The longbow was a powerful self bow associated especially with Welsh and English archers in the wars of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.
The longbow is the tall self bow of Wales and England, drawn to the ear and shot in volleys by massed archers. Between roughly 1300 and 1450 it gave English armies a capability no continental force could match.
It is a simple object and a demanding one. A single stave of yew, a string, and an arrow — but the draw weights recovered from the Mary Rose run from about 100 to over 180 pounds, which is far beyond what an untrained man can manage at all.
That is the weapon's real character. It required no expensive materials and a great deal of expensive time, which is the reverse of almost every other weapon in the archive and explains both its dominance and its disappearance.
The bow is a self bow — one piece of wood, not laminated — standing 1.8 to 2 metres, roughly the height of the archer. Yew was preferred above every other timber, and the best was imported from Spain, Italy and the Baltic because English yew grew too fast and too knotty.
The stave is cut so that the pale, elastic sapwood lies along the back and the denser heartwood forms the belly. Sapwood resists stretching and heartwood resists compression, so the bow is a natural laminate made by careful selection rather than by glue.
The cross-section is a rounded D, deep rather than wide, and the tips carry horn nocks to take the string without crushing the wood. There is no shaped handle: the archer grips the bare middle of the stave, and the whole bow bends through its length.
It was shot in volleys at a formation, not aimed at individuals. Massed archers could put ten to twelve arrows a minute each into a target area at 180 to 230 metres, and the effect is a continuous fall of arrows rather than a series of shots.
Its most consistent victims were horses. Unarmoured or lightly barded animals under sustained shooting become unmanageable, and a cavalry charge that arrives with half its horses down or bolting has already failed — which is a large part of what happened at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
English tactical practice paired archers with dismounted men-at-arms behind stakes or broken ground, so the enemy had to come through the arrows to reach a prepared line. The Battle of Poitiers in 1356 is the clearest demonstration of the combination working as designed.
Its strengths are volume, range and cost. Nothing else in medieval Europe delivers that weight of missiles that fast, and the raw materials are a stave of wood and a hemp string.
Its weakness is the archer. Drawing 150 pounds repeatedly takes years of conditioning begun in adolescence, and the skeletons of the Mary Rose crew show it plainly — thickened left forearms, enlarged shoulder joints and spinal adaptation from a lifetime of shooting.
Claims that it reliably punched through good plate need careful qualification. Testing gives results that swing enormously with range, arrowhead, angle of strike and plate quality, and the honest position is that the longbow was devastating against horses, mail, textile and the badly equipped, and much less certain against a fifteenth-century harness.
Powerful bows were used across Europe for centuries, and what changed in England was not the object but the institution: from the late thirteenth century the Crown built a system that produced archers in numbers.
Edward III legislated for it directly, requiring practice at the butts on feast days and restricting the sports that competed with it, and the archery statutes were reissued by his successors for a century and a half.
The system ends before the weapon does. At the Battle of Patay in 1429 the English archers were caught before their stakes were planted and were ridden down, and at the Battle of Castillon in 1453 French artillery in a fortified camp destroyed an English attack outright — the longbow had not become worse, it had been outmatched.
The weapon is Welsh in origin as an English military instrument. Its effectiveness was learned in the Welsh wars of the thirteenth century, and Welsh archers served in English armies throughout the following period.
It never transferred abroad, and the reason is institutional rather than technical. No continental power built the training system, and by the time anyone might have tried, the crossbow and then the handgun offered comparable effect from men trained in weeks.
The bows themselves vary little. What the Mary Rose showed is a remarkably consistent product — a standardised military weapon made in quantity to a known pattern, not a collection of individual craftsmen's bows.