Consider the time involved in making an arrow by hand in those times then think again about those numbers.
“Consider the time involved in making an arrow by hand in those times then think again about those numbers.”
They were on a military campaign so the arrows were already made. I don’t know how many arrows were shot, but the archers did run out at one point and have to go pick up arrows from the battlefield.
Agincourt is one of my favorite battles to study. Henry V was a military genius and the French obliged with their stupidity.
Bernard Cornwell wrote a good historical fiction book about an archer in the military campaign.
http://www.amazon.com/Agincourt-Bernard-Cornwell/dp/0061578908
The military arrows were made rather quickly using a pedal driven lathe. The fletching was attached using a jig still available from Basspro.
The bow is quite a lethal weapon.
The British spent years preparing for war. The motto was “six feathers from every goose”, to the fletcher for arrows. Every goose, for years in a country with millions of inhabitants. The Battle of Agincourt was not a casual encounter, both sides spent half a generation in preparation. There were 5,000 longbow men. That works out to about 200 arrows per bow. If you didn’t have enough arrows for them, why even bring them along.
Longbow men did act as light infantry, but generally only those sent through the wood to attack the French flanks, who when they ran out of all the arrows they could carry, would pick up abandoned arms - the battlefield was full of them - and make harassing attacks on the French flanks.
That’s 200 arrows per archer. Any grunt knows this is very plausible. Armies are great at filling idle time. 20 arrows a day would be child’s play to them, and that’s 10 days to be ready for a big battle.
It make less sense that a massive army arrives with less than 200 per archer available.
Consider the time involved in making an arrow by hand in those times then think again about those numbers.
In my misspent youth I was very interested in archery and I would make my own arrows. I would say that the difference between the ones I made and the ones the English used is that theirs were heavier and had a hand forged ‘bodkin’ point. Their arrows were only meant to be used once or twice and much time after the battles was spent collecting arrows and ‘refurbishing’ them for the next one.
But you do have a point, it would have taken a long time to build up reserves for war.
On a secondary note, when the Romans at Carrhae in Parthia fought the Romans the surviving legionnaires wrote of their despair at seeing all of the camels laden down with arrows for the horse archers that were attacking them. I recall reading that a Parthian ‘Fletcher’ could make a new arrow every fifteen minutes or so as long as they had the supplies available to do so.
Per Wiki, there were between 5000-6000 English archers at Angincourt. It’s not unconceivable that each archer was supplied with 100 arrows.