Mike Loades had some
good replies to the Andersen debate. I think I agree with pretty much all of his points.
Yes, Andersen did show that it's possible to shoot extremely quickly. He's a great trick shooter. But he made sweeping, poorly founded claims about all of military archery, which covers millennia of history across nearly the whole world, and he ends up very selectively looking at evidence. There were many different archery styles throughout time and across the world. Comanche, Cherokee, English, Manchu, Turkish, Korean, Japanese--there were a lot of different styles meant to meet different needs. English longbowmen certainly didn't hop around shooting the probably very light bows that Andersen uses. Andersen's style is all about getting off as many arrows as possible within a limited time and at a short range while hitting the targets. Which is fine for trick shooting, but in battle? Not good at all. He seems to use a light bow, and often doesn't draw it back fully. This lets him get off a lot of arrows very quickly, but sacrifices a huge amount of power. His video that includes the clip of the arrow piercing "mail" almost certainly portrays what we like to call "fail mail": Incorrectly riveted, or worse, not riveted at all, made of the wrong materials, with the wrong thickness and diameter of the links, and so on. Cheap stuff made in bulk that only looks like real mail to the untrained eye. The same crap they used in Deadliest Warrior. Even a thrust from a butter knife could probably defeat it. There are very, very few people alive who can make good-quality reproduction mail, and it's very expensive stuff. So people who don't know the difference or don't care get the cheap stuff. I can't blame them; I'm an armor nerd myself, and even I have a hard time telling the difference between 4-in-1, 6-in-1, punch-riveted, drift-riveted, and so on. But still.
He shoots at very close range--within lunging distance of a spear, usually. Not something you'd want on a battlefield unless you're mounted and you know what you're doing. He also shoots at such a rate that he'd very quickly exhaust even the largest of quivers.
But enough of the speculation--as other links here have shown, there's a lot of evidence for the sorts of things Andersen says are myths, and not so much for what he claims are real. For example, plenty of archers historically used back quivers. I prefer wearing my back quiver around the hip when I shoot, since it lets me more easily reach for the arrows and check on how many are left, but that's not to say wearing back quivers wasn't done. Plenty of archers shot in very different ways from Andersen. English longbowmen carried their arrows in arrow bags/linen quivers, and sometimes stuck the arrows point-down in the ground. They didn't run about shooting, especially since they didn't draw their bows so much as lean their bodies into them, which can't be done while moving a lot. They tended to be deployed in a static defensive position, and behind stakes and alongside heavy infantry or dismounted knights whenever possible, and would launch volleys at a good range. Manchu archers, whether on foot or horseback, also used very strong bows, and to my knowledge there's no evidence from period artwork or Chinese military manuals that suggests that they were supposed to hold arrows in the hand, shoot very quickly, or run while shooting. The very strong bows they favored above all just can't be shot that quickly without completely exhausting the archer--and he'd probably miss, too.
Andersen has done a good job of showing that rapid shooting can be done, but by making these sweeping claims, he's both attracted attention and wandered into an area he doesn't seem to know much about.