"Boys off the street" English and Welsh, were the archers who beat the
heavily armoured French knights at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt in the OPEN
FIELD. That's a TERRAIN type, guys. Of course, they weren't just 'boys off
the street', they were men who had trained since boyhood with the bow,
gradually building up to the longbow until they could shoot not only fast
but accurately AND pierce plate armour!
Moral: archers should beat cavalry in plains.
Your moral is flawed. Agincourt was won, and the longbowmen played a
very big part, but recent studies usually claim that their influence was
less than is traditionally believed. Their success there came about
largely due to the fact that Henry took up a prime position, in time
enough to fortify it with stakes (one per archer). The field was very
narrow, and flanked on either side by ditched woods. The French charged
into a funnel, their infantry were held by the English infantry, and the
knights piled in a huge push. The archers picked off so many, because
they couldn't move forward due to the infantry and the stakes defending
the archers, they couldn't move right or left due to the ditches (and it
is believed that there were flanking archers in the woods, and they
couldn't move back due to the press of their own troops.
A better commander would have refused battle, and even an average one
would not have sent knights in to a ditched, staked field with woods on
either side - his own infantry had failed to break the English line, so
it is probable that he thought putting the Cav in behind would prevent
them from retreating.
Archers get creamed by cavalry in plains, until you start to use them in
mixed formations. Mix your archers with pikemen (or their forbears
spearmen) and you have a more effective force.
While we're on the subject, what about the Huns and, later, Mongols, both
nations whose horse-archers terrorised European armies in open terrain?
Moral: archery of any kind needs open terrain to be effective.
How can you draw that moral from the example of archers on horseback.
Of course archers on horseback need to operate in the open - it is
otherwise too embarrassing when the horse runs into a lamp post. But
here of course the archer has taken superior mobility in exchange for
his usual need of cover or defending spearman.
So what about archery in the woods? I'm afraid GSI have this bit right - in
military terms, it was ineffective. The denser the woodland, the less
effective the archery.
Tolkien understood this. If you read the account of the Battle of the Five
Armies (The Hobbit), you will see that the Elven host comprised spearmen as
well as archers.
Yup, see above. When he moves out onto the field, where a mounted man
might charge him down, the archer needs some mobile trees.
If there was any close fighting to be done in the woods of
Greenwood/Mirkwood, it was done by spear rather than arrow.
Not sure you can demonstrate that.
No doubt the
Elves picked off any hostile scouts with archery, but that was skirmishing
rather than open battle.
Yes indeed. But skirmishing still happens in an around big battles.
The horse archers you mention above, actually did so well, because they
avoided what the Europeans would define as battle. Same with modern day
guerilla warfare.
As I said in the other post, a lot depends on how you imagine your
elves. Personally, I prefer the Robin Hood style image, of the arrows
decimating the column of Norman knights moving through Sherwood Forest -
shot from almost unseen bows. To me, the elven archer is a skilled
marksman, not a Welsh "Boy (boyo) off the street", who can stick one of
5000 arrows into the air roughly over there somewhere.
But there's room for both. The elven forest archer, and the Dunedain
levy need not exclude the existence of one another.
Regards,
Laurence G. Tilley http://www.lgtilley.freeserve.co.uk/
···
Richard John Devereux <devereux@lineone.net> wrote
