baseballkrba_10 说:
Historically inspired video games have given people a false sense that Medieval armies had "units". The truth is, in the middle ages each soldier armed themselves. If you were rich, you went to battle with a horse, mail armor, and a bastard sword. If you were poor, you maybe had a spear, maybe a bow, and no armor.
So armies at this time are going to be just are going to be very diverse and mixed. Some of your archers are going to have longbows, others wont. Some of your knights are going to use a sword, others are going to prefer a mace. Its really up to the soldiers what they want to carry or can carry into battle. So in drawing up ranks for your army you are going to be very broad. Instead of putting all the longbow men together and all the crossbow men together in units, you will probably just put all your archers together. You simply aren't going to have soldiers outfitted for a specific purpose like we go in modern armies.
It is certainly true that in the early middle ages recruitment, strategy and tactics could be quite crude. As time passed, however, things got more sophisticated.
baseballkrba_10 说:
There are also no set rules for arms manufacturers like there are today. All M-16s are the same. But in the Middle Ages, no two longbows or no two suits of mail are going to be the same. There are no rules that a bow has to be 6.23 feet tall, people just made bows and carried them into battle. So, this is going to make armies seem more like roughly organized mobs rather than tactical fighting units.
Yes, you are partially right here. The term "longbow" isn't used until the mid to latter part of the 15th century. I am mortified that even in this day and age we are told that the English army could turn out an army of 6,000 highly trained men with a good yew bow that could shoot arrows fletched with grey goose feathers that could pierce steel plate five kilometres away. The average height of an Englishman at the time was what? 5'-3"? 5'-4"? And they all turned up with a weapon that was 6' long? Of course not. We do have some evidence that is ignored by not-very-good historians. First, we have a story from the Welsh wars that an arrow went through someone's thigh, through the mail, through the saddle and into the horse. This sounds like an exaggeration to me, yet it is taken as gospel, and that is the reason why Edward I adopted the longbow as the English weapon of choice. In fact, the English shire archers were already established, and he was building up his archers. The longbow does not have any particular association with Wales. Any association belongs to a mistranslation by William Morris. Edward I did use Welsh archers, but they were a rabble armed with any stick with a piece of string attached. What inspired Edward I was the mass firepower he had witnessed by Saracen archers when he was on crusade.
The Genoese crossbowmen being mown down by English archers at Crecy also seems to be a gross exaggeration. For a start, the Genoese numbers are probably too high. There is no evidence that they had no pavises. The rainshower weakening the crossbow strings is drivel, even if professional arblasters didn't have a waxed bandage to wrap their strings with. The bit where they all got shot up, was written years later to be presented to Phillipa of Hainault, Edward III's queen. Perhaps the French rode down the Genoese because they were dissatisfied with them, or perhaps they thought they were English, because the Genoese badge, just happens to be a red cross on a white background. There is another account of the battle, where the Genoese got to shoot their bolts, but they were not particularly effective, and withdrew.
If you read the accounts of the battles, the air may be as black as the Ace of Spades with arrows from the thousands of English yeomen with their good yew bows; but the French or the Scots always manage to get through to the dismounted English men-at-arms.
Even at Crecy, there were complaints that the arrows were not pentrating the French armour, which indicates that you are right that the average English archer was armed with anything, and that the long yew bows were reserved for the tallest and most professional archers.
The term longbow was probably devised because there came a time when shortbows were no longer acceptable, because steel plate armour made them unusable in war, and that only the long yew bows, crossbows with steel laths and firearms had a hope of penetrating it. Edward IV was 6' - 2" tall, and was nicknamed "The Archer's Son." This could be because he was the height of a typical English archer of the later 15th century.
During the later middle ages, overlords would put together bands of mercenaries. The overlord would see that one way or another his men were equipped: either he would only recruit properly equipped soldiers, or provided the equipment himself, and get the men to pay for it by garnishing their pay. More sophisticated tactics were adopted, with good bowmen, arblasters, or handgunners involved in among the infantry. The English were among those to pioneer this method. As well as mass archery on the wings, they had their crossbowmen and best archers among the infantry; and their spectacular battlefield victories were as much due to their superior drill as it was to their mass archery.
