From a layman’s point-of-view it seems like the Bow & Arrow would be better for war since they, shoot much more efficiently, are cheaper to make and in even some cases significantly stronger.
I know that learning to shoot a bow is no easy task so would that be the main reason muskets became so popular?
In my simple man’s brain I’m wondering why you don’t see or hear anything about bows being used during something like the American Revolutionary war. Could it be that by then muskets had reached a certain level of design that made it more useful than a bow?
In: Engineering
Guns were easier to use, more accurate, and longer-ranged. This didn’t necessarily make them better than bows, but they didn’t need to be. Bows were not the main weapon for infantry combat – spears were. Add a bayonet to your gun and now you’ve got a spear. A spear that can also shoot. That’s handy.
Obviously the invention of the automatic rifle and technology advancements surrounding weapons caused the bow to be outdated, but was there a major drop off from the bow at one point in history?
It takes years of training, conditioning, food, and upkeep to train a military archer, a specialist devoted to his craft that you have to pay and house.
You can give a farmer a musket and an hour’s training and a little militia exercise every month and get comparable results.
Using a bow is hard. Using one well requires regular training with the bow to build the needed strength and skill. Arrows require skill to manufacture, and have relatively high cost. A bow is also more difficult to make then it might seem, requiring strong, springy wood that must be sized to the height and strength of the user.
A gun, on the other hand, is cheap. It’s a metal tube attached to a wooden part to hold, shooting a bit of lead that can be cast over a campfire with hand tools. Two weeks of instruction and a person can reliably use one. Three months and they can use it with some accuracy and skill.
A bow can be better then a 17th century firearm in the event you can be sure your people will have had years of training, but that is not a common situation.
so, theirs a few factors,, but the two biggest are:
**armour penetration:** while bullet proofed metal amour was a thing (indeed, some suits were sold with the dent of a pistol shot in them, as proof they could stop it) It *significantly* increased the weight and cost of armour, and muskets got better at piercing armour pretty quickly. This is part of the reason for the decline in plate armour usage in the early modern period, though not the only or even primary one.
**training time**: this is a biggie. quite simply, it takes a great deal of effort and training to handle high power warbows in combat conditions for a useful period of time. Their was a saying along the lines of “to train an archer, start with his grandfather”. It really was something you had to grow up with as a cultural thing, and needed literally life-long practice and exercise to develop and maintain the musculature for prolonged high power bow useage, as being able to do it once was not really useful, compared to the dozens of even hundreds of times a battle they might be called upon to fire, this meant that their was something of a hard limit on how many archers you could raise, and significant losses among them might cripple your army for a literal generation or more until new archers could be grown form childhood.
compared to this, a musket was dirt easy to train on, you could learn it to an acceptable level in a few weeks. losses in musket men could be made good pretty quickly assuming you had the muskets to give them. This helped a wider trend of armies growing larger and more centralised, both of which hindered archers.
that said, it soldiered on for a good while. both bows and guns co-existed for many, many decades, and even as late as the 1600s their was significant numbers of archers in service, so it wasn’t a total and instant change.
>I know that learning to shoot a bow is no easy task so would that be the main reason muskets became so popular?
Yes, that’s exactly it. Teaching someone to use a musket is much easier.
A trained bowman could have been very effective in that time period, but there just weren’t any. The lack of body armor due to the effectiveness of guns means a bow could be quite effective, but due to the amount of time that passed between guns being invented and armor being phased out, the skilled bowmen who could be recruited for the war effort on either side would be few an far between
How does the crossbow fit into this? Wasn’t this also seen as the same kind of revolution in not needing as much training etc? is the musket just an upgraded crossbow? (and if so, in which manner?)
> shoot much more efficiently,
Nope
>are cheaper to make
Very much debatable.
>in even some cases significantly stronger.
Lol no.
Add in the fact that even a smoothbore musket is more accurate, at longer ranges, than a bow, and muskets win out pretty handily.
Muskets took over from bows *because they were “better” weapons*
It takes years for someone to build up the strength and skill to effectively use a bow that’s powerful enough for warfare. The difficulty in learning how to use a bow and building the muscle required for it is why medieval England instituted laws that *required* men to practice regularly with a bow throughout their entire adult lives. This is why England’s longbowmen were so effective. But again, it took years for someone to become effective.
On the flipside, it took days, maybe a week or two, for someone to become effective with muskets since they didn’t need to build up the muscles that archery required. This meant that musketmen could become a very effective fighting force much more quickly than archers could, especially when you consider that muskets can double as spears when you put a bayonet on them. Also, when you lost all your musketmen in a battle, they were very easy to replace. It was virtually impossible to quickly replace your veteran longbowmen.
It’s important to consider the soldiers you actually have, not the ideal soldiers.
Prior to the musket, there were two sorts of bow-like weapons: Longbows (what you probably mean by bow and arrow) and crossbows. Longbows were demanding things requiring substantial amounts of physical training and skill; you generally had to be a dedicated longbowman. Crossbows were far more simpler affairs which could be reloaded by simple mechanical action and really just had to be aimed towards the enemy; you could give a few dozen to some peasants and get good results.
The musket was used similarly to the crossbow – take some relatively untrained soldiers who weren’t dedicated to the weapon, train and drill them in how to reload, and you can get pretty good results. Sure, the weapon itself is more expensive but the users aren’t. Any shortfalls in rate of fire could be made up for by quantity of soldiers. The crossbow was unable to completely replace the longbow, but the *musket* was – because it was close enough in range and power.
One substantial development in the use of muskets was the idea of volley fire, which was developed in Asia in the 16th century and spread through Europe around the 16th and 17th century. The concept is simple: Get your soldiers to stand in a grid, all facing the same way. The soldiers at the front all shoot, then get out of the way by crouching or heading to the back and reload. Each row fires in turn, discharging their muskets all at once. This makes an efficient way to fire many, many shots in quick succession, filling an enemy formation of massed infantry with a hail of lead. Doesn’t matter how accurate you are, plenty will hit.
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