Archers, volleys and lethality

[Erpingham]

A possibly interesting recent-ish blog post by Brett Deveraux about historical archery.  As regular readers will know, I am fascinated by medieval archery so I had to read it.

I don't think there is anything new here - a lot of what is here has been discussed on the forum or featured in Slingshot articles - but some interesting points on archery lethality.

For what it is worth, I think he is largely right about volleys but not quite. Medieval archers are spoken of as shooting "volleys" but the word volley didn't have the same meaning. It meant "flight" as in a flight of birds. Flights of arrows appear at various points. We also know English longbowmen shot "together" - at least roughly at the same time, though probably not to command but rather their rhythm of shooting (knocking, drawing, loosing) would have kept them roughly synchronised over a short period.