Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
From my understanding the alberd was designed to deal with mounted infantry and mounted knights. You either killed the horse or used the long blade to dismount the rider or the knight. Your right once a knight in battle armour was on the ground, killing him was no more difficult then shucking a lobster.
The longbows was always considered to be one of the great innovations of the middle ages war set, there wasn't a lot that could stop those bad boys.
The old saying, in the battle between armour and weapons, weapons usually wins.
The T34 tank was almost invulnerable to German tank fire in WW2, and that hearalded in the use of shaped charge anti tank weapons.
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The Longbow was extremely bad-ass. English archers would have been the equivalent of today's body-builders, minus the steroids. I think Benjamin Franklin said that if the Patriots had had a battalion of longbows, they would have won the Revolutionary War in a week. Depending on the archer, the bow could fire 6-10 arrows a minute over 200 yards, and strike a target the size of your hand.
It's more than just a technical battle too, though. Typically, the French, when facing the English, were notoriously undisciplined, breaking formation early, advancing into fortified positions etc... The English, at Agincourt, at Crecy, and Poiters, maintained strong unified formations of armoured foot with mixed arms of longbows on the flanks.
The French were awful at using mixed arms. They routinely wasted their crossbows, which even though it was a much slower-firing weapon than the longbow, had a longer range and was always present in larger numbers on the battlefield than the English Longbow.