The Sharpe author Bernard Cornwell wrote a couple of novels set in / around Agincourt and from memory there are a few extras to throw in - but I love your last sentence's conclusion
1. The extra training was enormous - thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock, not Kevin Costner.
2. The "cheap" idea is misleading - in preparation ofr agincourt a huge amount of the English economny was turned over to making arrows. During Agincourt an estimated 3/4 million arrows were fired. When looking at economics of ranged weapons, don't compare Bows to guns, think RPGs
3. Agincourt changed everything for a generation. Thanks to mud, foolishness, and yes, longbows, France lost an entire generation of aristocracy in one day. The english were being chased out of the country and suddenly ... owned everything.
4. finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster, you are not tied down to a specfific class of army recruits and you dont have to feed Arnie.
> thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock
As a nitpick: No, he would not. You don't achieve anything near build of Arnold or The Rock without steroids (both have admitted to steroid use), nor do you achieve it with more endurance focused training rather than maximising load for a low number of reps. Big and strong, sure, but much more compact.
Maybe professional arm wrestler would be even more apt.
Here is Devon Larratt (225 lbs) easily beating Hafthor Bjornsson ("The Mountain" from Game of Thrones; 419 lbs) without breaking a sweat. Specialization wins.
You need some pretty specific muscles for bowmanship, which don't really equate to a bodybuilder's physique. That goes both way, I wouldn't be sure whether Arnie in his best days could draw a 150 lbs bow, and I'm dead certain that Daffyd Longbowman didn't look like a candidate for Mr. Universe.
But you still had some pretty healthy specimens, which brings to mind one important factor that's often forgotten: It's not like archers were suddenly useless when they couldn't fire their bows anymore. They were decently well armed and armored, and if you're swarmed by guys with mauls (and possibly deep in mud), your fancy chain & plate doesn't really help you all that much.
The wreck of the Mary Rose has provided numerous well preserved skeletons of well trained longbowmen, and sailors (for comparison) and allowed studies of the effect upon their body. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17309665 - they found a significant difference in the lower arm bones of archers and non-archers.
Very interesting. I see that asymmetry is one of the indicators: "In fact, on one of the skeletons we have looked at, the surface area of the joint between the lower arm and elbow is 48% larger than on the joint on the other arm."
I believe there was a lot of arm-and-hand labor in being a sailor, but without the bias that archery creates.
> finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster
But the army you raise is less effective; quantity vs quality.
A country which did not want or could not afford to train longbow men may have had a deeper flaw: its model. Perhaps the real reason England could beat France had been a long time in the making: a strong economy, and politically society that afforded it a more equipped better trained army.
I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.
> I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.
There are many, many, many examples throughout history of this happening. In WWII, the British kept the European theatre alive until the Americans finally showed up. I learned in a Quora thread that opposing soldiers thought the British incredibly disciplined and reliable, while the Americans were absolutely nuts, making up in sheer bravado what they lacked in training.
People will fight very, very hard to save their political system when they are personally invested in it.
In the French Revolutionary wars, the generals led from the front of the army. Absolutely fearless, total badasses, fighting for the glory of the French Republic. Things changed of course after Napoleon grabbed the brass ring, but Napoleon did not make the army himself, it was the efforts of his revolutionary predecessors that forged the army that Napoleon commanded.
Strongly democratic nations enjoy virtual invulnerability in battle, particularly when defending.
The political stability is important when creating a national army that could conceivably be usurped by internal threats. The economy is essential for that oft-overlooked aspect of conducting a war, managing the supply train. Unless you're the Mongols, everything you use to wage war has to be maintained, and fed. Democratic countries simply do this better than autocratic ones.
> I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.
Yes. There was an article that reached the top page here about the cultural/organizational problems of information-age Arab armies from the perspective of a US Army soldier who had worked with several. Let me see if I can dig it up.
At Agincourt, England beat France on pure fluke. We were effectively running away to Calais when the French trapped the English and attacked. The battle was lost more than won - the French just bunched up and got stuck in mud, and got slaughtered
It was not a reflection on any economic models.
Ps on the crossbow front - the cost of arrows relative to the firing mechanism is key
It probably didn't sound like anything because it's most likely a misattribution (see the more detailed answers here: https://www.quora.com/Who-said-Quantity-has-a-quality-all-it...). Not saying that Quora or Wikipedia are authoritative sources, but many of this sort of alleged quotes by Stalin are usually either what someone thought Stalin might have said, or coined by Western authors writing about Stalin and later misattributed to him.
Most references I've found point to an American saying this quote (or similar) in the 70s.
1. The extra training was enormous - thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock, not Kevin Costner.
2. The "cheap" idea is misleading - in preparation ofr agincourt a huge amount of the English economny was turned over to making arrows. During Agincourt an estimated 3/4 million arrows were fired. When looking at economics of ranged weapons, don't compare Bows to guns, think RPGs
3. Agincourt changed everything for a generation. Thanks to mud, foolishness, and yes, longbows, France lost an entire generation of aristocracy in one day. The english were being chased out of the country and suddenly ... owned everything.
4. finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster, you are not tied down to a specfific class of army recruits and you dont have to feed Arnie.