First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false.
But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.
I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama.
Am I missing something here?
Bows have highly variable “lock time”. There is no trigger and you can’t reasonably get an army to draw at the same rate.
Reload times are fast enough that the fastest archer may be able to be ready to fire again before the last archer has completed their first shot.
In those circumstances, you would simply get orders to start and stop firing.
Why wait for a specific command? It sounds like as an archer maybe you could try and hit a few far-off enemies whenever you wanted. There will be a critical period when most of the arrows will be released and be most effective, but the primary limiting factor is the archer's fatigue level. The article makes it clear there's not really a shortage of arrows.
So it's probably more like "people start talking, some arrows start flying, as the enemies get closer more arrows start flying". Which is pretty different from a coordinated volley.
It’s not perfectly reasonable at all. When the enemy is charging, what you want is maximum efficiency, which means a rate of shooting as high as possible, which means everyone shoots as soon as they are ready, which precludes synchronisation.
When the enemy is not charging and just manoeuvring, volleys are counter-productive because you just give them some time to hide behind their shields and move between volleys.
I can imagine maybe one time when such tactics could work, it’s in an ambush. But then it’s not large scale and it is quite difficult to pull it off, because you need to synchronise the archers without giving away their presence. And it’s quite far from the autor’s pet peeve, which was archers fighting like they had guns in big battles.
> upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
You cannot really do that without extensive drills that were not really a thing in pre-modern armies. There are too many variations in individual strength, not really standardised equipment, and different people behaving differently. Even if you take 10 people, you would not get synchronised arrows if you did that.
> Am I missing something here?
Why would they? What advantage would they gain doing so? Particularly when doing it more naturally is more efficient and effective (not going to repeat the story’s argument, but there are several).
Allow me to introduce the longbowmen whose skeletons adapted to being professional longbowmen.[0]
[0]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285885888_Architect...
Arrows are not more effective (e.g. armor penetration) in a volley, and the psychological effect is also less for volleys I would argue: you know a volley is coming, duck and cover, and afterwards it's clear, vs a continuous rain where you never know when an arrow is headed toward you specifically.
In this scenario, how big is this impenetrable (and undoubtedly heavy) shield you are lifting over your head with one arm while charging the enemy?
One example given is a Scutum (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutum) which weighs around 22 lbs- "light enough to be carried with one hand"
Or, you can protect your front while the arrows get dropped on your head. Decisions, decisions...
https://youtube.com/shorts/0AWfhAcFu_k?si=XokulP_9f3aFl2mu
However, if the enemy has an elevated position, that is literally what the romans did.
However, it seems a lot more reasonable to suppose that archers were sometimes told to hold until a given strategic moment. In that case, you might see something resembling a volley when, say, an advancing enemy reaches a particular position and the archers begin loosing. But I don't think that's what the post was talking about.
Just waiting until someone says to start shooting isn’t a volley. It’s just holding fire.
But this leads us to the more important question: why wait until that last moment? If the enemy is within your range of fire, shooting at them is better than not shooting at them. You shoot at them all the way until they reach your own infantry, accumulating wounds and breaking up their ranks. Not shooting at them won't make the final arrow you loosen before they charge any more damaging.
Large scale coordination during pre-modern warfare was effectively impossible. The battlefields would often stretch for hundreds of meters or even a few kilometers and it was too chaotic to see anything once in the heat of battle. Generals could issue some local commands, especially if they were at the head of a cavalry charge, but only the officers and bannermen leading a small formation could exert any real control over their soldiers. A general signaling ranged combatants is just unrealistic.
Your second point is spot on. Infantry formations don’t generally charge the way we think of charges - they were rather slow, controlled forward movements with weapons and shields lowered. otherwise the first soldier to trip or take an arrow would take down the entire formation. No one ever really pitches battle with their infantry starting in range of the other army’s archers so there’s never really a clear opportunity for a volley.
Cavalry charges are a bit of a special case because they’re especially vulnerable to archers, but they’re also the group most capable of avoiding volley fire. Cavalry charges don’t run into soldiers, they train for coordinated feints so they can quickly change direction unlike infantry. When attacking cavalry, archers generally want to have random fire to increase the chances of bringing down a single horse, which often causes enough chaos to break the charge.
Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Edit: To quote the OP: "... as hard as it is to prove a negative, I will note that I have never seen a clear instance of volley fire with bows in an original text and so far as I can tell, no other military historians have either. And we have been looking."
> it still seems perfectly reasonable to me
Where's your evidence? "seems perfectly reasonable" leads to belief in witchcraft, the stars orbit the earth, leaches cure disease, the lack of germ theory, etc. That's why we modern humans require evidence.
Be very careful with that assumption. Brett Devereux (author of the blog) himself constantly points out that our historical sources are often very limited because they were written by the nobility who only wrote about their own social class, completely ignoring the majority of people actually involved in a military campaign or civic life. We know a lot more about the generals and cavalry than the foot soldiers, archers, or supply train.
During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics.
I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
But we do have so much written about musket volleys, and those were done by lower status soldiers as well. It is very strange that much was written about musket volleys but not archer volleys.
More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
One thing that I don't enjoy from COUP is he often demolishes ideas that approach strawman territory (is a barely coordinated order to start shooting a volley? or does it have to be something else), but I understand that from his perspective as a teacher, he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
The most obvious reason they practiced volley firing for muskets is the large amount of smoke they produce, once one person shoots the rest can't see where they would fire so you want everyone firing at once so they don't block each other.
So there is no reason to believe the practice evolved from anywhere, they is no world where they didn't volley fire with muskets that produce a lot of smoke since its the obvious thing to do.
After photography for sure, the Zulu used them extensively when beating the British.
While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all.
So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers!
Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist.
How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
* Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
And the reason that those societies favored cavalry is that they won battles.
It'd be very silly to favor something that doesn't work, and any attempts to do so probably wouldn't last long.
The former supported cavalry because it won battles but the latter did so because it earned them prestige among their peers. It also helped them feel powerful when they rode into battle literally hoisted above the common foot solider, as if they were closer to the gods.
The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials.
edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.
Why not?
It’s not even true for all (or probably even most) of modern times. For instance the upper classes of Britain in WWI suffered much higher casualties than the lower classes.
Not really scientific but you can see the exact same outcome in video games. After the initial synchronized volley, it becomes more of a constant barrage as each archer's differing rate of fire causes shots to become desynchronized.
Is it true? I have no idea, but it's hardly magical thinking. It's logical but could still be untrue for other reasons not assessed.
It seems extremely unlikely that a group of individuals would all make the exact same choice simultaneously without a prearranged signal for it. And I think the post itself makes a strong enough case for why that signal wouldn't be made.
If the enemy is out of range you might wait with an arrow knocked but not drawn - but if that is what they were doing the order would be to draw. there is no real point of such an order though - archers are themselves smart enough to estimate their own range (which as the other response pointed out was not the same for every archer), and thus make their own decisions. The only reason to hold fire until everyone was ready was if the combine fire was devistating enough - but there is every reason to think combined fire wouldn't be devistating.
You can of course have the arrow nocked for as long as you desire.
One of the stories about Agincourt (that the author didn't mention and I don't know if it's true) is that the French underestimated the range of the English archers and drew up inside their maximum range, so were getting shot before they were ready for it.
So "everyone shoots when the enemy gets into range" would still not be a volley as each archer judges for themself when the enemy is in range.
But volleys imply a specific coordinated cadence. If you're just telling your troops to open fire, whether it be with bows or fire arms, that's not a volley.
> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy.
Yeah, pretty much nothing of that is actually reasonable.
First off, pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent. The only command that can be reliably given is "go", and even then, unless you're decently well drilled, that's still as likely to come from following what your neighbors are doing than being able to pay attention to your battlefield commander who might be a half-mile away. And archers are the least trained portion of the pre-modern battlefield!
Second, actually trying to hold everybody for a single coordinated volley seems incredibly counterproductive. The primary purpose of volley fire, as explained in the article, is to mitigate slow reload times. Archers have the opposite problem; they're going to exhaust their ammunition supply in a few minutes. Staggering the start time of the archer attack over, say, 30 seconds is actually a very significant percentage increase in the amount of time the attacking army is going to be harried by the archers.
> And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.
Already by this point, that means you don't have a single, solid pulse of arrows, but rather a continuous stream that's going to take--at least--2 or 3 seconds before everyone has loosed their first arrow. And quite probably, your slowest archers are loosing their first arrows after the fastest archers have loosed their second arrow. It doesn't make sense to me to call that a "volley", since it's not going to look anything like what we would think of as a mass volley of arrows.
Given that you're already stretching the definition of "volley" quite hard to match what you think is happening, and given that there is absolutely no sign that anyone ever thought trying to achieve a more cohesive initial volley was worth striving for, I think it does more harm than good to argue that volley fire existed in some form with regards to regular bows.
What are those contexts?
An infantry charge starts at the last moment. At that point, the infantry formation has been in the effective bow range for a couple of minutes. It would be stupid to exhaust yourself by running a long distance over rough terrain carrying a heavy load before the fighting even starts. And shields tend to be large enough that the additional protection from them outweighs the gains from reaching the enemy faster.
People mostly don't go around listing off things they're not doing and have never done. Therefore, lack of mention that someone's not doing something isn't really evidence they are doing it, or at least is very weak.
For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.
and that is where volley may be helpful - simultaneous hit to multiple horses and soldiers may break the pace and may cause stumbling and local pile-ups. Slow down of advance -> more exposure time to the follow up arrows.
It very much depends on the historical context. Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. If they broke rank or ran away from battle, everyone including their parents, siblings, neighbors, and potential lovers would hear about it back home (and never let them live it down). Most conscripts at that time fought alongside their fellow villagers and farmers, not random professional soldiers. They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-...
In particular, the concept of 'drill' gets a lot of attention:
"Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.... The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine."
He talks specifically in other posts about the problems with "discipline" as a term (it groups too many different things as though they were the same), and he talks specifically about "cohesion" (which is the thing I think you're getting at) in this post at several points.
I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.
I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
It's just surprising that the number's that large.
Compound bows of course you can go higher because of mechanical advantage, but either way I don't think that people realize how difficult it is to draw a 100 pound bow. Typical professional recurve bow users would rarely want to exceed 50 pounds as I understand it.
1. https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...
A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.
Never eliminated though!
But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
> [I]n the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal.
I wouldn't want to be shot by one, regardless.
They pinned his army down with a fresher army meaning to destroy them. The English infantry and cavalry were vastly outnumbered due to attrition, but what he did have were longbows. And somehow they beat a superior army while losing a fraction as many men.
The historical military analysis I saw was that with the front lines so thin, the archers essentially didn’t have to fire long arching volleys. The flatter angle of the arrow trajectory and shorter flight distance increased the penetration force, and they just absolutely destroyed every charge against them, confusing the attacking army. Arrows should not be dropping this many men. WTF.
(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)
When I owned one, it had a 65lb draw with an 80% letoff. So it took maybe 10/15lbs to hold it at full draw. But my bow could still reliably throw arrows out to around 300m, basically double the range of an english longbow. Nobody ever aims a modern bow for max range. Doing so is incredibly dangerous. World record distance shots have broken 1000m.
The first two times he lifted the bag he said this isn’t that heavy, maybe he got defrauded, so he got a scale and checked. But by the time he tried to lift it off the scale he was struggling, and getting it back into the metal can was serious work.
Stamina separates the pro from the amateur, but fatigue comes for all of us.
If you're interested in archery-focused exercises - https://www.morrelltargets.com/blogs/archery-blog/9-strength...
What makes it various bow styles exceptionally difficult is the draw style -- horsebow drawing by a single thumb is especially difficult; war bow has a strange draw style I've never attempted due to shoulder issues, recurve isn't difficult as you get three fingers, and compound archery is simply cheating.
Most of these draws aren't a draw and immediate release, but a draw and hold to aim. That's where archery becomes physically exhaustive. There was some recent YTer who showed off by drawing a 100#+ bow but couldn't hit worth shit. Hitting your target takes patience and practice.
As noted in another child, draw weights are typically measured at 30", but your draw may only be 29" or may be 31", etc. You'd want a bow that fits your draw length as close as possible, though.
Imagine picking up a 45-kg weight using only a string held by three fingers. The pressure on the fingers is intense. Getting the shoulders and chest into the pull is the trick, and it's not quite as hard as lifting a weight off the floor because of that. But the fingers are doing a lot of work. Mine had turned white after a few shots, even with a thick leather tab to protect them.
We did do volleys, because the public expected it and it was fun to do. But we could not hold for long - the bloke doing the shouting knew that he had only a couple of seconds between "draw" and "loose" or we'd be all over the place.
Or maybe they would have simply massacred any army so dumb as to try it.
Then you continue to ignore the other elephant - the soldiers and everyone else who won battles also record history avoiding the slavery/food route
And again, "massacre" doesn't mean 100%
jakubmazanec•1d ago
jayGlow•1d ago
wffurr•7h ago
jjmarr•4h ago
https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-...
Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad.
The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops.
In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.
kergonath•6h ago