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there have been thousands of weapons made in the last couple of years, but one of my favourites is the English long bow... read a small article about this weapon some years ago, some were made with a 100pound pull on them ! can you imagine the amount of physical strength needed in the upper body to be able to hold and pull, then release accurately !?!?!
these bowmen were true craftsmen. the bone in the upper body would grow thicker to compensate for the stresses of working these armour piercing beasts..
what can i say other than "amazing weapon"
No best answer has yet been selected by funkymoped. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.when they find archers' skeletons, they're usually deformed because of the constant effort of drawing. Also, they had to practise all year to keep in trim (hence the business about practising on Sundays), which was difficult in the days before professional soldiering - in the off season, men used to have to work their fields as well.
lots of stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow
I think there's a bit of a danger of over estimating the impact of the longbow though.
Bows in general had long been a problem for the upper classes who'd previously seen war as a bit of a sport where you went off and killed a load of peasants and if you got in difficulties you'd yield and get ransomed back.
The bow rather messed all that up because all of a sudden a peasant could kill a lord!
That wasn't how the game was played and they tried to ban it. In 1139 the second lateran council said:
We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hated by God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.
Didn't make much difference of course
In fact the longbow wasn't a great step forward in terms of power have a look at this analysis:
http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/crossbow/cross_l_v_c.html
I'd suspect the rate of fire was the big improvement