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
Would the ammo for the musket not be cheaper and lighter?
I am going to use my go-to example from history whenever the topic of. “Bows vs muskets” comes up:
If bows were better weapons than muskets, Native Americans wouldn’t have tried to get their hands on *as many muskets as they could*, if the things they already knew how to make and use themselves were better.
Because Native Americans *loved them their muskets*. They loved flintlock muskets so much they *drove the firearms trade in North America*.
Critically “accuracy” as far as the pinpoint thing we think of with rifleman or bow hunters didn’t really matter. Penetraring power is kind of the same thing, it matters less than you think because the vast majority of troops on any given field didn’t have the kind of equipment that would protect them from arrows or balls.
In a battle, you massed your ranged units up and fired them and your opponents massed units. It didn’t really matter if you hit the guy you were aiming at or the the guy two places over in line, the point was to get a wall of flying death moving in the general direction of a block of dudes. This is true with bows or guns. Ideally you get successive waves like this, which muskets did very well with the adoption of volley fire.
You’re also probably also underestimating the labor and maintenance cost of a war-grade bow or the amount of consistent training it takes to pull a heavy draw bow. The ammunition for muskets is also cheaper to make and easier to carry in mass quantities.
It was cheap, cheaper than you think, was easy to train on and did the whole “wall of death” thing roughly as well as bows could. Better once you account for the number of them you could field.
One thing I’ve not seen mentioned is that guns make a loud noise and produce fire and smoke. They’d have been useful weapons of psychological warfare even if they couldn’t kill a bill to police insider trading. At Talavera four Spanish battalions routed from the sound of their own volley, fired at a few out-of-range dragoons the day before the actual battle.
The reason is actually quite simple. It takes years of training to make a man strong enough to be an archer, while using a musket correctly is a matter of months if not weeks of training.
Todd from Todd’s workshop explained this brilliantly when he showcased how much strength is needed to shoot a war bow.
One more thing that hasn’t been mentioned here, but definitely was mentioned by contemporaries in the 16th & 17th centuries, was the severity of injuries caused by guns.
If you actually wanted to kill or seriously injure your opponents, a musket was much more likely to do it than a bow.
Bowmen required years of training to be effective on the battlefield. It was too expensive to field large armies of bowmen; medieval armies were mostly made up of spearmen.
Muskets were much easier to train. You could take a raw recruit and make an effective musketman within a month. This allowed European monarchs to field larger and larger armies as muskets became more prevalent.
Military longbow had ~90-110 lbs draw weight. You needed to be a damned strong man in good health to fire one repeatedly.
Even a malnourished teenager can load and fire a musket.
You want to train an archer with a bow and arrow?
You start with his father and hope that he passes the knowledge down to his sons.
You put in laws requiring that men keep a bow and several arrows and train with them and you train them from their teens. You train them for 15-20 years to draw a bow so strong that their bodies – muscle and bone – are changed by the effort required.
And then maybe, you’ll find some that are good enough to draw an English longbow.
The average person these days don’t come close to drawing a 100lb bow nevermind a 180lb longbow, never mind hitting a target accurately.
To operate a longbow effectively at 18-20 years of age, you need to train a man from childhood to shoot bows. Not just technique but muscle and stamina. When you hear “hundred pound draw bow” it means the dude has to exert the equivalent of lifting a 100lb weight with one hand, for each shot. What are the requirements to operate a musket? Two hands and preferably at least one working eye.
Latest Answers