> First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it
Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Edit: To quote the OP: "... as hard as it is to prove a negative, I will note that I have never seen a clear instance of volley fire with bows in an original text and so far as I can tell, no other military historians have either. And we have been looking."
> it still seems perfectly reasonable to me
Where's your evidence? "seems perfectly reasonable" leads to belief in witchcraft, the stars orbit the earth, leaches cure disease, the lack of germ theory, etc. That's why we modern humans require evidence.
> Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Be very careful with that assumption. Brett Devereux (author of the blog) himself constantly points out that our historical sources are often very limited because they were written by the nobility who only wrote about their own social class, completely ignoring the majority of people actually involved in a military campaign or civic life. We know a lot more about the generals and cavalry than the foot soldiers, archers, or supply train.
I think that argument cuts the other way on this one. If there were some higher-rank person, presumably a noble, ordering a volley, as depicted in TV shows, and as happened with firearms, there would be a bias towards mentioning that person doing that, to demonstrate his command, rather than towards omitting him!
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics.
I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
> I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
But we do have so much written about musket volleys, and those were done by lower status soldiers as well. It is very strange that much was written about musket volleys but not archer volleys.
The printing press fundamentally changed everything so our sources get much more socially inclusive starting with the arquebus onwards (but not so much the hand cannon, which predates the press). This cuts across all subfields of history because society no longer depended on expensive scribes to preserve sources and publish new material.
More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
Indeed, it would make sense that musket volleys evolved from archer volleys than being spontaneously invented as a tactic for a weapon that was competing with the bow.
When was the last recorded javelin volley? I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows.
One thing that I don't enjoy from COUP is he often demolishes ideas that approach strawman territory (is a barely coordinated order to start shooting a volley? or does it have to be something else), but I understand that from his perspective as a teacher, he has to disabuse his students of all the nonsense tropes they pick up from tv shows and movies.
> I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows.
The most obvious reason they practiced volley firing for muskets is the large amount of smoke they produce, once one person shoots the rest can't see where they would fire so you want everyone firing at once so they don't block each other.
So there is no reason to believe the practice evolved from anywhere, they is no world where they didn't volley fire with muskets that produce a lot of smoke since its the obvious thing to do.
Well, you aren't really aiming with early firearms. You are just shooting in the general direction of the enemy. So I don't think smoke really explains it.
Javelins continued to be used around the Mediterranean until the gunpowder era, so there's no reason volley tactics could not have been transmitted directly.
> I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.
While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all.
So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers!
Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist.
How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
> What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.
I don't think this follows in practice, particularly since what's missing here is not names of archer captains but descriptions of the mechanics of volley firing (which may have been routine in certain circumstances, or not). Seems like attribution of the outcome to the excellence of the calvalry captains' flank attacks and valor of the Lord's retinue in holding the centre whilst merely noting that a grouping of archers were present without attributing anything to any decisions made by any individual archers at any level is pretty consistent with their low prestige (apart from Agincourt and a possibly apocryphal story about Harold Godwinson, archers don't seem to get much credit at all for being decisive, despite archery being important enough for peasants who wielded blunt instruments and blades in their day job to get compulsory longbow training).
Brett's argument that longbow volley firing would be difficult to time and probably not beneficial (especially compared with musket volleys) is compelling, but the argument that battle narratives don't really describe volleys, except in translations of words that may not have meant volley, isn't really in a context where archers rarely get much credit for anything .
That has causation backwards: nobles weren’t cavalry because cavalry won battles*, but because cavalry was so expensive that only nobles and well funded centralized states with professional armies could afford them. You not only had to train the rider from a relatively young age but feed and support all the horses they’d need - armies rode in with at least three horses per rider on campaign to keep the horses from exhaustion (not including all the ones they’d train on). Supporting cavalry easily cost 5-10 times as much as supporting an equal number of infantry.
* Which it very often did, but for unrelated psychological reasons.
Cavalry won battles in societies that favored cavalry. If your society was built around elite warriors, your army probably relied on cavalry, because those elite warriors wanted to be individually as effective as possible. But if the state was responsible for raising the army and there was a middle class with sufficient combat skills available, infantry (such as Roman legions or mercenary pikemen) was often more cost-effective.
War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully lived and mostly fought in elephant habitats. Likewise, cultures on or close to the steppe had much more of a cavalry focus because cavalry was so much more effective there. When the Romans went east, they didn’t stick to their heavy infantry, they developed cataphracts. And their eventual conquerors, the Turks, replaced most of their traditional cavalry with infantry as they expanded westward into Europe.
It's less about cultural preferences and more about fighting with what you have.
If you have a feudal society based on personal relationships between the elites, you probably can't raise large bodies of heavy infantry. You don't have the people trained to fight in formation, you don't have the resources to equip them, and you don't have the capacity to organize them. Instead, you have the elites, who are often well trained and equipped. The elites have their personal retainers, who are pretty much the same. There can be some mercenaries if you can afford them. And then there are commoners who have to fight for various reasons but often lack both training and equipment.
Elephants used to be native to North Africa, until the Roman Empire drove the subspecies to extinction. Carthaginians, Romans, and some Macedonian kingdoms used them in war. Persians and other Macedonian kingdoms imported elephants from India. But none of them fielded more than tens of elephants at once, at which scale infantry was capable of countering them. Some contemporary Indian kingdoms found it practical to have hundreds of elephants on the battlefield, which was qualitatively a different situation.
You fight with what you have but then sometimes you lose to someone who has a better army than you do and disappear from history. So in the long run you end up fighting with what actually works in your terrain. And I think it's very interesting that horses, who are only really indigenous to the steppe, ended up proliferating over the entire earth in a way that elephants did not. Hundreds of elephants on the battlefield sounds great if you can feed them though!
Armies are combined arms, with few exceptions (Mongolian horde, perhaps), they didn't have just a single unit type. But armored heavy cavalry (with stirrups) wasn't some kind of weird sociological hang-up of European nations, it was a very effective unit type to have in your mix, such that societies were "willing" to spend significant resources in supporting the existence of that unit.
Here "willing" really means, "subjected to competition pressure such that societies that didn't support heavy cavalry units were for the most part militarily bullied into either annexation or standing up their own heavy cavalry support system."
That lasted until the technological realities of war changed (sufficiently-advanced firearms), at which point quite rapidly those societies stopped fielding heavy cavalry, which is another data point that this wasn't some kind of peacock display from nobles.
Having a unit type in your toolkit is one thing, and expecting it to play a decisive role in battle is another. For example, Alexander's heavy infantry was supposed to anchor the enemy in place as cavalry won the battle, while Roman heavy infantry the primary fighting force.
Mercenary pikemen ended the dominance of heavy cavalry in Europe before firearms became common. But that didn't make heavy cavalry obsolete, and neither did firearms. Cuirassiers had a prominent role in the Napoleonic Wars, and French cuirassiers actually wore their breastplates a few weeks into WW1.
>It'd be very silly to favor something that doesn't work, and any attempts to do so probably wouldn't last long.
What are your political beliefs? Because this argument applies equally well to cavalry as it does to communism. Would you seriously claim that all stupid political beliefs are new?
Who is “you” in this case? Is you the Roman state or is you a random noble trying to curry favor and glory?
The former supported cavalry because it won battles but the latter did so because it earned them prestige among their peers. It also helped them feel powerful when they rode into battle literally hoisted above the common foot solider, as if they were closer to the gods.
There's a notable technological divergence between the Roman and the noble - stirrups that make cavalry charges possible. Roman cavalry were usually lightly armed and armored and had a very different function on the battlefield.
Also as I recently learned from Lindybaige video, war horses themselves were “one shot weapon” - you would train one to do a “cavalry charge” and would not be able to repeat it with the same horse. So in essence, even more expensive!
Well, in the Bhagavad Gita and in Ramesses' inscriptions, chariot archers did win battles, were the heroes, and were the nobles. There's some speculation that changes in weaponry making this approach obsolete were the main cause of the Bronze Age Collapse. (Devereaux is writing about more recent wars, but archer volleys from chariots seem even less likely.)
The nobility were involved in military campaigns. The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. When we talk about our historical sources being limited, it's because they focused on things like battles and military strategy, precisely because it is interesting to the wealthy people who support historians.
The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials.
edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.
> The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing.
It’s not even true for all (or probably even most) of modern times. For instance the upper classes of Britain in WWI suffered much higher casualties than the lower classes.
I don't think WWI can be firmly called "modern times" with regards to warfare. It was a notable event in the transition to modern, but the cavalry charges against machine guns and such are reason enough to exclude it.
The modern period of history is widely considered to have begun in or around the 15th century. A common epochal event is the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Any definition which lumps drones and airplanes together with swords and muskets is not useful, in my opinion. The last ~100 years are totally different from what came before.
Yea but you'd need some sort of argument why class intersects with how archers are characterized when they are. At best I think you might say "we don't know".
The volley could just be an emergent result borne from the fact that if an attacking army was outside the maximum range of archers, and then charged, all archers would have an enemy within a reasonable range nearly simultaneously. If every archer let loose when there was an enemy in range, the end result would be an initial large volley.
Not really scientific but you can see the exact same outcome in video games. After the initial synchronized volley, it becomes more of a constant barrage as each archer's differing rate of fire causes shots to become desynchronized.
Is it true? I have no idea, but it's hardly magical thinking. It's logical but could still be untrue for other reasons not assessed.
It's only logical with video game reasoning imo. In actual life each archer would have a different bow, varying physical strength, ability at the extreme end of their range, visual acuity, practice assessing where the extreme end of their range even is, etc etc.
It seems extremely unlikely that a group of individuals would all make the exact same choice simultaneously without a prearranged signal for it. And I think the post itself makes a strong enough case for why that signal wouldn't be made.
Videogames are unrealistic. There's no such thing as a discrete "maximum range" for archery, because the closer the target the harder the arrow will hit, and there's a point where the arrow will simply fail to do any damage when it hits.
Also, not everyone can fire an arrow equally fast. And even if they did, when they're acquiring different targets (lest they all shoot the same person) they can take slightly different amounts of time to choose who to shoot.
Also, speed isn't really the limit for firing in the first place - if someone thinks there aren't any good options just yet, they might wait a second or two before there's a good option, and now they're way out of sync with anyone who saw a good option immediately.
Videogames are just terrible because their physics are wildly unrealistic, and the human factors are removed entirely.
Maximum range varies per archer. Each bow is different, and each archer is different. This isn't modern mass-produced armaments (though they did mass-produce bows, each one was still made from a different piece of wood with its own quirks), and maximum range also depends on the archer's draw length (how long their arms are) and strength.
One of the stories about Agincourt (that the author didn't mention and I don't know if it's true) is that the French underestimated the range of the English archers and drew up inside their maximum range, so were getting shot before they were ready for it.
So "everyone shoots when the enemy gets into range" would still not be a volley as each archer judges for themself when the enemy is in range.
archers wouldn't do the because unlike a gun you cannot hold it loaded for long. So your order would be draw and fire. You can of course hold abow drawn for maybe a minute - but why do that when you can fire 6 arrows in that time which might hit.
If the enemy is out of range you might wait with an arrow knocked but not drawn - but if that is what they were doing the order would be to draw. there is no real point of such an order though - archers are themselves smart enough to estimate their own range (which as the other response pointed out was not the same for every archer), and thus make their own decisions. The only reason to hold fire until everyone was ready was if the combine fire was devistating enough - but there is every reason to think combined fire wouldn't be devistating.
Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.
Edit: To quote the OP: "... as hard as it is to prove a negative, I will note that I have never seen a clear instance of volley fire with bows in an original text and so far as I can tell, no other military historians have either. And we have been looking."
> it still seems perfectly reasonable to me
Where's your evidence? "seems perfectly reasonable" leads to belief in witchcraft, the stars orbit the earth, leaches cure disease, the lack of germ theory, etc. That's why we modern humans require evidence.