You heard I liked Yumi so you posted a yumi pic? 
WIth a humming-bulb, it looks like.
The Japanese asymmetric longbow is pretty horrible, from an ergonomic and engineering perspective, which makes the amazing feats that martial artists perform with them even more impressive.
I donât see what is so perplexing. History is replete with examples of comfortable monarchies who allowed military technology to pass them by.
Thatâs the weird thing. From what I can tell it was only the English and Welsh. The Scots and Irish never joined that particular party.
And there seems to a serious lack of consensus on just exactly when, where, and from what it developed. Which seems like the bigger, more interesting question. A lot of it seems tied up in not particularly scholarly dick wave over just how terribly English long bows are (what what, spot of tea imperialism).
France used crossbows because it bought them in - at Crecy, for instance, the âFrenchâ crossbows were in fact Genoese mercenaries. Genoa used them because they tended to be based on galleys, where there wasnât enough space on deck for longbow usage.
Compare that to the English/Welsh - the archers were ordinary men who were used to the space required for effective longbow use.
I used to be an aristocrat like you, but then I gave longbows to the rabble.
Eye gnu u wood seh tâat.
/sorry, /meta
The usual line is âto train a longbowman, you must begin with his grandfatherâ.
A medieval English warbow was a monstrous thng; huge draw weight and none of that fancy modern camming trickery. The skeletons of the archers are noticeably lopsided, thanks to the lifetime of asymmetrical strength training. Without the years of practice, most men could barely draw a longbow, let alone use it effectively.
Also in the crossbowâs favour (or not, depending on your POV): if you were a peasant looking to play sniper on some of the local gentry, can you think of a better low-tech weapon than a crossbow? The ability to fire while lying down is a major advantage.
Thatâs the first time I have ever heard anything along those lines. Do you have any further information on that?
Is she using her forearm/wrist as the knock? The front of the arrow is clearly on the âwrong sideâ of the bow, good thing she has the leather coat as an arm-guard for when that string slaps her bicep. It does still look cool, but not as cool as a recurve.
Is he rhyming âloveâ and âwoveâ?
The arrow is on the normal side for that sort of bow, but the wrist/knuckle nock is very unusual. Could possibly work, though.
Yes, as someone else points out, they were mostly Welsh. Whatâs more, the yew trees mostly werenât English. Doyle, as his name suggests, was of Irish origin and grew up in Scotland, so his excessive English nationalism probably originated from a desire to blend in.
From the point of view of the gun lobby the longbow versus yew argument is not so good, because the use of the longbow was very definitely related to being part of a well regulated militia. The population of England during the Crécy-Agincourt period was several million (even after the Black Death) but the number of available skilled archers was fewer than 20 000. The longbow is also very much less convenient to use than a handgun. In modern terms it is more like a small artillery weapon and the archers were deployed like field guns.
Letâs rewrite that in relative economic and capability terms: Can you think of a better high-tech weapon than a light tank?
In the medieval period crossbows were advanced technology, and in terms of effectiveness inferior only to early cannon - which were unreliable to say the least. A peasant could no more afford a crossbow than an equivalent modern person could afford to keep a tank.
Until rifles and handguns were mass-produced they too were too expensive for ordinary people. The drafters of the Second Amendment were thinking of the rights of rich people like Paul Revere, not poor subsistence farmers.
Thatâs because that is a gross oversimplification of history. The âHundred Years Warâ was in reality a series of different conflicts with different objectives. In the end, France with its larger and richer territory was going to recover from the Black Death faster than small England with its lack of agricultural land, and it was just a matter of which of the competing rĂ©gimes in what is now called France would eventually take over.
The role of Jeanne dâArc has assumed mythic dimensions and it is true that she did affect the outcome of a few battles. But like WW2, the outcome in the end was determined by the side with the biggest resources.
wasnât it similar with the woods around the Mediterranean Sea and the fleets Rome and other sea-faring cultures built? afaik most of the deforestation around the sea is still a result of the naval program two millenia ago.
The second picture depicts a horsebow being strung and held the wrong way aroundâŠ
Iâve been trying to figure out what keeps the arrow in place. There seems to be nothing stopping it from falling away from the bow.
Also, the arrow is nowhere near the centre of the string. Is this something archers do?
Welcome to the convention of ânear rhymeâ, without which English poetry would be much blander.
Ever wonder why the Petrarchan form of sonnet quickly gave way to the Miltonian version in Britain? English: it doesnât rhyme half as well as the Romance languages.
Not handy. I recalled reading about it in a book for a report many years ago. Little nuggets like that stick in my mind. As you can see with the laws, they still required permits for handguns for non-party members. IIRC the opinion pushed at the time was handguns were for criminals, and law abiding German citizens wouldnât own one, they would own a shot gun or hunting rifle.
It is possible I am either not recalling it correctly, or my original source was incorrect. But it was in a book book, not like some pundit site. (Though it was long time ago.)
Next you will tell me there is no such thing as a Patriot Arrow eitherâŠ
