Knight vs Samurai

[Supercommunist]

So you think the only thing the arrows did was kill the horses and that then allowed the 1000 english men-at-arms to defeat at least 10 000 French ones?
I am not claiming the arrows would have killed many of the French knights directly, seeing how they were wearing a lot more than just maille (although that goes to show how well killing the horses would have worked out), namely full plate armour.
Still, seems unlikely that heavily outnumbered English infantry would have been effective against dismounted knights (both forces being stuck in mud then) if the arrows had little effect on anyone from the French force besides reducing their (already reduced) mobility and maybe giving them some unpleasant bumps.

This is what Mike Loades had to say about the subject:

Agincourt was an astonishing victory against the odds, for the few against the many, but archery played only a small part in the outcome. It was tactics and terrain, sucking mud and incompetent French command that caused the French to lose; that and the fighting pluck of the English archers. However, with their arrow supplies exhausted, it was a victory the archers won in desperate hand-to-hand fighting rather than with their bows.

The debacle of Crécy prompted changes in the French approach. Armour improved and at many battles the French opted to dismount their horses and attack on foot. They did so at Poitiers a decade later and again, after the initial disastrous cavalry attack, at Agincourt in 1415. Much has been made of the carnage wrought by English archery upon the French cavalry at Agincourt, but the original chronicles paint a less catastrophic picture. In describing the cavalry charge by Sir Guillaume de Sauveuses with 300 lances, Monstrelet reports that ‘all of them returned, save for three men-at-arms … it was their sad misfortune that their horses fell amongst the stakes’; he does concede that ‘their horses had been so troubled by the arrow shot of the English archers that they could not hold control of them’ (quoted in Curry 2009: 161), but this is a very different story from the annihilating arrowstorm of popular legend. There were only three dead, and these casualties occurred because their horses were skewered on the stakes and their riders’ skulls cracked beneath an archer’s maul.

I am sure some knights were killed by arrows that in agincourt, some arrows probably managed to enter gaps and openings in the knights' armor but most of them would not have been directly harmed and the main value of the bows in that battle where the disruption the arrows caused.

Well people in japan actually weren’t that quick to discard armour as gunpowder weapons came about. Neither where they in Europe actually, plate armour was widely used well into the 17th century, including by soldiers who wielded gunpowder weapons themselves (and here it is actually true that. But armour continued to evolve, and the obvious counter to archery would have been plate armour (whether or not this was specifically a result of archery). On the other hand if maille stops pretty much everything already, why go through all the difficulty of coming up with plate armour, which is actually a lot more complex, hot and inconvenient than maille?

Plate was superior to mail in almost all aspects. Once the technology to create plate became available their is little reason to wear mail. A chest plate, unless it is very, very thick is actually lighter than mail, offers better protection and can be mass produced (creating chainmail is a notoriously very tedious process). The only advantages chain really offers is that it is a bit more flexible and easier to put on by yourself.

Ok so whole wars were supposedly won and lost and whole empires built because one side was discouraged by "unpleasant thumps"? Sorry, but that sounds far-fetched. Unless you are talking about weaker bows used for skirmishing, as was the norm for large parts of history.

I might have phrashed it a bit weird so this is what Loades writes:

Nevertheless, the test did highlight what I consider to be the key role of the longbow on the battlefield – to thump the enemy with very heavy hits. It was a bonus when a shaft shaft penetrated, whatever the percentage chances of that may be, but nearly all shafts can be counted upon to hit.

That was the fight. That was the battle – relentlessly striking the foe with powerful blows. It did not matter, within certain parameters, that the force of the blows varied in intensity, either because of the angle of strike or the draw-weight of the bow; even the lighter, but still strong, strikes would have taken their toll cumulatively. Archers were engaged in a slugging match; arrows were steel-clad fists with a considerable reach. It was attritional warfare, wearing the enemy down with hard strikes. In such a contest the power of the hits was important. Heavier bows and closer ranges were better, but the knockout punch was not everything. Of equal importance was the frequency of the hits, dependent upon both the rate of shooting and the number of archers.

The majority of casualties occur during the route and historical soldiers could panick very quickly. The roman were instance once panicked and ran when a bunch of naked celtic warriors charged them. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, if you look at most ancient/middle age battles between two roughly equal forces you will see that the losers typically suffer much higher losses than the winners. Most men simply dont have the nerve to keep fighting if their comrades die at a rapid rate, and when two sides were actually fighting one another they were probably not that many deaths.[/quote]

As I said earlier in this thread, during a battle most deaths occured during the route. In the age spear of sword, good armor tended to defeat the best weapons and most men wouldn't have the nerve to keep fighting if their comrades died at a rapid rate. Historically, soldiers could be routed suprisingly easily. The romans for instance where known to panick and run when charged by naked celtic warriors lol and Napolean was reported to have said "“In war, the moral is to the physical as ten to one.”


Here's something intresting I found:

"...and whilst the Turks were fleeing before him, they (who shoot as well backwards as forwards) would cover him with darts. When he had driven them out of the village, he would pick out the darts that were sticking all over him; and put on his coat-of-arms again... Then, turning round, and seeing that the Turks had come in at the other end of the street, he would charge them again, sword in hand, and drive them out. And this he did about three times in the manner I have described."

Go to page 197-198 to find the quote:

archive.org/details/memoirsoflordofj00joinuoft/page/196/mode/2up

Another reason why I assert that most arrows didn't kill is because they are battles where archers loose literally tens of thosuands of arrows, if even 10 percent had killed the other side would have been crippled the enemy and probably caused a mass route but that doesn't seem to have occured.

Again, with the Swiss mercenary example. If arrows could inflict a high amount of causulties, the mostly unarmored and outnumbered mercenaries should have been quickly decimated by crossbow fire, but instead they managed to fight on for several hours and inflicted many kills on the enemy.

So why would you use a war bow if it was barely any better?

A warbow is more powerful than a hunting bow. What I am saying is that a hunting bow is basically useless against armor and thus a longbow being better does not neccessarily mean it was particularly effective against armor.

So again, why would you have 5/6 of your army use a primary weapon that could kill barely anyone on the battlefield, and then win?

Why did armies in WW1 lob so many artillery shells despite the overwhelming majority of them missing? Why did people charge infantry formations on horseback when a well-braced group of spearmen should be able to repel and maim the horses?

The reason is because people are not rational and will panick. Most men are not killing machines that will keep fighting if they take heavy losses. A lot of weapons may not cause a lot of direct causulties but they are useful for slowing down movement or for suppression fire.

Which was apparently not effective at preventing them from being shot, not even at Agincourt when armour was far more advanced.

Horse textile armor probably did not cover the entire body and given that the longbow men were loosing thousands of arrows they would have inevitably hit some of the horses exposed flesh. In this scenario, the samurai is on his own. Killing a horse is possible and I have noted that earlier in this thread that is one way he might win.

Marching through a hail of arrows is probably a terrifying expeirence even if you are mostly safe from it and even if only one out of hundred guys dies from an archery volly that one death can rattle many other men.

Anway I'll have to leave this topic alone for awhile. I have a midterm in a few days and it was really irresponsible for me to invest so much time in this discussion LOL.

[Infinity Blade]

Yes sure, neither is a 100% counter to the other, but it’s a question of percentages here. How often and how well will mail stop an arrow, with a suitable head shot straight at it from a powerful bow?

I could flip that question and ask how often and how well an arrow with the right head will shoot right through maille and gambeson. But the source I linked to above states that there are "many" historical accounts of maille stopping arrows and protecting the wearer from being pierced underneath, and mentions historical examples which demonstrate this. It also mentions modern tests corroborating this, just as there are some tests where arrows shoot through maille. Judging from that, no, I don't think we're talking about an insignificant proportion of cases where maille beat arrows here.

Even if the mail does offer significant protection, there’s not that much of a downside to using the bow here, it’s not as if the knight can shoot back and stand a better chance of killing his opponent.

Why does he need to? If the knight's combination of mail and gambeson provides significant protection from the samurai's arrows (except at say, very close ranges), then charging in and ramming his lance point home suddenly becomes a far more viable option. And if that happens, the samurai will be in trouble.

Sure, you could argue that the closer the knight is, the better the samurai's chances of hurting him with his bow. But then again, the closer the samurai has to be to penetrate his foe's armor, the more the very purpose of his bow (to attack at range) is defeated. A game of cat and mouse won't do the samurai much good if he can't harm the knight at an appreciable distance (and it's not an act he could keep up forever).

(As an aside there were knights, from the 11th century and onward, who did use either bows or crossbows->. Digressing from High-medieval knights here, but the Teutonic Order still had thousands of crossbows and over a million bolts in Prussia alone even in the early 15th century (link->). And interestingly, their composite horn crossbows were effective enough that they remained the Teutonic Knights' dominant long range weapon even after being impressed by the English longbow (link->). I neglected to mention them at first because I just wanted to discuss how a "normal" knight would do with his conventional equipment.)

On a slightly different note, the horse is still susceptible to arrows, is it not?

Sure, which is why I didn't flat out conclude "knight winz" in my big post concentrating on the 11th century, at least as far as mounted combat is concerned. Although, we should be careful to not overstate this vulnerability: medieval iconographic evidence shows that archers still shot at mounted knights at not too far of a distance (otherwise, the archer's ability to accurately hit such a fast moving target and fatally wound such a big and powerful animal would be compromised).

As for the inference "maille was around for a long time so it must have been good protection against arrows", I don’t really agree. Maille was around for a very long time, sure. And there are really good reasons for that, some I already mentioned. But as I pointed out massed archery tactics using truly powerful bows were not that widespread, and whenever they where they seem to have made quite an impact. Success of a type of armour (just like a specific functional morphology in evolution, one might say) is not just measured in how strong it is, but also various other factors such as cost, ease of use and repair, wearing convenience, and of course how common the threats it was most effective against actually where in the environment it was used in. If archery was not generally employed en masse (because trained archers able to shoot bows powerful enough to penetrate armour reliably where not around in sufficient numbers), there would be less selective pressure on armours to be arrow-proof, making other considerations more important. And then of course maille did get replaced or supplemented by plate repeatedly. In the case of medieval european armours, surely quite a significant improvement in protectiveness would be needed to justify the added weight of wearing plate (at least at first) in addition to maille (yes I know, plate alone is lighter than maille, but initially a coat of plates would simply have been strapped on above an already existing coat of maille).

But even if powerful warbows weren't necessarily widespread in a given point in time, wouldn't you at least expect armies to equip them (and train more of their personnel to effectively use them) far more frequently once they realized maille is very consistently weak to arrowfire from said warbows?

The Vikings, for instance, had powerful longbows, and would have used them against men decked in maille. Granted, their longbows didn't get as powerful as late medieval longbows could, but they could still get respectably powerful (one example had a draw weight of 104 lbs; that's at the lower end of Mary Rose longbows), and of course, had the appropriate arrowheads (bodkins) to boot. In spite of that, it's not as if the Vikings suddenly made the lion's share of their forces longbowmen, and accordingly it's not like the enemies of the Vikings suddenly showed any signs of switching to the type of armor they used. As all of us know, maille would continue to be used for centuries to come.

And keep in mind that warbows aren't the only factors that might prompt armies (especially in medieval Europe) to switch from maille to plate. There were also blunt/armor-piercing melee weapons (e.g. single-handed warhammers for melee combat start being used in the 13th century, poleaxes in the 14th), not to mention gunpowder weapons (gunpowder appeared in Europe in the 13th century). Not only do I think these were also important factors, but I'm also willing to bet that these prompted the switch from maille to plate throughout the 14th century in Europe more than warbows did, considering not everyone in western Europe was going up against massive numbers of archers with strong warbows (i.e. English longbowmen), yet they all switched to plate anyway.

Certainly by reinforcing it enough or just layering enough of it you could make maille arrow-resistant to arrows in and of itself, although of course that would make it even heavier (maille already being very heavy).

Didn't stop people from recommending it.

O yoroi is lamellar armour incorporating iron plates, and rather heavy one at that.

The iron plate composed the top part of the waidate (the separate piece of armor on the right side of the torso), but the rest of the cuirass was lamellar. Wikipedia says this (unfortunately, I can't view the particular page of its source that goes into detail about this):

The ō-yoroi (dō) consisted of two parts. One (the waidate) was a separate defense for the right side and the other part covered the rest of the wearer's trunk. The upper part of the waidate was solid iron plate covered with leather. The lower part was lamellar. When dressing for battle, the waidate was put on before the rest of the dō and fastened with cords that tied around the body. The rest of the dō was constructed with individual lacquered scales (kozane) laced together and covered with leather on top.

I’d imagine a solid iron plate should stop an arrow at least as well as any iron ring would, probably more so.

Sure, with a huge generalization we could say that lamellar is (generally) more protective against arrows.

But there are three problems here. First of all, ō-yoroi – and samurai armor in general – also incorporated rawhide (I don't need to explain why that's far less protective than iron). In the case of ō-yoroi, it was to significant degrees, with alternating iron and rawhide kozane in order to cut down on weight (even though it still ended up being quite massive). Just like how you might have a chance of having the tip of a weapon or arrow go through the gaps of a maille ring, there's a chance that say, a lance tip or what-have-you could end up hitting a point protected by rawhide instead of iron.

Secondly, considering the protective benefits of lamellar against arrows versus maille, is it even established that the yumi was meant to actually penetrate through ō-yoroi at the time? The little I could find suggests that ō-yoroi was very much designed with protection against arrows in mind (that samurai deliberately created an empty "buffer zone" between themselves and their cuirass is consistent with this), meaning the armor was a counter to the weapon, not the other way around.



Third, there's no hard evidence that maille was around this early in Japan's history. Wiki has a source that claims that maille's use in Japan goes as far back as the Mongol invasions (so late 13th century), and really kicked off in the 14th century. So how many, if any, of the arrows our 11th century samurai is carrying would even be well suited to penetrating maille?

So you think the only thing the arrows did was kill the horses and that then allowed the 1000 english men-at-arms to defeat at least 10 000 French ones?

No. The arrows fired in Agincourt disrupted, slowed down, and dismounted the French as they tried to engage the English. Of course, they also killed anyone who was less well armored or any unprotected body parts (I guess with that many arrows coming at you, some people are bound to get hit there).

It didn't help that a) the French were mired in soft mud that sank them down to the "thick of their legs", b) the men-at-arms were on big-ass horses with hooves poorly suited to staying atop of soft mud, c) both man and horse were clad in steel armor, and d) the English longbowmen were protected by sharp wooden stakes that protected them from cavalry charges anyway (another big thing that sometimes allowed longbowmen to be so effective even against heavy cavalry). In fact, it's said that by the time the French men-at-arms finally engaged the English at close quarters, they could "scarcely lift their weapons".



Curry (2000)

So what you ended up with were 1,000 or more English men-at-arms plus 5,000 or more archers who, mind you, were still equipped to fight in close quarters versus French men-at-arms who were so exhausted that they couldn't even lift up their weapons to properly fight. Even a heavily armored man-at-arms could be beaten by less well armored enemies if he's that exhausted.

[Supercommunist]

Have not sat around to watch this whole video but in one of Thegnthrands videos one of his arrows launched by 130 ib warbow bounces off mail though does note that the gambeson beneath is probably thicker than what somebody would have worn if they had mail as well.

14:38



13:29

Strangely, in the same video the arrow enters the gambeson, but not through the figure itself and seems to almost exit out of the mail.

[Infinity Blade]

Sorry to necro this thread, but I just wanted to reiterate something about the power of the yumi, particularly from the earlier days (well, centuries) when samurai were horse archers. We have an idea of how powerful one from the Sengoku and Edo periods could be. There is an actual historical yumi from the early Edo period (which began in the early 17th century) with its draw weight found to be at 196 lbs (link). But during the Sengoku period, the spear (and other polearms) had replaced the bow as the samurai's primary weapon, so a samurai from that time period is unlikely to bring a bow with him in this hypothetical fight (at that point ashigaru were the ones mainly using the yumi).

However, the important thing to remember is that the yumi evolved in its construction over time. It was considered to have become nearly perfect in design by the mid-16th century, and it reached what was considered a "revolutionary" design in the 14th century (link).

Here's what yumi from different centuries looked like in cross section (unfortunately, I've found it hard to track down the original source).



As you can see, it becomes increasingly more intricate in construction over time. These additional improvements would have conferred greater power to the yumi.

Compound bows, i.e. bows that were made from different layers of various types of wood, appear in Japan from around the 12th century onwards and were produced by adding a layer of bamboo to the bow's outside face. By the beginning of the 13th century a second layer was added to the nearside. Two centuries later a further two layers were added, one on each side, thus completely encasing the wooden core. All these types of bow, including the simple non-compound bow, were bound round with rattan to aid adhesion and lacquered all over to guard against the entry of moisture. These processes also added to the overall strength and power of the yumi.

Source: Turnbull (2021)

During early centuries of the samurai, as well as the Genpei War (1180-1185), yumi were not as powerful as cavalry bows from the steppes of Central Asia.

Japanese bushi confronted very different technological, as well as geographical and organizational circumstances. To begin with, they were forced to make do with bows distinctly inferior to those used by horsemen on the continent. The kiyumi and fusetake-yumi of the tenth to twelfth centuries were particularly weak and, used in conjunction with the heavy ōyoroi armors favored by early medieval samurai, forced warriors to shoot only at very close range – usually 10 meters or less – and to target with precision the gaps and weak points in the armor of specific opponents.

Source: Friday (2004)

For all its length the Japanese longbow had nothing like the power of the bows wielded by the mounted warriors from the steppes of Central Asia.

Source: Turnbull (2016)


It's often stated that Crusader knights were often shot by numerous arrows but remained unharmed, making them look like porcupines or pincushions as they kept on fighting. Unless the shot was at very close range, Muslim arrows apparently could not harm them (one of the links posted previously in this thread has accounts saying the same thing).

Unless shot at very close range, Muslim arrows could not penetrate the thick chain mail worn by the knights, so the knights could often be seen charging around a battle field like porcupines, stuck with shafts that had penetrated the armour far enough to stick in but not far enough to reach flesh.

Source: McLynn (2008)

A book I recently bought claims that the draw weights of Ayyubid mamluk composite bows would have likely ranged around 80-100 lbs (so it's not like these were weak bows either), and yet apparently they could only harm mail-clad knights at very close range. This should be kept in mind when discussing a knight vs a samurai from the latter's "horse archery centuries" (so circa 10th to maybe 13th centuries).

EDIT: In addition to this, I also recently learned that the box-like shape of ō-yoroi also considerably restricted the angle of fire of the bow to 45 degrees, from the 9 o'clock to 11 o'clock positions (Friday, 2004; Clements, 2013; Turnbull, 2016). Samurai archery duels were actually done with samurai riding towards each other and shooting at close range (Deal, 2007). So this suddenly starts to makes sense.

I originally thought that a fight between a mounted knight and mounted samurai archer would basically be a game of cat-and-mouse, where the knight would be chasing the samurai as the latter tried to keep his distance and fire away with his bow (like knights vs mamluks). In fact, we all just kind of assumed that. Looks like we were wrong.

[Supercommunist]

Something most people, including myself forget to consider is the quality of horse breeds. According to sources Japanese horse breeds were smaller and inferior to European ones and were not suitable for charges in most scenarios. Samurai horses were mainly used horse archery or just transportation.

Japanese horses were smaller and weaker. NHK tested pony of roughly the size of Japanese horses back then carrying the equivalent weight of a fully armored men, and found it could go no more than 9 km/h. It could only canter at best, and often dropped to a trot. This is matched by the rarity of the word 疾駆 (gallop) in written sources. At least in leisure, Japanese elites seemed to prefer to take it slow when riding anyway, leading Townsend Harris to say “The Japanese are no horsemen”.

Normally I wouldn't consider Reddit a good source but askhistorians is an exception

www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5g3e55/how_was_cavalry_used_in_japan_during_the_sengoku/.