IIRC they made it easier mainly for party members, and loosened restrictions on long guns on citizens. They still required permits for handguns for non-party members and there was propaganda that handguns were only used by criminals to discourage use.
So they armed party members, banned Jews, and kept some regulations on other citizens. If that isn’t manipulation of who owns what for purposes of control, I don’t know what is. Which is the point of the article.
Anywhere they occupied, however, they had very strict laws, basically dragging you out into the street and shooting you if you were found in a possession of a weapon.
I’ve heard that too, but it wouldn’t necessarily explain a difference between the choices of different countries (unless that should have been obvious based on knowledge of the social structures of England vs. France and Scotland that I lack). Although I admittedly also have no idea if such differences in choices/tactics are real or consistent or important.
This is what I’d be citing in response were I not busy trying to persuade Linux not OOM with the OOM-killer choosing to murder important processes we like running.
I think economics and social structure played a big part too. Skill in warfare means more money and options as well as an elevated social status.
If your country/culture/economy does not allow for the added expense and what basically amounts to the establishing of a middle-class then you’re going to have a conscript-heavy army of untrained/unskilled peasants. The advantage there being they are cheap and of low social tier = cannon fodder.
England seems to have, at that time, a culture and economy that allowed for such a class to exist and to keep a larger standing army or a reserve of skilled soldiers. If you look at the Yeomen class they were not nobles or a church but they were allowed to own land and hunt game because their value was recognized. And any peasant could train and earn this if they qualified. I think other nations leaders might fear upward mobility like this.
This is all speculation based on what little reading I’ve done on the subject, of course.
Everyone seems to forget that France actually won the Hundred Year War and that the English where beaten by a girl, archers non withstanding…
And France also had archers…
France organised an archer corps recruited from yeoman farmers, the Franc-Archers. They where less numerous and less successful, but they acquitted themselves honorably on a few occasions.
And also the fact that Absolutist France had no qualms fielding large armies of firearm wielding commoners a few centuries after this.
I guess these small facts just blow their arguments to pieces. That’s what happens if you let non-historians do an historian’s job.
That is rather outside the issue of gun regulation since disarming the populace is a standard tactic of an occupying power and doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on how said power deals with weapon ownership amongst its own citizenry. Plus this ignores the fact that Nazis had to overcome armed military resistance to become the occupiers in the first place, so clearly it wasn’t the strict gun laws that were the problem. Those came after, rather than before armed resistance. In fact, the Nazis never really controlled vast swathes of the territory they invaded, which was instead full of partisans they could never hope to disarm.
The longbow is not superior to the crossbow, any more than a submarine is inferior to a jeep; both have strengths and weaknesses.
(Note in passing that the longbow is a weapon, and the crossbow is a class of weapons.)
I have played around with longbows and multiple kinds of crossbow. The longbow suits my frame, but a cranked arbalest delivers more punch on a flatter trajectory.
You can shoot a crossbow inside a tunnel, which is an important feature in siege warfare. It requires significantly less training, skill, and physical fitness to use than a longbow or composite bow.
The longbow is faster than an equally powerful crossbow. If you have yew readily available, it is easier to construct than an equivalent composite bow of the same time period, and somewhat more resistant to weather (although not much). However, the composite bow will shoot flatter, last longer, and have the same rate of fire as the longbow.
Because the English instituted mandatory longbow training and practice at a very early date (bows aren’t mentioned in the Assize of 1181, but by the mid-1200s English landholders were already requiring that boys be trained to the bow) and the Mongols trained with composite bows from an early age, their archers were superior to those of nations without early training. It honestly had less to do with the weapons than with the very large body of highly trained men wielding them, as noted in the article Cory links.
Exactly, try shooting a target with a crossbow, then with a longbow (assuming you can pull it). The Welsh (and later English) longbow troops were effective because citizens were obligated by their governments to spend hours a day training with this difficult weapon.
Difficulty in training is why Europe didn’t drop heavy infantry and cavalry and invest all their military resources in light mounted archers after having their asses handed to them by the Mongols.
Speaking of training:
Skeletons of longbow archers are recognisably adapted, with enlarged left arms and often bone spurs on left wrists, left shoulders and right fingers.
There’s also the fact that the English demand for the wood required to make them ended up stripping much of Europe of the particular type of tree they were looking for.
Crossbows, while originally a solid step down in raw capability, could be made out of whatever reasonably solid wood they had lying around. The English ended up requiring trade vessels carry a sizable number of bowstaves in order to trade in their ports - folks in other countries were complaining about forests being stripped whole-cloth to feed the english demand for them.
So yeah. Years to train a longbowman vs a much shorter time with crossbows. Crossbow training didn’t require building up an archer’s require musculature, thanks to various assists (goat’s foot, etc). You could therefor keep the weapons, and hand them out when you wanted to, and put them away when done. All materials were required were available locally. Early crossbows weren’t really any harder to make, but certainly cheaper. You could field a larger group at less expense and get the benefit of volley fire.
And as for the training time - if you lose a decent archer, he’s gone. You can’t just slot in a random conscript, they don’t have the musculature required for longbow use as they haven’t spent their life training. If you lose a crossbowman, you just grab another peasant.
tl;dr - early crossbowmen were zerglings
And by the late medieval heavy crossbows were the equal or superior to the longbow in most areas other than firing rate.
You look really cool with one of Yumi’s Mughal horn composites! But unfortunately they take three years to construct… how about a Sassinian elite mounted archer?
I hate how she holds and draws her bow: supposedly she trained for the part, but she has a tendency to rest various face and hand parts in exactly the wrong places. I can’t help but wince sympathetically.
