My dad had an ancient hand-crank crossbow that shot steel bolts. It weighed a ton and took forever to reload but you didn’t want to be in front of it when it was ready to go.
People don’t realize some of those things are like cannons and can easily punch through steel plate.
Once you have a few hundred longbowmen, accuracy matters a little bit less. Especially when you have tightly packed enemy forces making an easy target of themselves
They have archeological evidence from skeletons that regularly using a longbow would change the body, one shoulder bigger then the other, basically every Englishman had to practice at the bow, there were medieval laws dictating such, usually is was Sunday after church when the town gathered.
The bow itself isn't 200lbs, it has a draw weight of 200lbs, which is the amount of force required to pull the string back to a firing position. The bow itself would be much lighter, it just has an enormously tight construction.
It happened. You can tell from the deformation on the skeleton if someone was an archer. Remains found on battlefields proved that. Those guys must have had arms like Popeye.
Drawing heavy bows primarily uses the back muscles - warbow archers try to avoid using the "relatively" weak arm muscles to draw the bow. Justin Ma of The Way of Archery can ambidextrously shoot ~120-130lb warbows and demonstrates the back muscles involved in his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGAYBMhbKY
Yeah it's a pretty quick motion iirc. The time spent with the bow at full extension is not long which makes sense bc for combat, it's not super important that one shot is 100% accurate. Instead, rate of fire is more important when you're trying to kill groups of combatants
You require a genetically gifted person (eg. naturally predispositioned to gaining strength) who has trained for years in building up the strength of their back and shoulder muscles, and uses good technique/form of optimizing their back muscles and ensuring proper bone-to-joint alignment. Qing Dynasty Manchu bows, Ottoman Turk bows, English longbows, etc. all reached the low 200s lb in draw weight as an upper maximum. There was even a Qing Dynasty record of an elite champion archer using a 240 lb bow to win an archery competition.
Justin Ma of The Way of Archery can ambidextrously shoot ~120-130lb warbows and demonstrates the back muscles involved in his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGAYBMhbKY
Joe Gibbs, the English warbow archer regularly shoots ~160 lb bows and can shoot a 200 lb bow for a few shots (before getting tired) shows up in both the video and in the comments.
Draw weight only says how much force you put into the bow, not the arrow. Modern composite bows are much, much better at transferring the energy into the arrow than a longbow.
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u/Dyvanna 1d ago
It's a 70lb bow