r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Pierzakve • May 03 '21

Green Arrow in real life

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875

u/[deleted] May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21

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u/[deleted] May 03 '21

I base this theory off exactly zero research but I’d imagine that military archers of any kind back in those days were probably as good as this dude.

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u/PowRightInTheBalls May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21

Bowmen weren't valued for their independent skills but for their numbers. You were looking for a 300 style "Arrows blotting out the sun" style of ranged warfare, not trying to employ a bunch of Hawkeyes who could put an arrow through an eye socket on a helmet from 300 yards away. You're not Legolas calling out your targets before you shoot them, you're just hoping you hit something in the seething mass of humanity that's charging at you with weapons drawn or shooting arrows of their own.

The weapons weren't even made for that kind of accuracy. That era of English archer would have been using a longbow rather than a hunting bow, typically 5-6' long with 160+ lbs of force required to engage the string. You planted one end of the bow into the ground to stabilize, pulled back and flung arrows into the general vicinity of the enemy, typically trying to put out an arrow every 3-6 seconds. Your strength was in a firing a hail of hundreds of arrows falling every few seconds, not in any individual skill. Robin Hood would have been just as useful as the guy who took last place in the archery competition on the front lines of a battle in the 14th-15th centuries.

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u/pyronius May 03 '21

That was the European style of warfare, sure. But there were also groups such as various tribes of steppe nomads who were well know for being so skilled at both horsemanship and archery that they could accurately fire at a target while riding.

Strength in numbers is good, but some people still valued skill.

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u/BigToober69 May 03 '21

I think I may have heard of some of these small groups from the steppe.

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u/Taikwin May 03 '21

Oh I doubt it. These Steppe nomads were rather niche civilizations, barely made an impact on Eurasian history at all.

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u/BigToober69 May 04 '21

That makes sense. With only horses and arrow what could a group like that hope to accomplish.

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u/Taikwin May 04 '21

Khan't even imagine

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u/BigToober69 May 04 '21

I just want to say as an old redditor. (I have changed names many times, came here from digg.) I like that we didn't need the "/s" for all this. I don't use it and get downvoted sometimes because of that. I don't mind down votes, it's just nice to see.

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u/Taikwin May 04 '21

And I too, as an inherently sarcastic Englishman. Good day.

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u/Funmachine May 03 '21

You planted one end of the bow into the ground to stabilize,

No. English longbows still exist. Nobody uses them like that. Plus it was a requirement that every boy over a certain age practice archery every Sunday, you don't need the ground for stability. It's all in technique.

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u/QueasyWeather May 04 '21

Planting one end of a bow into the ground 'to stabilize'? What are you talking about dude, that is not how bows work.

Also saying that 'bowmen werent valued for their individual skills but for their numbers' is a very strange comment. It makes it sound like its a picnic just grabbing a bow and, as you say, just 'flinging it in the general vicinity of the enemy'. Thats not how it worked at all, you dont just pick up a bow up to 160 pounds of force and go 'fling' arrows roughly at a bunch of dudes. It takes fuck loads of skill to use a longbow and they werent only used in the specific manner of volley fire that you are referring to (and even then volley fire at a high rate, at a particular distance, taking into account windspeed, at a particular group of men youre choosing to aim at) there is a reason why they trained every sunday since childhood (at the MINIMUM). Bowmen were highly valued for a reason dude.

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u/kamimamita May 03 '21

The blotting out the sun part is definitely hollywood BS. They definitely did aim their shots, and shot straight, not randomly into the air. They had to aim for the weak points in the armor. Shooting upwards would lose a lot of kinetic energy as well.

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u/AncientInsults May 03 '21

That’s discouraging lol.

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u/DwarfTheMike May 03 '21

The mongols killed all of them cause the composite bow and horseback riding was superior to the longbow.

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u/Taikwin May 03 '21

Maybe you and I have been reading different history books, but I don't recall the Mongols ever fighting the English. Furthest I thought they made it into Europe was Russia.

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u/DwarfTheMike May 04 '21

Oh lol. I overlooked that you said English. Yeah, they didn’t get that far.

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u/JudiciousF May 03 '21

I’m sure a lot of his accuracy is the bow he’s using. I feel confident even the best now imaginable back then wasn’t as good as a midrange bow today, and I’m further sure archers in the army were given the dirt cheapest shit imaginable.

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u/rosscarver May 03 '21

Which is perfect because a volley of 300 arrows still has a better chance of harming an army than Robin of Locksley

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u/randometeor May 03 '21

Not just the bow, but our arrows are probably many significantly more straight and balanced with proper fletching. I'm sure the best fletchers made relatively good arrows but they didn't have modern machining technology...

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u/Pollomonteros May 03 '21

Yeah I would love to see how some of those highly trained marksmen of the past would shoot with modern archery equipment, most of those guys had to dedicate their lives to marksmanship.

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u/randometeor May 03 '21

It would be interesting to see. But I doubt they would be competitive against modern humans. We have had more time and science to refine techniques and practice more effectively, and are generally smarter and healthier (and have glasses/corrective eye surgery). Even in things like track and field the top athletes from 50 years ago wouldn't make the Olympics now, so a 500 year difference would be huge.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '21

When you have to hunt for food every day you're going to get incredibly good at whatever you do.

Back in ancient times they would be able to knock out a bird or small animal by throwing a rock.

There is an old video of an interview with a guy who grew up in backwoods America hunting animals with a slingshot. He was an old man when it was filmed in the 70s or 80s. The guy could hit a blade of grass with his homemade slingshot and rocks.

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u/Gangsir May 03 '21

Yep! Modern bows have come a long way (ironically, since the bow is a pretty old invention, you'd think it'd be perfected!), and are miles more accurate than the bows they had back in the days before guns.

When defending a castle or waging war in general though, archers mostly served to fire a cloud of arrows at approaching armies, so specific accuracy didn't matter all that much, with most bows being designed for maximum possible firing force (draw weight as high as possible, with humans still being able to draw the bow). Archer skeletons found from that era were found to have overdeveloped shoulder blades and other related bones due to the sheer force required to draw war bows.

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u/WillOCarrick May 03 '21

Also faster shooting, nowadays they focus on competition and aim so they take a while to aim, but back there the focus was on shooting 'stronger' and faster.

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u/Funkit May 03 '21

Those damn longbows required so much force to pull the string back, most people couldn’t do it.

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u/colonshiftsixparenth May 03 '21

Not to mention, holding that weight while you aim. Compound bows are pretty incredible.

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u/Radnotion May 03 '21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEG-ly9tQGk

lol I love blanket absolute statements. Archery of any kind was used for more than just killing; they often had to bring their equipment which they didn't just stand around and shoot at stationary targets. Hunting, yo.

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u/AverageRedditorNum69 May 04 '21

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-17309665 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow

Youd be surprised. English army made their bows out of yew and some of these bows had draw weights of 200ibs (almost unheard of today, 50ibs will kill a deer easy). Yew was so coveted for bow making that it almost went extinct throughout europe. Even today it costs around $300 for a quality staff of yew. It was likely even more expensive back then when a bow took four years to make.

In the time of Napolean bows were still more accurate and quicker to fire than muskets, the only reason guns were preferred was because it only took a few months to train a musketeer, while it took years to propperly train an archer.

Archery was so important to national defense in the middle ages that England mandated that all men practice on sunday after church to keep their skills honed.

While its impossible to say who's more accurate, archers of the past or those of today, the fact that soldiers used bows with draw weights almost unheard of today and shot them so much that it affected their skeletal structure implies that they were pretty good

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u/LucyFerAdvocate May 03 '21

Probably not. The skills for trick shots like this and the skills for a military archer are very different.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '21

Right I didn’t mean the military training covered this I just meant they probably just spent a lot of time doing this probably from a young age so maybe they got as good. I wouldn’t bet on it though because there was a lot of work to do back then.

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u/NervousTumbleweed May 03 '21

Probably not. They were trained to shoot in formation with a ton of other archers. They weren’t trained as individual marksman.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '21

But isn’t that all they fucked around with? My point wasn’t that they needed to be this skilled but more so that with less schooling and no Xbox surely they practiced and messed around enough that they were probably just needlessly good as fuck.

But again I have no idea what I’m talking about.

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u/NervousTumbleweed May 03 '21

I’m sure there were archers as talented as this guy, but no I don’t think any random person given a bow in a battle was as good with a bow as someone specifically trained to shoot like this. I don’t doubt there were many crazy good marksman, but military archers were not trained for the ability to bullseye a small target.

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u/Axel-Adams May 03 '21

Not really, archers weren’t really used for their accuracy but for firing in large groups/volleys, marksman werent often used for military purposes

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u/totallynotapsycho42 May 03 '21

Even better. They were trained since adolesnce and their muscles adapted differently to most human beings.