English longbow or yumi?

[r3vange]

Actually, full plate was pretty effective protection against the arrows, whatever point was attached. This was because the arrow shafts had to be made of the right materials to stop them from shattering on impact. On the whole, due to the huge numbers of arrows the English archers got through, the shafts were never of high enough quality to actually allow a bodkin to properly penetrate plate. The main problem for any mounted knight was his horse. Bring the horse down on an armoured knight and he ended fairly squashed and broken from the 1.5 ton beast that fell onto him in its death throws, or it trapped him completely making him an easy target for a knife to the eye. The Scots got the idea that the way to counter the threat of the longbow was to go on foot in full plate. That effectively negated the archer as a real threat (apart from extremely lucky shots). Of course, you'd still need to be a better army than the one you were facing which is where the Scots tended to fail against the English. Not that they didn't have their victories, but in the end the odds were just too steep to overcome.

I concur, and I have historic evidence to prove it. During the battle of Adrianople 1205 The Latin Empire with its heavily armed French knights were absolutely destroyed. A decoy attack and retreat made the Latin army chase down light Cuman cavalry into a heavily muddy area near the Taza river. Once into the muddy trap the ambush was sprung and the order given to the archers* was to aim not at the knights themselves but at their horses. Once their horses laid dead the knights were dead in the water, surrounded and decimated. There are reports that knights drowned in the sticky mud unable to get up with their gear weighing them down.

*Now mind you, the archers were not pure archers in the commonly accented meaning of the word, they were medium and heavy infantry trained in both melee and projectile weapons and used relatively small bows which had no chance against plate but were quick to shoot and even quicker to swap for a sword or a mace.

---