the.com/longbow
a wooden gun that won wars before gunpowder bothered to show up
means A tall hand-drawn bow, roughly the height of its archer, capable of firing arrows over long distances with great force.
from Plainly Germanic: 'long' (Old English 'lang') plus 'bow' (Old English 'boga,' meaning something bent, a relative of words for bending and arching). The name simply distinguished it from the shorter crossbow and the ordinary short bow. The weapon's fame is English and Welsh — drawn from yew, it became the decisive instrument at battles like Crécy and Agincourt — but the word itself is just honest description: a bow that is long.
- draw weight
- Up to 150 pounds, more than most can pull
- agincourt 1415
- English archers shredded outnumbering French knights
- skeleton tell
- Archers' bones deformed from lifetime of pulling
- rate of fire
- Ten-plus arrows a minute, raining death
- yew wood
- Demand stripped Europe's forests of the tree
english longbow — medieval weapon that killed thousands at agincourt in 1415, could pierce armor at 100 yards
mary rose longbows — 137 intact yew longbows recovered from henry viii's flagship wreck in 1545, now at the museum
welsh longbow — 6-foot tall weapon used by edward i's forces to conquer wales in the 13th century