Longbow and Hackbutt: Weapons Technology and Technology Transfer in Early Modern England

The retention of the longbow by England’s soldiers of the sixteenth century was a matter of no little contention among contemporaries, and it has attracted comment ever since. Historians such as Charles Oman have generally regarded the bow as “distinctly obsolescent,” and the continued reliance on archery is taken as evidence of an enfeebled capacity for warfare. ¹ Military historians have been particularly prone to making such judgments, relying heavily on the concept of “war-winning weapons” as a causal factor in battlefield success. ² Less attention has been paid to the complex interplay of factors beyond technical performance that have governed the choices surrounding the adoption of particular weapons. A people’s chosen tools of war can be a manifestation of economic, political, cultural, and social circumstances, circumstances that defy the simple logic of a new technology displacing an old one. The relationship between the longbow and gunpowder small arms provides an instructive case study in factors relating to technological choice. This is true for military historians in particular, but the case has implications for all those interested in the remarkable persistence with which past societies have clung to “distinctly obsolescent” tools even after more “sophisticated” technologies had become available. The complexity of the factors relating to the slow replacement of the bow by gunpowder small arms puts at issue any overarching theory of single factor dominance. The transition was chaotic in nature, and incidental changes in surrounding social and political circumstances could have led to a quite different pattern in technology transfer.

Most studies of the equipment of early modern English armies have focused on the bitter debates of the closing decades of the sixteenth century when the proponents of the bow, chief among them Sir John Smyth, argued passionately for the weapon’s retention against those veterans of the wars in the Low Countries, notably Humfrey Barwick and Sir Roger Williams, who wished either to see the bow abandoned entirely or its use restricted. ³ These debates centered largely on the technical performance of the bow itself. The issue at stake was the correct proportion of English missile troops who should carry longbows as opposed to guns, for not even Smyth advocated that English armies be equipped only with bows. ⁴ This point has, perhaps, not been fully appreciated. Debates about retaining archers as a proportion of missile troops naturally indicate that an alternative technology, the hand held firearm, had already been adopted, but had yet to supplant fully the traditional arm. Yet the circumstances in which the English first chose to adopt firearms, and the process by which these gradually displaced the bow, have received far less attention than the rearguard action fought by archery’s defenders at the end of the century. Given the longbow’s centrality to English tactical practice and, perhaps even more important, its immense cultural and political significance, the episode provides a fascinating study in technology transfer. This simple tool had, after all, become inextricably linked to English national identity. As Thomas Churchyard, soldier, historian, and (bad) poet, wrote in 1575, “The bowe is feard as farre as flies our fame / And bowes, I weene, wan Englishmen the name.” ⁵ What can have induced the English to forsake such a potent symbol of their own nationhood?

The most obvious answer to this question is based solely on the technological merits of the two weapons: the bow was simply outperformed on the battlefield by handheld firearms, particularly as the arquebus (or “hackbutt,” to the English) and the larger musket were refined over the course of the sixteenth century. Yet the assumption that the early modern period really did see steady improvements in the range, accuracy, armor penetration, and rate of fire of infantry small arms has now been challenged. The test-firing of a selection of early modern firearms at the Landeszeughaus (provincial armory) in Graz Austria in 1988–89 failed to reveal any significant improvements in the performance of muskets manufactured from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. ⁶ The inherent ballistic qualities of such weapons meant that these...