Ok. You keep talking about steel quality, steel quality, steel quality and steel quality, and I believe you that it probably played a role since you seem to be knowledgeable on the matter of steel carbonizing. You seem to assume that I said it is irrelevant. I'm ready to admit that it played a role, much like doctrines, tactics, and everything else induced by the emergence of the longbow played a role. All sources and documentation are rather clear on this, good steel or bad steel. Even in the hypothesis of bad steel in the early war (14th), longbows were not the best weapons to use against plate armour. Crossbows - pure products of your machine warfare - were a lot more efficient, but they suffered from other cons.
In any case, as the war progressed, counters were progressively found, like better steel, better protection either on limbs or horses, changing tactics, doctrines, and finally gunpowder. That's honestly all I had to say besides addressing the point and you continue to think that steel quality = everything...
If you are not interested in replying to my points as well, I don't really see why I should continue in all honesty... Or just say right now that all these sources and common History are de facto wrong... Longbow was certainly not an unstoppable killer at the beginning despite what it seemed to be, and was neither a useless weapon at the end.
Anyway, the real point was that the longbow brought chivalry to and end. Which I find rather fallacious. To begin with, chivalry is a code of honour and conduct, not a weapon. Chivalry was put to an end by the emergence of humanism and rationalism during the Renaissance. Unless you contest those sources too of course...
Knights (heavy plated cavalry) and late heavy infantry were more or less brought to and end by weapons, yes, though I think it is rather illogical to think that the longbow was such a weapon, since they were able to protect themselves better and better over the years, making the longbow less and less effective. Why would they have stopped using heavy plated armour if it eventually worked ?
What brought them to a stop was the appearance of firearms and the heavy use of more modern pikemen (like at Marignan).
Okay, I think I've figured out where our disagreement is. The reason I'm not going point by point on you is that, although it seems a lot of the actual debate has been about the weaponry, we aren't really disagreeing about anything there besides practices and procedures, we're simply talking about technology about a hundred years apart. I was starting to get the idea that we're not really debating what we think we're debating. It didn't seem like talking about parabolic ballistics was going to answer any of your questions and the reason I kept bringing up the steel is in response to the idea that the longbow wasn't effective against knights in expensive armor of the time. Even against them, it was a bane because of their steel quality, but that doesn't seem to be a point of real debate either. Your own sources point that out for the most part, though I'd say you should probably read the research for the Wikipedia article (that 2006 study was sort of a joke).
However, I don't think your problem is with any of that unless you thought I was saying armor was entirely ineffective. I've been going over steel and steel quality because you said you didn't think longbows could threaten knights in high-end plate armor, and in fact during the era where longbows were most heavily used, they certainly could. They definitely didn't turn plate armor of the time into butter, if that's what you thought I was saying, but a longbow volley is a lot different just in terms of physics than you firing a crossbow dead ahead at something you've lined up. Still, any armor is better than no armor, and a mounted knight would have probably fared better than someone in a mail coat.
So why the debate at all? I mean, if you want me to go over all my reasoning for why the longbow was so effective, I can. The reason I'm not is because I don't think that's necessarily where you're getting frustrated. So I started trying to figure out what exactly the confusion was over. I took a look over your posts and, I think, we might have some different definitions of knights and chivalry, then maybe in how the longbow itself began the decline of both.
I wouldn't define a "knight" as just a guy in heavy armor that rode a horse, but as a noble, politically invested landowner or vassals who followed the code of chivalry. More importantly, I think you define chivalry as just a code of polite conduct, which is true. You're probably talking about chivalry as a system of social etiquette, like Confucianism, and so it is. But that is not what chivalry
was. Chivalry was a martial discipline, more akin to Bushido, and the majority of it was laden with rules about who could fight who, for how long, when, under what circumstances, what was allowed and what was not allowed. It dealt with gems like how much you could demand in ransom for a captured knight, what weapons you were permitted to duel with, and who or what it was acceptable to kill and die for. It essentially dictated politics and historical events in Europe for hundreds of years.
That code essentially began to die after Crecy and the longbow, not just because of the weapon itself, but because of who used them. A longbow volley was lethal to everything beneath it, knight and peasant alike, and was used primarily by conscripted peasants. While it wasn't technically dishonorable to just dismount your knights and use them to protect peasants while they killed your enemy for you, the fact was that you don't take captives under longbow fire until you start chasing them down. Peasants simply aimed and fired, untrained in the martial conduct and skills that knights were trained in. In essence, they were simply using machines to process whatever they wanted to kill.
There was no political maneuver the French had that they could take to stop it or skill they could train for, they simply had to wait for better armor and machinery to fight back. That's the essence of machine warfare, that it isn't essentially important who you field as much as what equipment you field. Suddenly, the knights weren't all-powerful combatants anymore and sometimes weren't even the most important element of their own armies (as in the case of the Brits). That turned them into more social leaders than military leaders, and ended the days when kings essentially conquered and reconquered empires based on that chivalric code. The code itself was altered as practices became obsolete and were phased out into what we have today.
Either way, I wouldn't call the heavily armored men who fronted pike formations to be knights, as they were almost entirely men-at-arms that were then directed in combat by landowning knights. Cavalry existed for some time after, but by then, the politically and historically important parts of the chivalric code were long gone.
It didn't necessarily make the idea of someone in a suit of armor obsolete. If anything, I'd rather be out in a deerskin bodkin than completely naked during an arrow shower, and steel of the time was definitely better than that. But the Brits essentially ended chivalric warfare in Europe with their longbow combat during the Hundred Years War.
I hope that clears up whatever you weren't getting. I thought that by going into longbow physics versus steel tolerances of the time, I wouldn't answer any of your questions.
Author
Topic: Where have the Brits not invaded? (Read 10495 times)