiers and Crecy. Following which French armies simply refuse to meet English armies in the field, and stay behind fortifications - negating the benefits of the longbow, hence the English adoption of the Chevauchee style campaign. By the time the French army start to engage English forces in a meaningful way again the armour of the period has improved and the bows are no-longer as decisive as they were.
I'd also be careful about citing what people had to do by law - after all it's the law that we all all do 70mph on the motorway! and English armies weren't levies any more, particularly during the later 14th century, they tended to be of considerably higher social status.
I completely agree that English armies of the period would be massively bow-heavy, and so there shouldn't be much of a limit on including them your army. but i'm not sure the longbow was quite as good as recent scholarship seems to be implying. after all if it had been that good the French army would never have even tried to engage at Agincourt, and I suspect the Agincourt French army was defeated by poor organisation and weather/ground conditions than by an overwhelming technical advantage of the English army. bear in mind that the hill in front of the English was studded with defensive spikes and ditches to prevent the French charge from hitting in full force. The English obviously weren't that confident that archers along could halt it.
It also has to be said that the corollary of the much bandied about statistic of the longbowman shooting up to 10 shots a minute, but they probably couldn't do that for very long before running out of arrows - especially given the relatively few archers facing them.
I'd stick with the 'marksman' rule to start with and work on the assumption that having an accurate proportion of longbowmen to men at arms will give you the right 'feeling' force.

[DeanMoto]

Thanks for the great debate, Gents. Good arguments on either side (super weapon or not ). In fact, I'm asking on behalf of my opponent's English army - as I have the French. We have about 3K+ (WAB points) each for our armies, and played several WAB games with them in the distant past I thought it would be interesting to rematch them using Hail Caesar rules. BTW, the actual period of our armies - or at least my well-armored French - is the later part of the HYW. I would forego using my two cannon though. Thanks again, Dean

[BigMike]

@Deanmoto - a pleasure mate. Though i suspect watch this space, is suspect this debate might go for a bit...

[Cubster]

I agree with bits of your post Mike and certainly not with others.

It has been argued that Edward I's experiences during the Welsh campaigns taught him the value of the longbow and it was from then on that he began to field larger numbers of them. But they were popular before that in hunting as I said.

That the English bow, Welsh bow, great bow, long bow, whatever you want to call it, was an extremely powerful weapon used by very skilled practitioners (who required a minimum rate of fire of 10 shots per minute in order to be hired) is not a matter of conjecture, it is a matter of documented fact. Did they run out of arrows quickly? Hell yes, Henry's stockpiling of arrows before the Agincourt campaign was an enormous undertaking requiring towns all over England and Wales to provide bundles of arrows. They even used some mouldy old arrows decades old (and probably of questionable value) from the Tower of London. It was part of life on campaign that archers were provided with an awful lot of arrows because they had to be. It's like any ammo, you must plan for sufficient numbers to be available or you're screwed. They wouldn't be firing continually, 10 shots a minute, for the full duration of a battle, any more than a modern infantryman is continually firing his weapon at full auto during a battle. They would wait until a target is in range and go 'full auto' if they needed to. Which begs the question, if it wasn't such an effective weapon, why take so many men on campaign if it was such an expensive undertaking? The pay of the longbowman of the time also reflects a much higher than average wage, comparable with a man at arms even. Why pay so dear for someone who doesn't provide an exceptional military service?

You can't assume that the longbow wasn't a killer just because the English at Agincourt used every bit of terrain and defensive measure possible to maximise their chances of survival, nor because the French attacked in a disorganised and impetuous manner against an army they viewed as being on their last legs, trapped and massively outnumbered. One might equally argue that fear of the longbow made them hesitate as long as they did. The longbow was a superb weapon, but a single archer had no chance of bringing down a charging knight on level ground. They needed to slow the mounted men at arms and give themselves time to put the arrows in. Even then the plate armour was so thick that it would have to be extremely close range, a very lucky shot, or both, to penetrate. The same was true of the crossbow, which is why I would say they should be comparable. But this was towards the end of the operational life of the longbow anyway as armour started to get very thick indeed just before gunpowder weapons began to take over.

The law about practicing archery was one that was enforced and one that was encouraged, through tournaments, team games between villages and through good rates of pay for bowmen of a high enough calibre to take service with the local lord. Archeological evidence shows bowmen of the time had distorted skeletons consistent with massively muscular upper bodies, especially the shoulders and back. How and why would a bowman become so transformed unless the bow they used was extremely powerful? This sort of skeleton is not seen on those who used the self bow in other countries.

The longbow was about five to five and a half foot long, which was about the height of a man back then, and the thickness at the 'belly' was around six inches or so. This has been proved through archelogical finds as well. In fact, the rough dimensions of the bow, the materials used and the manner in which each one was made are pretty well known. You can't physically have a bow like that without it being immensely powerful when drawn to the ear (which many contemporary illustrations show).

Now I'm willing to accept someone quibbling about whether a heavy crossbow, a composite bow, or a longbow was the more powerful weapon, because each has a decent claim, each obviously differed from weapon to weapon because there was no industrial process to make each kind identical. But what cannot be disputed is that they were all bows of exceptional power and range. They were designed specifically for this. I can guarantee that should HC bring out a HYW supplement there will be a special rule about the longbow, same as there is in just about every medieval rule system that gives specific stats for different weapons.

[DeanMoto]

Again, thank you very much for the detailed arguments for the longbow, gentlemen. I really appreciate you both taking the time and effort to espouse the details. Until a supplement comes out with "proper" rules, I think I will allow for an increase in range and also a miss re-roll for these weapons. Best, Dean

[Cubster]

Don't listen to Big Mike, he's a well known cannibal and a molester of llamas.