This week on the blog! We're looking at the movie motif of having a whole bunch of archers 'fire' at once and discussing what is volley fire for and both why archers couldn't do it and why they wouldn't do it even if they could! acoup.blog/2025/05/02/c...
That made a ton of sense. Thanks so much for writing that! By the way, are you aware of any good blogs that cover Napoleonic-era (or thereabouts) warfare?
One of the most ridiculous "bow in movies" moment is the most recent Robin Hood movie where they walk around with their bows drawn like they're holding guns.
The same with Tomb Raider (2018) where Wikander walk around with her bow drawn. Something you couldn't even do in the game.
I feel like Helm's Deep gets a pass for showing a soldier not being able to hold his bow drawn anymore.
In his Gladiator 2 commentary, Bret points out the silliness of the Praetorian guard in the aisles holding back the Colosseum crowd by gesturing at them with their fully-drawn bows.
I'm glad they had that moment at the beginning of the movie. It let my calibrate my expectations appropriately. It was a fun movie, but only because I watched it knowing the setting was just a thin re-coloring of modern-day.
Not familiar would that one, but reminded of the bit in Game of Thrones s4e10 where Sansa turns a corner and nearly walks into an arrow-point held by someone who had apparently been waiting for her for half an hour with their bow fully drawn.
Volley fire would be a useful tactic against jedi/sith.
discussed very well in the blog, but it's also worth watching a very strong expert archer working with a heavy bow to get a visceral feeling of how much strength would have been needed to use a real longbow
Ive been reading for 10 minutes and dear god its still going
Loose. You loose your arrows.
I suspect some of the bias is coming from RPGs (cough Skyrim) where archery is ridiculously overpowered
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@buehlmeister.bsky.social
I love the Field of Glory games and the common complaints about those is that archers aren't very powerful (they are good if used correctly) and that troops refuse to disengage making control a mess (also realistic).
One small thought: a commander could order their archers to "draw and loose", negating the need for them to hold the arrow at full draw but resulting in a hail of arrows being released at more or less the same time.
But: why would you want that? (If you read the whole post you'll see that that probably wouldn't be desirable.)
Sorry: I had to take the kids to school before I got to the very end.
Shooting arrows in volleys is fairly common in reenactments, so you can totally get a bunch of archers to do a synchronized "nock, draw, loose" with a bit of practice. I suspect, however, that this is done mostly out of modern safety concerns that a battlefield commander wouldn't care about so much.
If you give the commands as "nock!" and then "draw and loose!" rather than "nock, draw... loose!" it's even easier, though you won't get the same level of synchronization. I could imagine this being used at very long ranges when shooting to provoke rather than "for effect," to borrow a modern term.
Great and informative piece. Thank you.
Now I'm going to start thinking of massed archery as a debuff, not dps. Was there any sort of signal though to start shooting, or did commanders just rely on their archers knowing the effective range of their weapons and trust they would start shooting appropriately?
There *is* evidence of signals to start shooting! Froissart repeatedly mentions hearing a loud shout from some group of English archers, followed by a fuckton of arrows. Logically they must have also had some sort of cease-fire command, but AFAIK it's not as well-attested.
And of course you need *that* command, because while you have no use for volleys, soldiers will often discharge missiles, be they bullets, arrows or javelins, before effective range - there's a lot of psychological pressure to *do something* as enemies close.
So you need someone watching the range to give a 'let them have it!' command to commence shooting (and presumably a 'stop letting them have it') to stop shooting.
I agree, and I have a frustrated feeling that chroniclers found the "start shooting" command a lot cooler and more worthy of being recorded than the "stop shooting" command, personally.
I'm wondering now how often "cease fire" actually came up as opposed to running out of arrows or running away. Scenarios I can imagine: Enemy is running away, save your arrows They're too close to our own men Anything else?
As Brett says, if the enemy is much too far away but your archers are nervous and some of them start shooting prematurely. This is super common. Another is a case where an unidentified unit appears unexpectedly, your archers start shooting, but then you realize they're on your side.
Yeah, that last one sounds pretty important... Did they have a term for "friendly fire" before firearms?
Interesting. Sounds like the order came from the archers themselves rather than from some central commander. That makes a lot of sense. They'd probably have more ability to assess the battlefield situation than line infantry.
IIRC there are attestations of archers being led by "centarchs" and "decharchs," which roughly correspond to captains and sergeants in modern thinking. These ranks probably come from the late Roman author Vegetius, whose works were popular in Medieval Europe. They would be chosen from senior archers
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I had been wondering about this for awhile - thanks.
Did someone say Hollywood depictions of archers? (and this clip doesn't even include the bit where they fire smoke arrows to signal a danger close trebuchet artillery strike) www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07s...
I'm trying to decide whether the arrows of improbable kinetic energy or the plate carrier brigandine is the better ridiculous part of this, and I think I'm actually going to have to go with the armor because it's a little more subtle.
That scene is impressive in how awful it is. And I mean, I don't just mean the machine-gun ballista and how much the director *really* wants to do a GWOT film, but also as a fire-fight action scene, it's also bad?
it's extrememy funny how bad they wanted to do a GWOT commentary, given the later reveal is that the Crusades were actually a plot manufactured by the medieval English equivalent military industiral complex
Forsooth, the King doth govern the realm at the behest of Big Gonne
Though you could definitely make a movie about this for the 4th Crusade & the Venetians
There's the Albigensian Crusade, which had real doctrinal differences but was also mostly a French land grab, too, but that, well, doesn't put people in the Middle East.
I don't say 'what a good post' every week - even though they are - but this one is very very good. Another reason for musket volleys is that it wasn't uncommon to completely mess up the reload process. Once you have fired your ramrod away, you're not firing again until someone near you is KIA.
One addition (and a purely what I reckon) - I was chatting with a HEMA reenactor a few weeks ago who mentioned that even a few minutes fighting with the helmet down caused a desperate lack of oxygen; I wonder if Agincourt in particular can be explained a lot by having to walk a muddy field with >
It depends on the helmet and the user, but yeah. You see some interesting experimentation with visor design in the 15th century to try to get the best air circulation for the minimum exposure. Some early armets and close-helms feature really clever ways to get the best of both worlds!
Yeah, it's notable that you don't really get that with a fencing helmet, where the airflow through the mesh is pretty good. Though even there, it gets substantially worse when you're wearing a tournament helmet.
>your helmet down; even if you weren’t even smacked about by an arrow that just bounced off, you were going to be completely knackered with godawful situational awareness.
Yeah, this wasn't the place to get into visors, but absolutely they have an impact in terms of stamina and combat capability too.
I think it's somewhat analogous to the practice of engaging tanks and AFVs with machine gun fire in modern warfare. Actual penetration is extremely unlikely, but simply forcing the crew to button up constrains their endurance and situational awareness. You may also damage exterior subsystems.
That's with late medieval plate (Agincourt 1415)
Forcing someone to hide behind their shield in earlier periods probably had a similar effect, however.
A little more chance of actual wounds, I think
Yeah, somewhat more. It's also not a perfect analogy because even late-medieval plate armour usually has weak points that a skillfully shot (or simply lucky) arrow can absolutely penetrate, even on the front of the armour. But you get the idea.
The contemporaries said that many simply died of suffocation or were trampled on
They do, but this is pretty explicitly described as a crowding problem. Unfortunately, similar things are still fairly common in concerts or demonstrations where large numbers of people are funneled into constrained spaces for whatever reason.
A classic whinge from some is that no known set of wargames rules allow for a tabletop re-enactment of Agincourt, but that's sort of the point isn't it? They all assume, have to, a default level of competence that was somehow absent that day.
Easy to be competent when you see all from above and are physically comfortable
I have a blog series for that! acoup.blog/2022/05/27/c...
It's not even just that: the point of a game is for it to be competitive, right?
You could run a scenario to try to see how contingent the outcome was
But then there would be an argument about accuracy of simulation
I think you could possibly do it via something kriegspiel-adjacent, but it wouldn't be very satisfying for either side and would mostly involve the umpires either lying to you or the bulk of your orders failing to be carried out.
Great fun for the umpire though.
Have started dipping my toes into playing kriegspiel online, and it's notable how many games start off with the umpire blatantly lying to at least one and usually both teams.
I wish I could just inject your blog into my veins. This is the sort of historical analysis that gives me life!
One point I'd make is that Valmont (1416) and Verneuil (1424) are better examples of the potential performance of armoured cavalry than Formigny. In the former, the French cavalry charged through the English despite the use of stakes, while the latter had more mixed results. The Italians succeeded,
but the French were turned back. In both cases the French lost the battle, but that was due to their inability to time the charge to be only just far ahead enough of the dismounted men-at-arms that the English couldn't reorganise. It's possible the French had some even earlier success,
such as at Mauron (1352), where 140 mounted men-at-arms broke the English right wing, but the defeat of the main body of the dismounted French allowed this attack to be driven off. By the time of Poitiers (1356), the best French men-at-arms were effectively invulnerable from the front.
Lighter than late medieval European heavy horse, but of course the Macedonians also demonstrate neatly what supported heavy shock cavalry could do, particularly when deployed with some mass.
I'm always a bit surprised by these royal armies with a few hundred or so riders, since I am used to Hellenistic armies where the 'cavalry hammer' is anywhere from 3,500 to 7,000 cavalry, which has, to my mind, real implications for the ability to turn back such a charge with arrows.
I suspect the evolution of French tactics and their use of only a small elite largely comes from the kinds of defensive terrain adopted by opponents once the French monarchy was able to muster high thousands of men-at-arms. They'd have loved to have brought 16 000 mounted men-at-arms to face
their opponents, but when terrain is selected or shaped to prevent those charges, their best bet was to limit the size of the force to manageable one that had a chance of breaking through and then supporting it with superior numbers of well armoured and motivated infantry.
Do we think the French monarchy could really field such a large force of cavalry? My sense is that a lot of 'mounted infantry' rode mounts not fit for battle and that the resources of the French king in the 15th century were more limited than this.
Yep. Philippe brought an estimated 8000 knights, Squires and men-at-arms and 4000 "other" men-at-arms to Crécy, while a similar number were with his son at Aiguillon. At Bouvines in 1340, he had over 22 000 men-at-arms. Proper men-at-arms, in French service, required at least one proper war horse
I should add that there were another 5325 men-at-arms in Languedoc, along with nearly 14000 foot soldiers.
in addition to a second (the English required three horses total). Jean II's regulations requires that the French warhorses be slightly more expensive than English (roughly £6 Sterling vs £5), so these weren't just multi-purpose horses. Even their armed valets were supposed to ride horses in the
It was their bad luck to face an opponent in England that had shifted to a somewhat unique system of well supplied, reasonably wealthy massed archers who - coincidentally - also drew moderately powerful bows. The English could still have had a similar success with crossbows, for instance, but
the real advantage the English had was in both the quality and quantity of their missile arm.
And it wasn't just the French - according to Wyntoun, at Neville's Cross (1346) Sir John Graham was able to charge into the English archers, and only lost his horse while retreating - although it's possible his request for 100 men-at-arms and charge was an invention designed to highlight English
vulnerabilities to a contemporary audience (Wyntoun compiled his chronicle in the 1420s).
This makes me wonder if the foot wasn't a major weakness? Lots of armor but you're also just wearing sandals?
