Comments by "Seven Proxies" (@sevenproxies4255) on "The Battle Of Crécy - Longbow VS Crossbow?" video.

  1. A small question about using drawings as evidence for how the long bow was employed: Are there any drawings made by people who actually participated in the battles they depicted with their art? I'm not sayng i'm certain of this, but a propable reason for why archers are depicted in most art as shooting straight at their enemies rather than employng the "arrow rain" tactic of firing in an arch might be because the only practical examples of archery that most medieval artists came into contact with was during archery competitions and target practice. Therefore it's not unreasonable to assume that the artists didn't really see or have any practical experience with battlefield archery, and just assumed that archers would fire straight at their foes in battle rather than in an arch. Now while it is true that the arrow might lose some power by being fired in an arch with an angle to steep, the arrow will most certainly lose powrr by being fired straight due to gravity pulling the arrow towards the ground. If fired at a certain arch however, where the direction is more in line with the direction of gravity pull, the energy released at impact might actually increase rather than decreasing because the arrow carries the energy from the gravity pull as well as the energy of the velocity exerted on it by the bow, as well as increasing your range. From what I've read of battlefield archery, one method was that the commander of the archers fired a first shot, holding the bow at a particular angle so the other archers and the battlefield commanders could determine where it lands. Then the other archers try to match that angle and fire just when the enemy pass that first test shot, which ensured a maxmum amount of kills. There's also another advantage for archers to fire in an arch rather than straight forwards: and that is that you can deploy more ranks of archers firing at the same time since they fire over eachothers heads. If your archers all fired straight forwards, you could only have two ranks firing volleys of arrows (the front rank, and the rank behind them firing between the front rank) which isn't ideal sometimes.
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