Battle of Crécy (1346)
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Been thinking about Crécy lately — specifically from the standpoint of what it actually tells us about projectile weapons and why rate of fire still matters more than raw power in a lot of situations.
The crossbow was more powerful than the longbow on a shot-for-shot basis, but its rate of fire was less than a quarter of the longbow's, and that gap proved decisive.
That sentence should be pinned above every reloading bench. Two shots a minute versus ten — that's the difference between suppressing a threat and getting overrun. We still have this argument at the range, except now it's bolt gun versus semi, or single-stack versus double-stack. The math hasn't changed much.
A 2017 computer analysis by Warsaw University of Technology found that heavy bodkin arrows could penetrate typical plate armor of the period at 225 metres, with penetration increasing at closer ranges or against lower-quality armor.
Standoff distance with effective armor penetration — that's still the whole game. The English weren't shooting harder than the French crossbowmen, they were shooting more while keeping the threat farther out. That's a terminal ballistics and volume-of-fire problem solved through system design, not through raw projectile energy.
The English also fielded gunpowder weapons — their exact number and mix are uncertain from contemporary sources, but types identified include small guns firing lead balls, ribauldequins firing metal arrows or grapeshot, and bombards firing metal balls 80 to 90 millimetres in diameter.
So the first documented Western European battlefield use of gunpowder weapons — and they were essentially a noise and disruption platform, not a primary casualty producer. That tracks with how new weapons tech usually enters the picture. Nobody showed up at Crécy betting their lives on the bombards. That came later.
Here's the question for the thread: thinking about rate of fire versus raw power — where in your own shooting, whether carry, competition, or hunting, have you made a deliberate trade in one direction or the other, and how did it actually play out in practice?
Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team
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