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Old 12-07-2012, 01:45 PM   #51
gruundehn
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Default Re: Do the Archery rules cover this?

I watched the video and was struck by something that has not been explictly addressed, just kind of talked around. The bow he used and the draw he used was quite common for short bows, where the draw was to the chest. Once the Welsh longbow became common in military use the short bow was discarded becasue it was no longer good enough. Trying this with a longbow and you do not get the same power since most of the power in a bow's draw are in the last portion of the draw, the part abandoned here. Thus, a longbow would not be as powerful as a short bow drawn to the same draw point, the chest.
I my untrained opinion this is a trick that would only work with the equipment he is using. A longer bow would require longer arrows and they would most likely get in the way as he is working the bow.
A memory from reading about medieval warfare is that the English archers would fire their first shot in an arc and their second shot straight on so that it arrived at the same time, meaning that the active defense counted only against one or the other. The idea of a hail of arrows might date to the Greeks at Thermopylae where they were told that the Persians would darken the skies with their arrows and the Greek responce was "Good, we'll fight in the shade." And even here ther reference was probably to the thousandsw of archers not a smaller number firing a huge number of shots.
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