Scott Alexander (author/host)

The English, you see, had the longbow.

The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward.

It's a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it, you can put a 37-inch arrow through chain mail.

Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians.

Modern research suggests that even a short-ranger couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe.

Footnote.

Modern research is the best name for shooting arrows at plate armour and watching them explode.

See Skalagrim and Todd's workshop on YouTube for more details.

But patriotic historians can exaggerate anything.

Horses didn't wear heavy armour, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle, 500 years later.

And, interestingly, one author of the French Revolutionary Wars, some 400 years after our story, recommended the British ditch the single-shot musket for the longbow on these grounds.

This probably would have been a mistake, since longbows don't come with bayonets.

But given that nobody but a few cuirassiers was wearing armour by that point, I suspect Pitt's government would have gotten a good deal by recruiting any hobbyists still practising with the weapon and having them fire on enemy infantry and cower inside a bayonet square whenever cavalry threatened.

The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better.

Footnote, do you ever wonder if the French had it coming?

By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor wounds...

the ones with major wounds didn't make it to the English lines, and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to you is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armour is good enough to stop the projectile.

Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.

The French, naturally, put together another army, which was beaten in almost exactly the same way at Poitiers.

Again and again it repeated itself, Agincourt, Vernouille, Algebarotta, and dozens of other minor fights.