Longbow can only be acurately fired standing?
Also what would be efective range, and what penetration it can achieve?
.pt
This is lifted from wikipedia
To penetrate chain mail armour, many war arrows had 'chisel' (or 'bodkin') heads and were quite massive. Bodkin arrows have tips like elongated pyramids, which result in a very sharp and very narrow point. With their bodkin points these massive war arrows probably weighed around 65 to 100 grams (1000 to 1500 grains, grain being a unit of measure often used for arrows and bullets). This is 2 or 3 times the weight of the wooden or aluminum arrows that are used today and 4 to 5 times the weight of modern carbon fiber arrows or pre 20th century 'flight arrows', used in distance shooting contests. In peacetime, in some regions, carrying chisel points was a hanging offence, because it was thought to threaten noblemen or they were taken as evidence that one was a highwayman. Specialist war-arrows were designed to tackle the problem of different types of armour. For example, arrows with thin and sharply slanted heads were used to pierce chainmail suits, breaking one ring and consequently 'popping' a huge hole in the armour as the force of the impact knocked the other rings out of place. Many war-arrows had heads that were only attached with a small blob of wax, so that if they were to be removed conventionally only the shaft would come out, leaving the head lodged in the victim which would almost certainly cause an infected wound. The effects of a longbow are illustrated by this 12th century account by Gerald of Wales:
...in the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron cuirasses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal. (Itinerarium Cambriae, (1191))
On the battlefield, English archers stabbed their arrows upright into the ground at their feet, reducing the time it took to notch, draw and loose (as drawing from a quiver is slower). An additional effect of this practice was that the point of an arrow would be more likely to cause infection. Bowmen relieved themselves on the same ground, but this is unlikely to have any additional effect.
Cloth-yard shafts (used in longbows, their length being 31" or one yard of cloth) recovered from the Mary Rose show that some arrowheads were attached using a copper-based glue. As copper is lethal when introduced into the bloodstream, this could be considered an example of biochemical warfare.
The only way to remove such an arrow cleanly would be to tie a piece of cloth, soaked in boiling water or another sterilising substance, to the end of it and push it through the victim's wound and out of the other side — this was incredibly painful. There were specialised tools used in the medieval period to extract arrows if in places where bone prevented the arrow being pushed through.
ouch, a trained Long bowman could hit a firing rate of up to 20 rpm!
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