Because The United Kingdom?

[swerve]

 

 

 

 

The Broadberry-Burhop estimate seems to have won the day, after both they & Ritschl accepted some of the others numbers, but with more movement by Ritschl. That means a lead of maybe 5-8% in 1907, & rough equality in 1936.

 

Probably. It was Andrew Gordon in Rules of the Game IIRC.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the+rules+of+the+game+jutland&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Athe+rules+of+the+game+jutland

 

Looking at the prices on Amazon I sinceirely wish I had held onto my copy now...

 

I wonder if he is distant relative of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Gordon/ In modern Russia we got his distant offspring as relatively well-known TV host https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BD,_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80_%D0%93%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87

 

 

We tend to forget how big the diaspora of Scottish names there are in the world.

 

My surname's from Scotland, but the first ancestor I know of with it was living in Buckinghamshire in the 1690s.

[swerve]

Apparently, there was a second influx after the Glorious Revolution. James I/VI was followed by a lot of aristocrats & court hangers-on. William & Mary weren't, but the change from James II's Catholic bent, an economic opening-up to Scotland, & a flourishing English economy attracted a lot of Scots looking to make good in a richer country - & by all accounts, there was quite a difference at the time.

 

One of the economic sectors that's said to have attracted many Scots at the time was the cloth industry. My ancestor settled in a weaving village, married a weaver's daughter, called himself a 'salesman' in his will (apparently used where we'd use 'dealer',or 'trader' now), & another bloke with the same surname settled there soon after & opened a haberdashery shop in a town not far off. All coincidences?

Edited November 10, 2015 by swerve

[sunday]

Or the importing of yew for the manufacture of longbows

 

 

 

Did they really make longbows from churchyard yews?
No. The volume of yew wood needed for war archery from the early 13th to the late 16th century was far too vast to be in any logical proportion to the wood which could have been grown in churchyards. After all of the yew stands in Britain and Ireland had been depleted, the English crown began to import yew wood from Spain and, after this source was exhausted as well, turned its eyes on the trade with the Hanse towns of the Northern and Baltic Seas. Gigantic amounts of yew wood came from the Alpine borders via Nuremberg and the river Rhine while the Polish tradesmen in Danzig received barge-loads of yew wood from the depths of the eastern European woodlands, namely in western Russia and in the Carpathian Mountains. During the first half of the 16th century Bavaria and Austria alone exported 0.6 - 1.0

MILLION yew staves, by 1568 there was not a single yew left in Bavaria! When Elizabeth I decreed on October 26, 1595, to replace the military longbows with firearms, she did so because there was no tradable yew wood left in the whole of Europe! Not because firearms were superior. On the contrary, even at the time of the battle of Waterloo, almost 200 years later, firearms still were no match for the fire speed and precision of the yew longbow.

Summary: It is not true that we have ancient yews in churchyards because of the medieval need for longbows, but that ancient yews have survived despite the need for longbows, because of the churchyards (where they were protected from mundane purposes).
(Copyright © Fred Hageneder 2005)

http://www.ancient-yew.org/s.php/frequently-asked-questions/2/2#didthey

[swerve]

It's also much easier to train a musketeer. To pull a proper longbow requires skill & development of musculature that takes years. You have to start pretty young, & keep practising regularly.

 

That's the trade-off. A highly-skilled professional longbowman who takes a decade to make & has to start training as a boy (& is expensive to hire), with a bow made by a skilled bowyer (also expensive) from increasingly rare & expensive wood, which has to be obtained well before it's needed & stored in the right conditions (to season it), firing bulky & fragile (transport problems) arrows also made by skilled workers (hence expensive), could beat musketeers.

 

But the musketeers could be trained in weeks, or days at a pinch, their muskets could be made by less specialised workers from materials all of which were widely obtainable, & their ammunition was much easier to both make & transport.

 

Of course, one can make bows from other woods, & one can pull a bow without being up to the standards of the archers at Agincourt. But a less-skilled, less strong archer pulling a lower pull weight bow with less resilience won't have the same range, accuracy, penetrating power or rate of fire - so won't have the same advantages over a musketeer.

Edited November 10, 2015 by swerve

[Roman Alymov]

Its kind of interesting when you think about it, they didnt consider reintroducing Longbows in the Napoleonic war.

Some nomad units or Reus army used bows and arrows in Napoleonic wars with some success (unlike firearms of that time, it was possible to “reload” bow while riding horse in battle)

 

 

Bashkirs are still proud of their role, celebrating events and running reenactments

 

 

http://newskif.su/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1p_7izlF0M.jpg (still, the man sitting with bow seems to be ethnic Russian)

 

Still, bows where not exactly their weapons of choice: they where forbidden by Tsar Gov from owning guns after their participation in Cossack uprisings, so returned to old traditional weapons

[swerve]

Re-introduce longbowmen? Too expensive & would take too long. You wanted accurate fire, you have Baker rifles, & even a top-class rifleman could be made in a fraction of the time to produce a good longbowman. How would you begin? Training bowyers & scouring Europe & beyond for suitable wood, then laying it down to season, while instituting a mass youth training scheme using lighter, cheaper, bows made from inferior wood, in the hope of having a corps of longbowmen & bows for them to use in time for the next war?

 

Mongols or the like could have been hired to make composite bows & train locals, I suppose. But they'd be even more sensitive to wet weather than yew bows. At least with a gun all that had to be kept dry was the powder, not the whole thing. And they'd still have the training issue

[DB]

When the Mary Rose was lifted, many longbow staves were recovered. I seem to recall that they were stuck in barrels, much as you would put walking sticks in a stand.

 

http://www.archers-review.com/images/842.jpg

[Marek Tucan]

Not really sure if you could train average musketeer that quickly actually, as you have to have a lot of practice for the soldier to be able to stand in the ranks and reload as fast as possible. If the training/cost was that much of an issue and longbow would be so effective, it would last longest where the money was... But in practice firearms replaced it quickly.

One issue might even be harder control of longbowmen in the field. They had to be in looser formation, so the benefit of higher rate of fire was outweighed by lower formation density.

[Ivanhoe]

Thats very interesting. And suggests that if you use textiles as the start of the industrial revolution, it was starting to boom even before the traditional start of the industrial revolution in the next century. Particularly if population movement was already underway.

 

Writers and historians love the Big Story, but as demonstrated by the show Connections and many similar tales, Big Stories are almost always a mosaic of Little Stories that aren't big and exciting enough to merit a book or dissertation.

 

Example; powered flight wasn't just about two bicycle mechanics having an epiphany one summer. It was about a whole community of scientists and experimenters, making slow, grinding progress.

 

If you look at the Official Industrial Revolution of the 19C as the offspring of the Enlightenment, and start tracing factors back in time, the IR really began when Rome decided it wanted to conquer the Levant.

 

I was noting on an episode of time team that some of the precursors of the industrial revolution could be seen as far back as Elizabeth 1st Reign, particularly in construction of cannons and extraction of coal. That was one of the things that came home to me reading the novel wolf hall, at how extensive our trading links were with the Continent in that period. I gather that there are a number of buildings on the east coast of Britain that still exist made of bricks similar to those used in the construction of Bruges.

 

No Eurosceptics back then it would appear, or at least not in trade anyway.

Being skeptical of the Euro & Euromarket is quite a bit different from being a free market skeptic. Back in the day, there was all sorts of commerce free from the heavy hand of politicos. As an exemplar, consider the case of Gibson Guitar vs. Fender Guitar. Both use imported tropical wood, same species, same countries, for the same purpoise. Both injecting American dollars into poor countries. One has been raided by gun-toting ninjas, one has not. Under the pretense of giving the Executive branch of the federal gov't the ability to protect rainforest species, we have given the Executive branch of the federal gov't the ability to drive law-abiding small businesses out of business, in pursuit of partisan goals.

 

Anyone not skeptical of government-managed trade is not fully engaged with reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

..

[Panzermann]

Not really sure if you could train average musketeer that quickly actually, as you have to have a lot of practice for the soldier to be able to stand in the ranks and reload as fast as possible. If the training/cost was that much of an issue and longbow would be so effective, it would last longest where the money was... But in practice firearms replaced it quickly.

One issue might even be harder control of longbowmen in the field. They had to be in looser formation, so the benefit of higher rate of fire was outweighed by lower formation density.

Muskets are still quicker to produce than bows. Good iron (or steel) and mediocre quality wood will do. Whereas only select woods can be used for bows and even those will produce lots of rejects.

 

Lead balls can he produced easily in towers. Just let molten lead drip from the top into a water bucket. (zero-g manufacturing ) Black powder is mixing the three ingredients sulfur, coal, saltpeter consistently in the correct mix.

 

Contrast that with how difficult and thus expensive bow making and arrow making is. And produce consistent products.

 

Bowmen had to train from childhood on. And keep training to keep strong enough.

 

A musketeer is okay when he can bite off the paper cartouche and stick it in the barrel and not fumble. Then he has to hold the musket straight and in the direction pointed by the sergeant. Most grown ups should be able to do this. To overcome the lack of accuracy and rate of fire the dense formations and volley fire were developed.

 

And England lacked the funds for bows and bowmen as well, because it invested mostly into the royal navy. So expensive imports of precious yew for bows was out of the question. Importing oak for ships was more important than yew.

[Marek Tucan]

IMO it is not fair to compare longbowmen with Rifles. Rifles were elite infantry (such as some rather good Archer companies), but the rank and file compares more to musketeer. Massed fire at area target.

The "only biting cartridge and loading" consisted of a number of motions that could screw everything up - or at least slow down the loading considerably. To be battle effective, you have the guy doing it all mechanically, without hesitation, under fire... Line infantry was not a mob given hastily muskets and when well trained line infantry encountered hastily armed mob, it usually went one way. Hastily trained troops usually started to spread out already as effect of their own fire... Add few losses and it all falls apart.

 

So while the production of muskets might have been cheaper than that of bows, and same for gunpowder... The firearms were probably more effective (or rather the longbows less effective) than credited

[Marek Tucan]

Horse archer vs. infantry square - not good. Muskets are not slings and pilum, muskets can reach you at range you need to hit the square from horseback.
Horse archer vs. light cavalry - specific, like lancers - but with less hitting power.

 

etc.

 

Arming cavalry with carbines was usually done so that they can act as mounted infantry, whether in primary or secondary function - ie for ambushes or defensive actions. So firing from a saddle was not really an issue.

 

Regarding the battle of Towton, it would seem the main effect of the bows was to deteriorate morale and cohesion of the Lancastrian units, subject to barrage with no chance to return fire - forcing them in the open, but that does not necessarily translate into being too effective at causing losses. Most losses were probably in a close-in combat - and then during the pursuit of broken and fleeing enemy.

[Panzermann]

Mongolian archers trained riding and shooting arrows at the same time from childhood on. Where should Napoleon have taken such experienced riders?

[sunday]

Those were heavy cavalry by another name, not Dragoons, Stuart.

[Daan]

A classic character (Art Alphin) explaining the introduction of firearms in a series of lectures intended for Westpoint cadets:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q23H_eQ8Yd8

 

[toysoldier]

If artillery was already the deal breaker, why not switch the basic weaponry system wholly to barrel and gunpowder? You definitely had to procure large amounts of it for bombards and the like, why bother also with flying pointy sticks?

[Panzermann]

If artillery was already the deal breaker, why not switch the basic weaponry system wholly to barrel and gunpowder? You definitely had to procure large amounts of it for bombards and the like, why bother also with flying pointy sticks?

Good point. The black powder was the same for both mmuskets and artillery.

[Brian Kennedy]

Has anyone ever tried analyzing the effects of (for example) a Brown Bess vs full plate armor? I guess a lot of it would depend on range...

[sunday]

In the pike-and-shot era there were special "strong" pieces of armor that were bulletproof. Bucklers, for instance. At least against arquebus and pistol fire. Against the heavy muskets of the time, perhaps they were less effective.

[Panzermann]

Face hardening was a known process and the better armours were treated. And bullet proof. Actually that is where the expression comes from. Good cuirasses were sold with the dent the proofing shot had left.

 

 

On the other hand there were pistols loaded with arrow shaped projectiles for melee range armour piercing. nothing new under the sun for mounted combat.

[Colin]

Has anyone ever tried analyzing the effects of (for example) a Brown Bess vs full plate armor? I guess a lot of it would depend on range...

the matchlock video shows them punching through a typical Korea/Vietnam era US helemt

[Marek Tucan]

Not in peninsular, though British dragoons fought as real dragoons still at Culloden.

French light cavalry was armed with carbines quite a lot. Came in handy for counter-partisan operations for sure.

[sunday]

 

Not in peninsular, though British dragoons fought as real dragoons still at Culloden.

 

French light cavalry was armed with carbines quite a lot. Came in handy for counter-partisan operations for sure.

 

Hmm, interesting point, Id not read that. Did Marlborough use them that way on the Continent?

 

Did the French actually dismount to perform as infantry though?

 

 

According to wikipedia, he did at Blenheim:

 

 

 

Marlborough now had to turn his attention from the fleeing enemy to direct Churchill to detach more infantry to storm Blenheim. Orkney's infantry, Hamilton's English brigade and St Paul's Hanoverians moved across the trampled wheat to the cottages. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting gradually forced the French towards the village centre, in and around the walled churchyard which had been prepared for defence. Hay and Ross's dismounted dragoons were also sent, but suffered under a counter-charge delivered by the regiments of Artois and Provence under command of Colonel de la Silvière. Colonel Belville's Hanoverians were fed into the battle to steady the resolve of the dragoons, and once more went to the attack. The Allied progress was slow and hard, and like the defenders, they suffered many casualties.[83]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blenheim#Fall_of_Blenheim

[Panzermann]

To steer this back into the UK:

 

Callmedave must have it comfy and cozy in Number 10:

 

David Cameron hasnt the

faintest idea how deep his cuts

go. This letter proves it (Guardian)

 

...

In leaked correspondence with the Conservative leader

of Oxfordshire county council (which covers his own constituency), David Cameron expresses his horror at the cuts being made to local services. This is the point at which you realise that he has no conception of what he has done.

...

Answering Cameron complaining the cuts in services:

 

Explaining the issue gently, as if to a slow learner, the council leader, Ian Hudspeth, points out that the council has already culled its back-office functions, slashing 40% of its most senior staff and 2,800 jobs in total, with the result that it now spends less on these roles than most other counties. He explains that he has already flogged all the property he can lay hands on, but would like to remind the prime minister that using the income from these sales to pay for the councils running costs is neither legal, nor sustainable in the long-term since they are one-off receipts.

 

Detached from the ground and sitting on cloud nine. Not that other countrie's politicians had more grounding...

[Roman Alymov]

Nice picture http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/12010438/Britain-calls-in-French-to-hunt-Russian-sub-lurking-off-Scotland.html