Reinventing the fastest forgotten archery

Forget Mike, I want to be like Lars. That's a man that should probably survive the zombie apocalypse. Silent death skill set ftw.
 
That's amazing! Also amazing is how we completely forgot, as a society, how archery was actually performed. How something that was once such a necessity for survival both by way of hunting and making war could decline so quickly in our collective memory is just incredible...
 
Now do you see why the English won at Agincourt?
There's something about how the French nobility was comprised of idiots in this video?
 
OK. OK. You're right!

But the Agincourt outcome wasn't based solely on the idiocy of the French nobility, now was it?
 
But it's funny to emphasize the idiocy of the French whenever the opportunity presents itself :D
 
You may emphasize it, indeed. But I can't possibly risk casual racism of that magnitude. ;)
 
Even the French say that being French isn't an ethnicity, but a state of mind ;)
 
Isn't it modern consensus that the arrow barrages at Agincourt weren't nearly as effective as once believed?
 
That's funny. I say the same thing about being English.

And yes. The arrows may not have been as important as the heavy rain the night before, iirc.
 
That's some fancy shooting, accurate as well considering he doesn't bother with a fixed anchor point.
 
Yes. It is very impressive. He's relying on lots of practice, and trial and error (I'm guessing). So he doesn't have to take deliberate aim - since there really isn't time to do so.

It's a straight from eye to hand thing.
 
This thread has re-ignited my interest in Archery a bit, I used to go to a local club fairly regularly.

Was fairly decent out to about 40 yards but my bow was only 35lb draw weight so I couldn't get decent scores any further than that without sights as I was raising the bow so high I couldn't see the target anymore.

Might get some stronger limbs for it :) .
 
I reckon if you can release 10 arrows in 1 second, you're bound to hit something.
 
The line of bushes behind the targets probably. Seriously, going through those bushes looking for arrows was really annoying.
 
Video is interesting, but the words "lars" "anderson" are said way too many times! Yes, that's the guy doing it, we got it the first time. Or the second. Third, fourth...
 
I've seen this. It's pretty crazy, but I doubt it was a standard technique in battle. For one thing, he's using a bow with between 30 and 35lbs. of draw, which is several times weaker than your average war bow. Most of the bows on the Mary Rose were well over 100lbs. in draw weight. And shooting this way would exhaust both you and your quiver in under a minute, not a good thing on the battlefield.

The mail used in the test could not possibly be accurate, as properly-made mail can easily resist most attacks with swords, spears, and arrows. This article by Dan Howard gives a good overview of mail. I find that armor is much more misunderstood by most people than archery; in movies, armor almost never protects the wearer at all, and many believe that knights could barely move in their armor and needed cranes to lift them onto their horses, which is completely untrue.

Finally, English war archery wasn't like this. Their archers shot in massed volleys at fairly long range with very heavy bows rather than rapidly at close range with weak bows. And at Agincourt and Crecy, English archery doesn't seem to have killed too many men; at Agincourt, the French knights were superbly armored (though many non-knights were not), so the bulk of those killed or maimed by arrows seem to have been horses. The French, however, had to slog through a quagmire before meeting the English lines; the exhausted French suffered many losses in the melee, and thousands were taken prisoner only to be executed. At Crecy, the English had the high ground and the sun to their backs. The French deployed their Genoese crossbowmen, but they had left their pavises behind, and after suffering from English archery from their superb position, the Genoese pulled back. The enraged French saw this as cowardice and charged through their own crossbowmen, killing many in the process and causing chaos. The English had little difficulty winning as a result of poor French leadership and an excellent position, not because their bows were effective against plate armor (they really weren't). Most "tests" of the English bows have been at almost point-blank range against a firmly secured slab of steel plate that is not of armor quality or shape, and has no padding behind it; mail and plate usually, if not always, had layers of padding to absorb blows.
 
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