Is Bannon right about this one thing?

[Bengalzona]

(02-23-2017, 12:55 PM)michaelsean Wrote: What was up with that last shot?  

And yes the archer was the real machine of death.  You get 1000 of those, and you could be facing 25,000 arrows over a 2 minute span.

It looked like something went wrong with the powder. Perhaps it was still burning in the chamber. And that type of malfunction would also have been typical historically.

Outside of the English longbow, bows were never as popular in the West as they were in other places of the world. Western culture generally favored shields and armor over bows and other missile weapons. It started with the Greek phalanx systems and carried on into the Roman legions. When the Romans felt they needed archers, they generally hired locals as auxiliaries. The same with the Crusaders in the Middle Ages.

But the Crusaders brought back a new respect for the bow. The Crusaders were pretty well protected from arrows by their armor. But their horses weren't. And the key tactic of Crusaders was the heavy cavalry charge. More than a few cavalry charges were stopped in their tracks when knights' horses were shot out from under them (which could also cause serious damage to the rider from the fall), something the French relearned at the Battle of Agincourt. But the problem with bows is that it is a skill that has to be learned and practiced. The English had to mandate that their longbowmen practice shooting every Sunday after church. The crossbow was seen as more practical for their societies as you could hand it to just about any peasant and they could fire without a lot of training.