Medievil Archery - The Way To Shoot A Longbow

Since I was a young boy I was facinated by one of humankind oldest weapon, the Longbow. Then finally I fulfilled one one of my childhood dreams. I tailored my own medievil clothes and equipment and was crafting my own longbow !!!

As some might know, the first longbow was found in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps. It was around 1.80 m in length and was found beside the worlds oldest mummy Ötzi from around from 3,300 BC. Since then the bow can be found throughout the history in many forms and was used for various purposes.

After reading several books and watching countless films about the medievil europe between the 9th and 15th century my interest in this weapon was steadily growing. In this period the bow was used in several epic battles with a tremendeous successfull outcome during the Hundred Years War, which consequently changed the art of war for the future. For those who are interested I would like to mention my favorite two battles:

The Battle of Crecy in 1346:

Here the english army consisting of 12000 soldiers, half of them were longbow archers, battled against 25000 frensh soldiers, mainly mounted knights and crossbow archers. One would have predicted the total annihilation of the english troups but suprisingly the english army only counted far less then 1000 soldiers while the frensh army lost more than half of their troups !! ... that hit hard.

The Battle of Agincourt in 1415:

Here 7000 english soldiers, 6000 of them were longbow archers, battled against 30000 frensh soldiers, again mainly mounted knights.
Just think about the fact that the cost of an archer are just a wooden bow and some arrows for a simple peasant, while mounted knight have to be equipted with heavy armor, horses and are in addition a lot more expensive than a peasant. Just as a fact, all english peasants from the age of 15 were ordered by law to own a bow and train regularly. Kind of a double-edged sword ;) .. I can imagin King Henry V of England was rolling on the floor laughing after he heard that they again annihilated half of the frensh soldiers on the cost of only 300 english archers ... Baaaaam, that hit even harder.

How To Shoot A Longbow:

Aiming: The hand that hold the bow strongly grabs the shaft directly under the middlepoint of the bow, while the arrow is layed on the holding hand. The end of the arrow is hold beween the index finger and the middle finger.

Drawing: The shoulder, ellbow and hand of the drawing arm are forming a straight line with the nocked arrow while the two fingers of the hand draw the arrow. The arm that holds the bow is slightly bend to hinder the bowstring from hitting the forearm later on. The eye still fixes the targed while the index finger softly touches the lip in the corner of the mouth.

Adjusting the range: To adjust the range the whole upper body together with the tensed bow lays back depending on the drawing strentgh of the bow, the distance to the targed and the used arrow.

Loose: To loose the arrow the index finger and the middle finger are simply opened.

Of course this can be also done while standing:

Charackteristics Of The Longbow

The best wood for a longbow was definitly yew. Unfortunately the large need of yew during the medieval times led to the extinction of yew trees in most regions of great britain and the yew trees were put under nature protection. Another great wood for bows were ash and elm. The whole process of crafting a bow took more than 3 years, including drying and shaping the wood into a D-shape. The final length of such a warbow was somewhere in the range of 1.8 m to 2 m, depending on the hight of the archer and featured a drawing weight of approximately 80 Kg, which is increadibly high !! I myself have already troubles with bows of a drawing weight more than 40 Kg. For protection the bow was usually covered by beeswax and as a string usually hemp was used. Trained medievil archers were able to fire 8 arrows per minute with a range of 350 m that easily pierced heavy armored plates. Imagin 5000 archers are shoting arrows at the same time !!

I thank you all for reading my short article about medievil archery and hope you enjoyed it. Here just a few more pictures for you ;)

Best wishes,
Adalger