[HN Gopher] Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
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Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
Author : StefanBatory
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-05-03 08:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| kergonath wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| treis wrote:
| 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.
| ergsef wrote:
| > 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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).
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| >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_Archite
| ct...
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| 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.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| >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?
| haiku2077 wrote:
| TFA has diagrams showing the size and coverage of some
| typical shields, and discusses how even light armor was
| effective against arrows.
|
| One example given is a Scutum
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutum) which weighs
| around 22 lbs- "light enough to be carried with one hand"
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| Looks good. Now run across a field towards archers with
| that thing over your head and try not to take an arrow in
| the gut.
|
| Or, you can protect your front while the arrows get
| dropped on your head. Decisions, decisions...
| haiku2077 wrote:
| Generally arrows are gonna be coming from in front of me
| in the field, not arcing over like artillery.
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/0AWfhAcFu_k?si=XokulP_9f3aFl2m
| u
|
| However, if the enemy has an elevated position, that is
| literally what the romans did.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testudo_formation
| tekla wrote:
| There is literally an entire section dealing with this
| exact question that answers it.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| 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?
| gary_0 wrote:
| 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.
| enaaem wrote:
| 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.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> 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.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| 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!
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
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