Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire

https://acoup.blog/2025/05/02/collections-why-archers-didnt-volley-fire/

by StefanBatory • 1 year ago

513 318 1 year ago

When I was playing Medieval: Total War (both I and II), the bows and crossbows were very effective against an enemy attacking me. Now I wonder if the game modeled the arrow barrage realistically, or to align it with our movie-based perception of medieval archers.

jayGlow• 1 year ago

i remember a history channel show using the total war games in order to determine the best type of bow. I'm not sure how accurate it was

wffurr• 1 year ago

There's a variety of essays on Total War and various infantry types, how well the tactics are modeled, etc.: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.b...

jjmarr• 1 year ago

Their essay on composite infantry types is interesting as a Crusader Kings II player, because the game has tons of historically accurate mixed units you can recruit that combine archers and heavy infantry/pikes, but virtually all of those units suck because the combat mechanics still enforce a rock-paper-scissors dynamic.

https://acoup.blog/2022/04/01/collection-total-wars-missing-...

Specifically, every 15 days, your army rolls a "combat tactic" (based on number of troops) that buffs certain types of units and nerfs others. "Advance" buffs heavy infantry, "force back" buffs pikemen, and "charge" buffs cavalry. Then if an army uses "advance" goes up against "force back", they get an additional boost. Likewise, for "force back" against "charge" or "charge" against "advance". There are also archer-specific tactics that don't play a role in this triad.

The simplified combat tactics to enable rock paper scissors matching is what makes the historically accurate archers + pikemen trash. No matter what combat tactic I roll, I would rather have either additional archers or additional pikemen because only one gets boosted at any given time. The game does not model the mutually reinforcing nature of diverse armies because it could break the rock-paper-scissors triad that says certain troops should defeat other kinds of troops.

In fact, having a diverse army is penalized because you will "roll bad tactics". If I used China's 250 archer : 100 pikemen retinue, they will correctly alternate between pike (the force back tactic) and shot (barrage tactic), then get slaughtered by another army that had 250 pikemen : 50 archers because their 250 pikemen was getting buffed 24/7 by force back instead of having to share the limelight with my archers.

kergonath4• 1 year ago

There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.

frollogaston5• 1 year ago

Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead.

Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.

frollogaston5• 1 year ago

Btw, the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for MTW2 is amazing. It turns the game into a more historically accurate and overall better version of Rome TW... but archers still do volleys, which even if they wanted to avoid, is probably part of the game engine.

Interestingly, mounted archers don't do volleys in those games.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

I've read the whole thing and I'm not convinced at all.

First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false.

But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.

I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.

But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama.

Am I missing something here?

kayodelycaon• 1 year ago

I think his argument about draw weight is compelling. In order to do a coordinated valley you would have to have everyone draw and hold.

Bows have highly variable “lock time”. There is no trigger and you can’t reasonably get an army to draw at the same rate.

Reload times are fast enough that the fastest archer may be able to be ready to fire again before the last archer has completed their first shot.

In those circumstances, you would simply get orders to start and stop firing.

treis3• 1 year ago

You wouldn't hold the bow drawn. The archers would nock their arrows and at the command would draw and loose the arrow. That would result in them all shooting at roughly the same time. Just a second or so delayed from the command.

maxerickson• 1 year ago

I would think it would work to drill on draw speed (where the faster archers paced the slower ones). So you'd be able to tighten up the release window quite a bit vs doing nothing.

ropable2• 1 year ago

Agreed; it's completely impractical for someone to "hold" a proper non-modern war bow at full draw. Every single instance I've seen of reenactment archery using an authentic bow has the archer smoothly nock, draw and release in one motion. There is no "aiming" like we see in modern competition archery - this occurs during the draw. Not to say these weren't accurate, some video I've watched of reenactment archery looks positively lethal out to about 30 metres or more.

IAmBroom10• 1 year ago

In order to do a coordinated valley you would have to have everyone draw and hold.

Why? If I have twenty archers, and tell them to be READY, AimAndFire will result in a volley that is still restricted a couple seconds of variance.

A couple seconds is not consequential in a battle that may be limited by the rise and fall of the sun.

ergsef• 1 year ago

You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields

Why wait for a specific command? It sounds like as an archer maybe you could try and hit a few far-off enemies whenever you wanted. There will be a critical period when most of the arrows will be released and be most effective, but the primary limiting factor is the archer's fatigue level. The article makes it clear there's not really a shortage of arrows.

So it's probably more like "people start talking, some arrows start flying, as the enemies get closer more arrows start flying". Which is pretty different from a coordinated volley.

kergonath4• 1 year ago

But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.

It’s not perfectly reasonable at all. When the enemy is charging, what you want is maximum efficiency, which means a rate of shooting as high as possible, which means everyone shoots as soon as they are ready, which precludes synchronisation.

When the enemy is not charging and just manoeuvring, volleys are counter-productive because you just give them some time to hide behind their shields and move between volleys.

I can imagine maybe one time when such tactics could work, it’s in an ambush. But then it’s not large scale and it is quite difficult to pull it off, because you need to synchronise the archers without giving away their presence. And it’s quite far from the autor’s pet peeve, which was archers fighting like they had guns in big battles.

upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.

You cannot really do that without extensive drills that were not really a thing in pre-modern armies. There are too many variations in individual strength, not really standardised equipment, and different people behaving differently. Even if you take 10 people, you would not get synchronised arrows if you did that.

Am I missing something here?

Why would they? What advantage would they gain doing so? Particularly when doing it more naturally is more efficient and effective (not going to repeat the story’s argument, but there are several).

onlypassingthru11• 1 year ago

You cannot really do that without extensive drills

Allow me to introduce the longbowmen whose skeletons adapted to being professional longbowmen.[0]

[0]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285885888_Architect...

Ferret7446• 1 year ago

I don't see what's so beneficial about a volley. Concentrating the arrows allows the opposing force to ready their shields which renders the volley less effective, and advance in between volleys. It's better to rain arrows continuously which prevents the opposing force from defending in any capacity without stopping their advance entirely.

Arrows are not more effective (e.g. armor penetration) in a volley, and the psychological effect is also less for volleys I would argue: you know a volley is coming, duck and cover, and afterwards it's clear, vs a continuous rain where you never know when an arrow is headed toward you specifically.

onlypassingthru11• 1 year ago

Arrows are not more effective

In this scenario, how big is this impenetrable (and undoubtedly heavy) shield you are lifting over your head with one arm while charging the enemy?

o11c• 1 year ago

The one thing that theoretically would be advantageous about a volley is that it's impossible for a target to block/dodge all of them. FTA (though focusing on how useful shields and armor are):

arrows at range move slowly enough to be actively blocked and dodged

It's just that this one theoretical advantage isn't enough to make volleys useful in practice, since volleys decrease the total number of arrows you can shoot.

haiku20776• 1 year ago

Another point: bows and arrows don't have a consistent load time or range across users. Different archers have different timing and effective ranges with the same bow and arrow. How do you pick a volley range? Or do you trust your men to know about how far they can shoot, based on their practice?

p_ing6• 1 year ago

Nock time can be drilled, just like any other skill.

gary_0• 1 year ago

I think the blog post is arguing against a volley that happens all in one instant, requiring all the archers to synchronize perfectly. This seems pretty easy to argue against because while movies do it because it's dramatic and cool, it's harder to justify in actual combat situations (and the post goes into great detail on the pros and cons).

However, it seems a lot more reasonable to suppose that archers were sometimes told to hold until a given strategic moment. In that case, you might see something resembling a volley when, say, an advancing enemy reaches a particular position and the archers begin loosing. But I don't think that's what the post was talking about.

MBCook• 1 year ago

I agree. It’s talking about large scale synchronized firing. That’s the normal definition of a “volley of fire” isn’t it?

Just waiting until someone says to start shooting isn’t a volley. It’s just holding fire.

enaaem• 1 year ago

I remember from a Lindybeige video that war bows have too much draw weight, so you can’t hold it drawn like in the movies. You have to almost instantly shoot it. You want war bows to be as powerful as possible.

bluGill4• 1 year ago

you could hold a bow for maybe a minute - if you had extensive training. However there is no reason for anyone to train like that (they they didn't / couldn't). Someone strong can hold 200 lbs for a minute - but not longer. Or in that same minute you could launch 6 arrows - which is why they did the 6 arrows.

orthoxerox• 1 year ago

The general making a visible signal is a bad idea. Most generals even today don't have a cool bird's-eye view of the battlefield; they simply won't notice the moment, let alone be able to communicate their decision instantly. Okay, let's replace the general with the sergeant leading the archers.

But this leads us to the more important question: why wait until that last moment? If the enemy is within your range of fire, shooting at them is better than not shooting at them. You shoot at them all the way until they reach your own infantry, accumulating wounds and breaking up their ranks. Not shooting at them won't make the final arrow you loosen before they charge any more damaging.

throwup2387• 1 year ago

The blog author has a great multi-part series on just this topic: https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...

Large scale coordination during pre-modern warfare was effectively impossible. The battlefields would often stretch for hundreds of meters or even a few kilometers and it was too chaotic to see anything once in the heat of battle. Generals could issue some local commands, especially if they were at the head of a cavalry charge, but only the officers and bannermen leading a small formation could exert any real control over their soldiers. A general signaling ranged combatants is just unrealistic.

Your second point is spot on. Infantry formations don’t generally charge the way we think of charges - they were rather slow, controlled forward movements with weapons and shields lowered. otherwise the first soldier to trip or take an arrow would take down the entire formation. No one ever really pitches battle with their infantry starting in range of the other army’s archers so there’s never really a clear opportunity for a volley.

Cavalry charges are a bit of a special case because they’re especially vulnerable to archers, but they’re also the group most capable of avoiding volley fire. Cavalry charges don’t run into soldiers, they train for coordinated feints so they can quickly change direction unlike infantry. When attacking cavalry, archers generally want to have random fire to increase the chances of bringing down a single horse, which often causes enough chaos to break the charge.

mmooss2• 1 year ago

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.

throwup2387• 1 year ago

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.

nkrisc• 1 year ago

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.

jjk1664• 1 year ago

I don't think the article is arguing there would not be a starting point to archer fire. One would expect commanders to make some decision about when their forces would engage, and even without explicit command most soldiers would probably recognize the same point as being ideal to start firing. It might not be as sharp as a line of muskets, but odds are everyone would have shot an arrow before anyone got off their second.

But volleys imply a specific coordinated cadence. If you're just telling your troops to open fire, whether it be with bows or fire arms, that's not a volley.

jcranmer• 1 year ago

There's no evidence of it in contexts where we would expect something like this to be mentioned. So the absence is a strong indication that it didn't happen.

You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy.

Yeah, pretty much nothing of that is actually reasonable.

First off, pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent. The only command that can be reliably given is "go", and even then, unless you're decently well drilled, that's still as likely to come from following what your neighbors are doing than being able to pay attention to your battlefield commander who might be a half-mile away. And archers are the least trained portion of the pre-modern battlefield!

Second, actually trying to hold everybody for a single coordinated volley seems incredibly counterproductive. The primary purpose of volley fire, as explained in the article, is to mitigate slow reload times. Archers have the opposite problem; they're going to exhaust their ammunition supply in a few minutes. Staggering the start time of the archer attack over, say, 30 seconds is actually a very significant percentage increase in the amount of time the attacking army is going to be harried by the archers.

And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.

Already by this point, that means you don't have a single, solid pulse of arrows, but rather a continuous stream that's going to take--at least--2 or 3 seconds before everyone has loosed their first arrow. And quite probably, your slowest archers are loosing their first arrows after the fastest archers have loosed their second arrow. It doesn't make sense to me to call that a "volley", since it's not going to look anything like what we would think of as a mass volley of arrows.

Given that you're already stretching the definition of "volley" quite hard to match what you think is happening, and given that there is absolutely no sign that anyone ever thought trying to achieve a more cohesive initial volley was worth striving for, I think it does more harm than good to argue that volley fire existed in some form with regards to regular bows.

Jap2-0• 1 year ago

There's no evidence of it in contexts where we would expect something like this to be mentioned.

What are those contexts?

empiko2• 1 year ago

pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent

I think you mean strategic level. Tactically, they were able to hold formation, rotate, do all kinds of maneuver. Just look at how many "NCOs" are in a Roman legion. But it was difficult to control the units strategically, e.g. taking several units and moving them across battlefield in an organized fashion.

jltsiren5• 1 year ago

In a cavalry charge, the shield protects as much (or as little) as otherwise. The horse is doing the actual work, while the rider can use the shield normally.

An infantry charge starts at the last moment. At that point, the infantry formation has been in the effective bow range for a couple of minutes. It would be stupid to exhaust yourself by running a long distance over rough terrain carrying a heavy load before the fighting even starts. And shields tend to be large enough that the additional protection from them outweighs the gains from reaching the enemy faster.

msla• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure nobody in the historical record mentioned how their armies have never once used blackcurrant jam to destroy a rampaging army from Venus. Does that make such an event more or less likely for you?

People mostly don't go around listing off things they're not doing and have never done. Therefore, lack of mention that someone's not doing something isn't really evidence they are doing it, or at least is very weak.

bell-cot3• 1 year ago

Generality: If (1) X is not done in the modern real world, and (2) your only experience with X is seeing dramatic Hollywood depictions of it, then "common sense" does not apply.

bigstrat2003• 1 year ago

I don't think that the onus should be on historians to prove that something didn't happen. Rather, the onus should be on people to prove that something did happen. It's fine to have arguments about how it's plausible (or not) that something occurred when we don't have direct evidence. But at the end of the day, I think it's better to not draw conclusions without actual evidence.

int_19h2• 1 year ago

You're literally arguing with a professional military historian specializing in the time period where bows were heavily used. Consider re-examining your preconceived notions of "common sense" from this perspective.

FranzFerdiNaN• 1 year ago

I love this comment. It’s just so peak Hacker News. You read the work of a professional, you have no clue about the field at all, and yet with full confidence you start writing a massive comment about how the professional is wrong based on you having watched some tv shows and your gut feeling.

hoseja2• 1 year ago

Investigate your pre-conceptions. Watch some actual tribal warfare. Realize that ALL FILM IS UTTERLY FAKE and ruled mostly by the rule of cool. "the general makes a visible signal" How? Turns out you can't actually do that on the battlefield for the most part.

INTPenis• 1 year ago

I think the main argument against volley fire was that it's just impractical. An archer wrote a comment in another thread here on HN saying that they would do volley fire for an audience because it was expected, but the leader had only seconds to wait while they all drew back before they had to shout for them to loose. An archer just doesn't have the strength to hold the bow drawn and wait for a command like that. It's a waste of energy and resources.

What we see on TV is always one completely unprotected army, and one squad of arhcers.

But in the real world if squads of archers exist, then every single army would have a protection against them. The romans had the tortoise formation, I can't believe this was just forgotten for 1000 years.

lukan8• 1 year ago

"Am I missing something here?"

The way a bow works. I could shoot much more arrows in my own rhytm, then coordinating with everyone in the unit and wasting energy holding the string longer than needed.

So I am pretty sure, there were some sorts of volley fire, when the archers start firing when the enemy gets in range. But once the shooting starts you would loose lots of kill power restricting your archers for very little gain.

I would ask the question the other way around: if you wouldn't learned of it in spectacular movies - why would anyone ever implement it?

With crossbows and musquets, where holding the fire does not cost energy - different story. But maybe try it for yourself: hold a war bow at full strength - you don't want to any longer than needed. So typical you pull and release.

usrusr3• 1 year ago

Organized volleys would give the advancing infantry convenient time slots to hunker down behind their shields and reduce the effectiveness of arrows even further. A less dense but continuous stochastical distribution would be objectively more deadly, except perhaps against a force going for arrow evasion.

mkehrt• 1 year ago

What is the point of this post? Devereux is a literal expert in the field who has studied this for decades. You're...someone on the internet? What are you posting for? This is rank anti-intellectualism.

jjk1664• 1 year ago

What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting.

For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.

sandworm1014• 1 year ago

> I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover.

Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.

detourdog2• 1 year ago

This was a nice write and it would be nice to hear about the advantages of the long bow.

gota• 1 year ago

From the same author:

https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-s...

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...

If you're not yet aware of it (unlikely as it made it 'big' in the overall internet), I believe the video from Tod's Workshop with actual experimentation is a must see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE

There is a sequel and many other related videos, but this one is the source for a very famous clip (at 20:50 - https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE?si=oISZqXvdv8ymoCDi&t=1239)

trhway• 1 year ago

Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible

and that is where volley may be helpful - simultaneous hit to multiple horses and soldiers may break the pace and may cause stumbling and local pile-ups. Slow down of advance -> more exposure time to the follow up arrows.

_heimdall• 1 year ago

It takes a special (in a bad way) kind of commander to send more arrows after their cavalry and infantry engaged. I'm sure there are records of it having happened, but you have to assume you're taking just as many casualties as the enemy due to friendly fire.

AzzyHN• 1 year ago

As an untrained soldier myself, I can attest that I would freak out if I saw a whole bunch of arrows flying in my general direction, and probably change my course entirely.

wvh2• 1 year ago

Some might call this intelligence.

Aeolun• 1 year ago

Not sure if you’d ever see a whole bunch of arrows. In a space the size of a battlefield, with 1 arrow per 10s per archer, you’d need a lot of them to have several in flight in your general direction at once.

throwup2387• 1 year ago

I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection.

It very much depends on the historical context. Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. If they broke rank or ran away from battle, everyone including their parents, siblings, neighbors, and potential lovers would hear about it back home (and never let them live it down). Most conscripts at that time fought alongside their fellow villagers and farmers, not random professional soldiers. They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.

throwaway4744• 1 year ago

They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.

Historical times were brutal. If they were defending their home, losing the battle would result in their home being pillaged and their family enslaved or raped. That would be a great motivator to not run

antisthenes2• 1 year ago

Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue.

Most peasants during the Middle ages did not fight at all, except in revolts and uprisings, usually with terrible outcomes.

If they were taken along for the (military campaign) ride by their feudal lord, it is most likely they would have avoided the battlefield altogether, providing auxiliary services, e.g. setting up camp, feeding the horses, cooking, tending to their liege, etc.

Conscription was not really a thing until the mid-Renaissance (roughly), and the vast majority of battles in the Middle ages was fought by nobility, ranging from lower class to dukes and lords.

jjk1664• 1 year ago

Routs happened. Indeed they were common. If social pressure could not prevent people running from battle, dooming their comrades and also greatly increasing their own risk of death, don't tell me no one looked for cover when being shot at for fear of appearing cowardly.

tomr_stargazer• 1 year ago

Bret (the author) does discuss the discipline of conscripted troops in another post, here:

https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-...

In particular, the concept of 'drill' gets a lot of attention:

"Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.... The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine."

treis3• 1 year ago

IMHO that's the key point against the "no volley" idea. Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own. You act in formation and repeat what you've been drilled.

A company of archers is probably the same. They'd be working in unison following the direction of their captain. Not for shock value. But to manage fatigue, arrow supply, and ensure that they're firing with a full draw.

lmm4• 1 year ago

What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops.

He talks specifically in other posts about the problems with "discipline" as a term (it groups too many different things as though they were the same), and he talks specifically about "cohesion" (which is the thing I think you're getting at) in this post at several points.

jjk1664• 1 year ago

I'm not going to say discipline isn't an overloaded term, but it really ought to include resisting instinct and desire to do what needs to be done so as to accomplish goals. I would certainly not describe what I'm referring to as cohesion, which I would consider more the skill of soldiers coordinating their movements and actions.

pm30032• 1 year ago

There are some examples in the American War of Independence (or maybe War of 1812), where militias would lie down to reload and break the discipline of the overall force.

Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.

creaturemachine• 1 year ago

It's unlikely they were muzzle loading lying down. They could maybe kneel at times, but the barrel had to be vertical for reloading.

anshumankmr2• 1 year ago

the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows

Case in point the Spartan army led by Leonidas. One of the soldiers apparently really said that if the Persians will rain fire arrows on them, they will fight in the shade.

folbec• 1 year ago

The author has a VERY dim view of Sparta, and of the people who worship Sparta and of the quality of information the legend of Sparta is based upon (second hand roman information, from Romans, at a time where Sparta had become a sort of theme park for bored senators).

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r...

ashoeafoot2• 1 year ago

We know quite well what drafted peasants would do facing combat. Sinking to their knees in endless "Father ours"..

jsnider3• 1 year ago

That's not what they did.

SV_BubbleTime2• 1 year ago

There is something strange about the way this article was written. Besides that it could have been 25% of its final length, it repeats itself quite a bit.

I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.

ranger2072• 1 year ago

The name of the blog is "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry". The symptoms you see are caused by Unmitigated Pedantry. It's the author's style

SV_BubbleTime2• 1 year ago

Cool… except being intentionally lame doesn’t make something less lame.

psalaun• 1 year ago

It annoyed me as well, I eventually stopped reading due to this

trefoiled• 1 year ago

I found the overuse of italics for emphasis fatiguing

ropable2• 1 year ago

The statistics about the draw weight of war bows being 100 to 170 lb (45-77 kg) is striking to me. Imagine getting to the gym, picking up a single 45 kg dumbbell (the lowest end!), and setting out to rep as many single-arm rows as you can before failure. Of course you wouldn't hold that dumbbell at full contraction; that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.

almostgotcaught• 1 year ago

that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.

I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").

varelaseb• 1 year ago

Why would it ever be impossible/unbelievable? The whole point is it was commonplace for this type of person.

It's just surprising that the number's that large.

hooloovoo_zoo• 1 year ago

Plus a dumbbell is the same weight the whole time while the bow is only the draw weight at full draw.

tmpz22• 1 year ago

Yeah but spend your whole life malnourished and march 20 miles THEN do the reps (as peasant archers probably had to do).

make3• 1 year ago

The article's point about the lethality of arrows.. I feel like every Youtube test I've seen on the subject shows that Arrows can pierce even full plate pretty reasonably easily, though this is not scientific at all ofc.

cwmma3• 1 year ago

He has an entire article on the subject[1]. Basically when you take into account distance and angles penetration is much harder.

1. https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...

wchar_t• 1 year ago

Not plate, unless at very close range and at a very favorable angle. Mail, sure.

iamthemonster• 1 year ago

Check out Tod's Workshop youtube channel. It's only entertainment, but he has a far more realistic overall testing of arrows' armour-piercing capability.

A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.

Never eliminated though!

But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.

hinkley7• 1 year ago

Angles matter. There’s a famous rout that happened in France where an English army overstayed its welcome and was trying to make its way back to England when the locals decided it would be better to never have to deal with them again by finishing it now. I thought it was William of Orange but I cannot find anything to corroborate that.

They pinned his army down with a fresher army meaning to destroy them. The English infantry and cavalry were vastly outnumbered due to attrition, but what he did have were longbows. And somehow they beat a superior army while losing a fraction as many men.

The historical military analysis I saw was that with the front lines so thin, the archers essentially didn’t have to fire long arching volleys. The flatter angle of the arrow trajectory and shorter flight distance increased the penetration force, and they just absolutely destroyed every charge against them, confusing the attacking army. Arrows should not be dropping this many men. WTF.

hoseja2• 1 year ago

You saw them shooting at bad temu imitation plate armor.

ekianjo• 1 year ago

Chain mail is usually effective against arrows I believe?

alpaca128• 1 year ago

In a YouTube test I have seen (Todd's Workshop) their plate armor didn't really care about a 100kg draw weight longbow. Though if I remember correctly they said it's possible it would have done a bit of damage back then depending on material quality.

sandworm1014• 1 year ago

That is the weight at maximum draw. It is more like pulling back a rubber band that gets progressively harder until you hit your max. It isn't like lifting a weight which is a steady force. Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up. A bow doesn't have inertia. You can pull it back as quick as you like, which makes it easier for a given max "weight" of pull.

(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)

hinkley7• 1 year ago

How modern? Not modern enough for writers and directors of photography to have gotten the wrong idea, right? This trope got in early and has never gone away.

hermitcrab4• 1 year ago

Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up.

Force is force, whether it is due to elasticity or gravity. The difference is that the drawing force increases progressively, whereas the weight of an object is (for these purposes) constant (as stated).

dredmorbius• 1 year ago

Strength-training routines can exploit these characteristics, through the use of bands and chains.

Bands progressively increase resistance as they're stretched.

Chains load or de-load resistance as they're raised or lowered to the ground.

(How much of this was known and utilised during mediaeval warfare training and drilling is unclear, but I suspect the answer is "little".)

hinkley7• 1 year ago

YouTube suggested an old NileRed video to me today. He bought 100 lbs of titanium shot for a project. It came in a bag in a metal can.

The first two times he lifted the bag he said this isn’t that heavy, maybe he got defrauded, so he got a scale and checked. But by the time he tried to lift it off the scale he was struggling, and getting it back into the metal can was serious work.

Stamina separates the pro from the amateur, but fatigue comes for all of us.

LgWoodenBadger• 1 year ago

FYI, tungsten obviousy, not titanium.

amstan• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99pZKMVQ9P0

p_ing6• 1 year ago

Drawing a bow activates muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activates muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell.

If you're interested in archery-focused exercises - https://www.morrelltargets.com/blogs/archery-blog/9-strength...

What makes it various bow styles exceptionally difficult is the draw style -- horsebow drawing by a single thumb is especially difficult; war bow has a strange draw style I've never attempted due to shoulder issues, recurve isn't difficult as you get three fingers, and compound archery is simply cheating.

Most of these draws aren't a draw and immediate release, but a draw and hold to aim. That's where archery becomes physically exhaustive. There was some recent YTer who showed off by drawing a 100#+ bow but couldn't hit worth shit. Hitting your target takes patience and practice.

As noted in another child, draw weights are typically measured at 30", but your draw may only be 29" or may be 31", etc. You'd want a bow that fits your draw length as close as possible, though.

lazide3• 1 year ago

Can confirm Compound archery is cheating - especially with modern releases and sights.

A couple months of training and many folks can consistently hit a soup can at 50 yards with a 75# draw (or better). That would be absurd to even contemplate 100 years ago.

justinator2• 1 year ago

Drawing a bow activates muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activates muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell.

You don't ever bend over and pick something off the ground?

IAmBroom10• 1 year ago

It also deforms your skeleton, especially if trained since youth.

Archer skeletons have recognizably curved finger and clavicle bones.

marcus_holmes2• 1 year ago

I used to have a 100-lb bow (for re-enactment), and the comparison is apt, but slightly off:

Imagine picking up a 45-kg weight using only a string held by three fingers. The pressure on the fingers is intense. Getting the shoulders and chest into the pull is the trick, and it's not quite as hard as lifting a weight off the floor because of that. But the fingers are doing a lot of work. Mine had turned white after a few shots, even with a thick leather tab to protect them.

We did do volleys, because the public expected it and it was fun to do. But we could not hold for long - the bloke doing the shouting knew that he had only a couple of seconds between "draw" and "loose" or we'd be all over the place.

tptacek• 1 year ago

What this article doesn't account for is the proposition that many, many historic armies did war bow volley fire, and we've never heard about it because they all got wiped out because it's such a bad idea.

eviks2• 1 year ago

Not really, first, being wiped out doesn't mean literally everyone dying, but also it doesn't prevent the winning side from recording the victory and its cause

acjohnson552• 1 year ago

Perhaps oral traditions survive from soldiers sold into slavery from lost battles. Like somehow, the folly of volley fire made it into the name of some food dish.

Or maybe they would have simply massacred any army so dumb as to try it.

int_19h2• 1 year ago

Occam's Razor.

permo-w2• 1 year ago

to me Occam's Razor is a fairly unsound thinking strategy, particularly in scenarios like this

rocqua• 1 year ago

I'd almost expect that to be so remarkable as to merit writing it down.

tshaddox2• 1 year ago

A response which could be given just as easily to any claim of the form “X never occurred in human history.”

Ekaros• 1 year ago

I would expect victors to write down how amazingly stupid their opponents were and why that gives them god given right to now lord over them and their subjects...

permo-w2• 1 year ago

you may expect that, but my assumption would be that in most cases condescension and pettiness would fail to trump disinterest and dismissal

sandworm1014• 1 year ago

Question: What does this author think happened instead of the volley? Does he expect that archers just started randomly firing when they felt like doing so? Of course not. They waited for the order to start firing. So the first shots would, imho, constitute a "volley" in that everyone would be launching in the same few seconds. Subsequent shots would then become less coordinated, but that first wave would be a true volley. Then orders would come to stop/move/start, resulting in other coordinated volleys.

lolinder• 1 year ago

The author has an entire series of posts on how pre-modern generalship did and didn't work, including a post on issuing commands. The tl;dr is that there cannot have been a generalized order to fire on cue because pre-modern armies didn't have that kind of command resolution and speed. Best case you have a few guys who start firing because they're told to and the rest follow suit when they notice that it's started, more likely there's an established doctrine for when firing should happen and archers use their judgement for whether to start.

https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...

mcmoor• 1 year ago

I don't think a command to start firing is that complicated. A simple flag wave suffices especially for <100 archers that's standing still. There are more complicated commands that a centurion had been able to do.

bandrami• 1 year ago

Peter H Wilson had an interesting point in his 30 years war book that it's not just the appearance of firearms (musketeers in Spanish terzios fired in their own time), you also had to have a philosophical change to allow seeing a human as a cog in a larger machine; it's fundamentally an Early Modern concept rather than a renaissance one. And so you first see volley fire among the Italian condottieri and the Low Countries' militias, where you were simultaneously seeing the start of mercantile economies based on transactions between individuals.

Asraelite3• 1 year ago

I disagree with the point about the word "fire". How can you criticize the English word used if historically they weren't even speaking English?

Scenes are depicted in English instead of the native language of the setting for the benefit of the audience (and budget), and in modern English it's perfectly okay to use "fire" as a translation for the act of loosing a bow, even if "loose" is more commonly used in archery.

tshaddox2• 1 year ago

But English-speaking places have bows and arrows. (Even a particularly famous historical one!). So it’s reasonable to expect a translation into English to use the English word for sending an arrow from a bow.

If it were some science fiction setting with a weapon very unlike any real historical weapons then sure, the particular etymology of the English word wouldn’t be very relevant.

Asraelite3• 1 year ago

There were no English-speaking places that used bows extensively. The closest would've been Early Modern English, which is still drastically different to Modern English.

If the actors were actually speaking Shakespearean English then sure, it would be wrong for them to say "fire"/"fyr", but if they did that then you wouldn't understand half of what they're saying.

I'm sure there's a few actual examples of this though, for scenes depicting battles in England after 1800 or so that use bows. I would still say it's debatable whether you could consider this truly modern English but it's close enough.

gitroom• 1 year ago

Tbh, reading all this makes my head spin a little but I def love how deep some folks get into the nitty gritty of old school tactics - you think there's actually any lost technique out there we'll never fully figure out?

bjackman• 1 year ago

I think lost techniques are the rule rather than the exception. There are loads of fundamental questions about how premodern combat took place that will probably never be decided. You can get a feel for lots of them by reading this very blog.

Stuff like: did opposing infantry lines actually stay in contact for long periods at a time or did they clash for a couple of brief minutes at a time and then mutually retreat a few paces to recover stamina?

dpig_• 1 year ago

In Warhammer we call it Fall Back in Good Order.

KSteffensen• 1 year ago

Lost techniques are the field of experimental archaeology.

smallwire• 1 year ago

We need a chronoscope.

usrusr3• 1 year ago

So basically, what he's saying is that the depictions in Hägar the Horrible of fighters charging on with arrow-studded shields aren't all that unrealistic. File under unexpected.

zurfer• 1 year ago

in the spirit that you only need one reason to be right, not five: the strongest argument against volley "fire" is indeed that holding a bow is exhausting and so a commander wouldn't tell their archers to "hold" before releasing.

otikik• 1 year ago

They didn't research the upgrade.

AlexMoffat• 1 year ago

The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.

codyvoda• 1 year ago

it happens on practically every topic. this was technologically not possible 100 years ago and it’ll be fascinating to watch play out. stfu and listen is a legit skill in 2025

cwmma3• 1 year ago

100 years ago the term "armchair general" was already 25 years old.

kop316• 1 year ago

The same author discusses something similar here:

https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...

In discussing why in LOTR Saruman's battle campaign is terrible:

"Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be."

alexey-salmin• 1 year ago

actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.

I don't see it as a bad thing really. Can't say about all professions but in mine (software engineering) I've seen many professionals who has decades of experience and still do things poorly, take bad decisions and make outright incorrect statements.

There's nothing wrong with politely asking questions and consistently challenging the logic shared by professionals. Maybe you'll learn something from them, maybe you'll learn that they are incompetent. Either way, some useful information.

cwmma3• 1 year ago

Software engineering is a young and still rapidly changing field, it is extremely likely that the state of play will have significantly changed over the course of somebody's career. There is fertile ground for a new outside the box idea to come out and take things by storm.

History is more similar to, say, databases or cryptography then software engineering in general in that there is base knowledge that is needed in order to have a productive conversation.

Take databases, a little bit of knowledge about some of the different guarantees that different systems have is required in order to have a productive conversation. When that's not there you get "mongodb is web scale" type discussions.

History is the same, actual historians (which don't have to be professional ones) have learned the basic pitfalls, they've learned what the biases of the sources. For this discussion, they know the things that were usually written down and so if there isn't evidence of it, it probably didn't happen (i.e. anything cool that rich people did in war) vs the things that weren't written down so who the heck knows about it (things poor people did).

Wrapping back around, in history, the out of the box ideas that outsides have, the historians have usually already heard them. Sometimes you do get interesting outside work from related fields, like experimental archeology and whatnot, but it's not coming from random people on the internet who obvious are thinking about this for the first time.

booleandilemma• 1 year ago

I don't quite buy it. There's a line in Herodotus' Histories about Persian arrows blocking out the sun, and that implies a volley to me.

I don't have time to find a link now but if you google it you'll see.

(Incidentally, it's also in the movie 300)

msl• 1 year ago

If you happen to have Randal Munroe's what if? [1] on your bookshelf, look up the chapter titled "Sparta". It should convince you that the story of arrows blocking the sun is probably not true.

If you don't have it, you could try to do the math yourself. Munroe assumes that 1) an arrow intercepts 40 cm² of sunlight, 2) an archer looses 8 to 10 arrows a minute and 3) each arrow spends an average of three seconds in flight. You could adjust those numbers to taste, but I would not expect the conclusion to change.

[1] https://xkcd.com/what-if/

codydkdc• 1 year ago

Herodotus, the famously accurate historian

joe8756438• 1 year ago

It seems like the archery gets disproportionately more “hollywood doesn’t understand how it works” coverage than other things.

Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?

jvanderbot• 1 year ago

Well there's also:

* Infantry presses vs out-and-out melee

* Siege weapons as "artillery" during field battles as though it was WW1 levels of firepower

* Cavalry charges as battering rams / tanks

So, maybe you can train yourself to see all of those too. Then you'll enjoy nothing :D

potato3732842• 1 year ago

Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?

Nah, it's everything. You see every specialist community complaining about it.

indymike2• 1 year ago

The bow has a slow rate of fire, you can't hold a longbow in firing position for long (150+lbs of force required hold the drawn back bow), and you are only accurate from 300-800 feet (add 15% if in a high tower). That means charging calvary will reach your archers in 10-15 seconds and moderately paced walking infantry unit will be on top of your archers within 20-30 seconds of entering range. That leaves time for a few arrows. The bunched up, tight formations formed a reasonable defense - your outer troops would take the hits from the archers for the 20 seconds it took to get to the archers.

We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...

cafard2• 1 year ago

It seems to me that at Agincourt the archers place obstacles in front of their position--sharpened stakes. That would have provided some protection against a cavalry

indymike2• 1 year ago

Agincourt was interesting because mud (a combination of rain and fresh plowed fields) reduced infantry and cavalry mobility. The opening cavalry charge made the muddy battlefield worse, and the combination of mud and stakes on the ground injured the horses. The French were heavily armored, causing men-at-arms to sink up to their knees in mud. English longbowmen were able fire arrows into the french men-at-arms who were literally stuck in the mud until they ran out of arrows. The decisive moment was when English archers ran out of arrows and attacked the exhausted French with the hatchets and mallets they used to make and drive the stakes into their defensive positions.

hirvi743• 1 year ago

To be fair, an arrow released from a bow with a draw weight of over 150 pounds could easily launch an arrow that could pass through multiple people at close range -- depending on how light their armor was.

I've seen bows with a third of that draw weight completely pass through a deer.

Obviously, certain factors have to be met -- distance being the most important and then shot placement.

onlypassingthru11• 1 year ago

Why would anybody ride a horse directly towards archers? If an arrow can make the horse fall or buck, the guy riding it with any sort of heavy armor is probably coming down hard.

IAmBroom10• 1 year ago

Same reason mounted military & police do in riot-control today: heavy training of those horses shifts the initial balance from "what will my horse do if injured?" to "will these guys break ranks and run before many horses are injured?".

salynchnew• 1 year ago

After that discussion of draw weight, I can now see why English longbowmen are notable in the the archeological record due their noticeable spinal deformities.

110lbs on a traditional bow? Sheesh.

butlike• 1 year ago

And in the movies you never see any of the arrows collide; ever.

mimd• 1 year ago

Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.

zombot• 1 year ago

Our weekly dose of pedantry give us today!

Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire

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