How Fast Did English Longbowmen Shoot?

One of the most interesting things about historical archery is how fast archers can shoot. And if you look at the stats online, you do a search on Google, you will find figures ranging from six shots a minute up to 12. And of course, naturally, people pick the higher figure as the more impressive and perhaps more realistic one. And that leads to this run-on effect where the continuation of this high ball figure is exaggerated, repeated, and even increased over time. So today, we're going to talk about how much we know about the shooting speed or the shooting rate of historical archers, specifically in the context of English longbow. The English longbowmen have long since been romanticized, glamorized, raised to mythical levels in some cases, and it's important to debunk some of the myths which have been brought up. So today's myth is where the figure of 12 shots in a minute comes from. As a bit of a preface, I think it's important now. It's been a while since I last made a video, and a lot of things have changed, both in my personal life, which you can probably see behind me, but also in terms of technology, education, and so on. And the biggest issue now, of course, is AI, artificial intelligence. More and more sources or pages or sites are using AI-generated content, and that means that it's very hard to verify whether information is correct, accurate, and reliable. The question should always be, is it? You should always be valuing your critical thinking, and it doesn't matter if it's an AI-created source. It doesn't matter if it's a human or a person like me. You should always be critical and ask those questions. I'm not infallible. I can make human mistakes, and I have made human mistakes in the creation of this video and my research, and those human mistakes have come from other human mistakes, which I'll share a bit later on. But the whole point is you should always question and be critical, and that is why you should follow up on sources and check where people get information from. And this is relevant now, not because this is an AI or anti-AI speech, but because historically people don't check sources too. So our accounts of historical feats of archery may not come from actual proper sources from the time, but have been fabricated by people throughout history and repeated as fact. So there is always a level of human mistakes, inaccuracies, and bias which can dictate the narrative, and people don't question this. This is why I'm making this video. People are blindly repeating this figure, which people have made up, and in some cases may be plausible, but it's not critically discussed enough. And in this deep dive, we're going to really bring out the sources and discuss whether it can be trusted. So I'll say it right off the bat here, while the figure of 12 shots in a minute for a medieval longbow may be plausible, there is no contemporary historical evidence of this rate. Zero. There are no sources from the medieval historical period specifically to English longbow as we know was used, say, during the battles of Cressy of Agincourt between the 1300s and the 1500s. There's simply no record. The earliest comprehensive source is Toxophilus by Robert Arsham, and that's 1545, but there's no mention of a required rate of shooting or shooting speed. So already there's one myth that we can debunk, and that is, did archers have a requirement or a standard to shoot a certain number of arrows in a minute? This is a time where people didn't measure minutes at all. Even with that said, there's no contemporary equivalent to timing. There simply is none. So this figure does not come from a historical source. So where does this exact figure of 12 come from? The most widely published source would have been a quote from Prince Louis Napoleon in the mid-19th century, and this is quoted in the book The Longbow, A Social Military History by Robert Hardy. He specifically says, a first-rate English archer who, in a single minute, was unable to draw and discharge his bow 12 times with a range of 240 yards, and who, in these 12 shots, once missed his man, was very lightly esteemed. So we can nitpick some of the words here. Specifically, he doesn't say ever that it's a requirement for a medieval longbowman to shoot 12 shots in a minute. He does say the words first-rate, which in the language of the day, as is today, is the highest level of archer, and he does frame this as anyone who shoots below this rate would be lightly esteemed. Now we can nitpick the language and say, well, is that a requirement? Is it a standard? Is it not? But more appropriately, how does he know this? Because Louis Napoleon wrote this in the mid-19th century. That is over 400 years since the use of the longbow. There is no living tradition of medieval longbow at this time, and that will lead on to some questions, which will be consistent in other contemporary sources, at least sources from Louis Napoleon's time. But we can actually track his specific figures of 12 arrows a little further back. So the next source is from 1832. It is an entry, a journal entry in American Journal, by an English writer. So the text is pro aris et focus, considerations of the reasons that exist for reviving the use of the longbow, with the pike in aid of the measures brought forward by his majesty's ministers for the defense of the country, by Richard Oswald Mason. I'm not making this up. That is quite a title. But the quote from this article states, The arrow is the ancient weapon of the realm, and the reviving its use in defense of our rights is but exerting it in the cause of humanity. In point of quick shooting, from the simple exercise of the bow, there are only the motions of knocking the shaft and drawing up the bow, which are soon effected with order, so that an archer, expertly trained, can shoot 12 times in a minute, and a slower from 6 to 8 times. That's a fairly reasonable estimation. I think 6 to 8, as the inclusion of the slower rate of shooting, is very reasonable as an estimate. I think most people who do archery, especially heavy draw weights, will agree 6 to 8 is very much sustainable. Lower is even easier, 6 to 8 is very much a reasonable figure for any archer to do. And again, we see the figure of 12, which is likely what's been propagated in research and sources and historical writing since then. But the 12, again, he's writing in 1832. There is absolutely no historical basis for this specific figure that we know of. He may be using notes, he may be referencing something, but there's no record of how he came about with this particular figure. And there is a very strong case where he may in fact be basing this figure of real archery experience from observation or even personal experience. However, we have to consider that the archery at this time, in the 1800s, is not medieval archery. The longbows used at this time were much lower in draw weight. Maybe 70 pounds was the top end, but mostly lower poundage, as archery was no longer used for military purposes in England, in Europe, in America, as we'll see. It's been long supplanted by the musket. And this specific division between bow and musket historically has been the case. There have been a lot of authors to have tried to resist the rise of the musket as the primary weapon and try to preserve the use of the bow and the pike, which was the title of this article. And we can trace this back even further. We can look at writers like Gervase Markham, who wrote The Art of Archery, mostly plagiarized from Toxophilus by Robert Ashar, but adds his commentary as a soldier. He fought in the 1600s. And we also see other writers like William Neale, also writing in the 1600s, in this case 1632, where he writes, he claimed six shots, referring to archers, six shots from a longbow for every one discharge of a musket. This is reflected by Benjamin Franklin, who is, of course, of American fame, 1776 in the letter. He claims a list of benefits of why the Americans should adopt the longbow, and he states as the second reason he can discharge four arrows in the time of charging and discharging one bullet. This is again reflected in the article by Mason, who immediately following the previous passage does claim, but the exercise of the musket is composed of more motion in order to use it, which take at least twice the time, however effected, so that archers could always return at least two shot for one of the enemy. The advantage must be evident attending the quick discharges of such galling showers of arrows, the danger of which is seen and apprehended. Is it possible, suppose, but that the greatest carnage and confusion must take place even with the best disciplined troops? And it will later go on the article to talk about how thousands of archers shooting in a minute might be 6,000 shafts at once, which is a lot of arrows. Again, we're not discrediting the fearsome nature of a lot of archers shooting at once, whether together in a volley or sporadically over a long period of time, but the important thing is, again, the context. What period of history? It is the rise of the musket. And as we said before, there's a division between the old guard, who are trying to preserve pike and shot, sorry, but pike and bow more like it, compared to the modern day, at the time, trying to advocate the wide adoption of musketry to the loss of the practice of longbow and archery. And because of this, it's very clear that many of the sources are strongly biased. And again, as historians, as studies students of history, we have to consider historical bias. These are authors who are glazing, marinating, really upselling the longbow, even though it's been, for some of them, hundreds of years since their use, to make it look more favourable compared to firearms, which may be lacking in, say, speed, or it might be low in supply, the ammunition, or might be too expensive. But that's a different debate for a different time. What we're saying here is every author has an agenda. And many of these authors were exaggerating the feats of longbow shooters, based off no experience, and making musketry look very bad. At least the numbers are fairly consistent. We understand that musk can shoot maybe 3 to 4 shots in a minute. And that means that longbows, should it be 2 or 3 or 4 times, might be between 6 to 12 shots in a minute. So at least we have consistency in where the sources come from. But once again, we just don't know contemporary sources. There's no medieval source which makes a claim to speed. And just as a bit of a little bonus, we have, later on, in the late 19th century, Maurice Thompson, who writes The Witchery of Archery, makes an even grander claim of how a well-trained archer could discharge 30 arrows in a minute. Now they're kind of pushing it. And it's possible. I think people who train archery today may find methods to shoot an arrow every 2 seconds. Is it a medieval warbow? It's 130 pound. I'm a little skeptical of that. I'm not sure there's many people who have tested this. And of course, we don't have a lot of evidence. People might have done it as practice, or as a proof of concept, or just demonstrated. But there aren't recordings that we can easily look up. So it's hard to validate any specific record claim. But we do know that there are very much human limits to what people can do. In the testing done by Mike Lodes with Mark Stratton and the English Longbow Society, as documented in the book Warbows, the max that I think Mark Stratton did manage in one minute with a 130 pound bow is 10 shots. And that's barely making the 10th shot. He said that he couldn't shoot 20 arrows in 2 minutes. That was very much the maximum limit of what he could do as one of the leading warbow shooters of the current day. And that's a fairly fair account. This is, for many people, the peak of human strength and endurance. For those who do gym work or weightlifting, if you're doing your max, near your max, consecutively under duress and shooting an arrow, trying to hit something at the same time, you're going to get worse and worse. Your form breaks down. And with archery, that means you don't shoot as quickly. That means you don't draw as fully. You struggle more. You shoot less accurately and with less power. And these weaknesses, as you continually shoot, will mean that each shot you do will become less effective. And that would lead me to question whether an archer would be shooting at such a high rate. In contrast, again, the most reasonable estimates would seem to be 6 to 8. I think now more people are saying under 6 would be a very plausible, sustainable rate when an archer can keep on shooting for a long duration. And it's no reason to assume that archers would have to be shooting at their max speed all the time. There are other considerations, things like the amount of ammunition they have. They didn't carry infinite ammo. The English archers carry at least one sheaf of arrows, which is 24 arrows, maybe two, which is about, say, 50. And then there'll be more supplied. So there'll be runners bringing arrows up there. But the distribution of arrows during a battle might not be reliable. So we have to consider the conservation of ammunition as well as the conservation of stamina. So ultimately, can an archer shoot 12 arrows in a minute? It's plausible. I think people can do it. People can show it today. Pushing it, maybe 10 to 12, is maybe the upper limit. But the nuance here is that we have no historical source which says that medieval archers at this period could do so. So ultimately, it isn't a myth. It's a plausible claim. But it may not be the norm. And we have to be careful in perpetuating that upper end that might not be the actual figure that was expected. We have no source for that. These are just people writing long afterwards claiming this highball figure of an archer who hypothetically might have existed, but by the time they wrote, no longer did. So that's my little talk there. Hopefully you find it interesting. Again, we're kind of splitting hairs. I'm not saying that archery or longbows are slow or that people can't do this. But we just have to really look at sources carefully and deep dive where we can. And the sources are dated way after the period we're talking about. So make a conjecture. But we can't state these as fact. And that's, of course, the nature of studying history. Be critical. Look at your sources. And make your reasonable judgments and evaluations. Anyway, hope you found that interesting. Thank you for watching. And hopefully we'll see you again next time.