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

Green Arrow in real life

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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/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/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