Editing Bows and Arrows (section)

== The Decline ==
Bows have two major issues that make their use on the battle field problematic: training time and user fatigue. Compared to a crossbow or a firearm, bows require years and years of practice to become really, really good at, and to build up the endurance to perform the difficult feat of pulling back a high-tension wire, holding it to aim, and letting go over and over again. There is an old English proverb which goes; "To train a longbowman start with his grandfather." The best archers in human history were the English Yeoman, the Japanese Samurai, Ottoman Janissaries and Mongol Horse archers: entire social classes full of hard-training men. In fact, we can go into any English graveyard and figure out who the longbowmen were just by looking at the left arms on the skeletons. Conversely, crossbows and guns are easy to train with and don't necessarily wear you out as quickly. If you can field more men than your enemy, it gives you a pretty massive advantage. (For added hilarity, anything more than minimal training on early musketeers was a waste of time, because the first generation of guns would wander off-target no matter how carefully you aimed; instead of training ''better'' gunners, you were better served training ''even more'' gunners).

Once stronger crossbows, more reliable firearms, and better reloading mechanisms and manufacturing methods for both became commonplace, the longbow faded from martial prominence, like the [[sword]] before it.

The bow held out a while longer in England and Japan, the two great strongholds of archery. The English stopped using the bow around 17th century when gunpowder finally could be relied to work in humid conditions on campaign. It was the reforms of the English Civil War that ultimately did in the bow in England. The New Model Army of Parliament opted for an entirely pike & shot formation, as the few archer companies were generally Royalists. After the defeats the Royalists took at Edgehill and Marston Moor, training skilled archers to replace their losses wasn't practical and so they too opted for pike & shot (and got crushed a year later at Naseby). The last fielding of an archer company in Britain is said to have been by a force of Royalist Highlanders fighting against the Covenanters at Tippermuir in 1644.

In Japan bows and guns coexisted for several centuries (the earliest guns arriving in the 1500's) as tradition, feudalism, and technical limitations kept the Japanese [[Firearm|tanegashimas]] from becoming a hunting tool like it did in the west. This held back the decline of archery as a skill and kept them relevant longer than in the west. Bows didn't completely disappear from Japanese battlefields until the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, the last and largest Samurai rebellion of the Meiji revolution, in which the last samurai rebels got cut down by breechloader rifles and gatling guns.

Tribes in the American plains kept bows alive long after muskets were regularly available. The Comanche used bows for buffalo hunting until 1878, when there no more buffalo to hunt.

The occasional general got it in his head to revive the longbow tradition as [https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-22-02-0207 late as 1776], but it never gained any traction. Hilariously and awesomely, though, Lt. Col. [[wikipedia:Jack Churchill|Jack Churchill]] went armed with a longbow to France in 1940. Alas, despite rumors that he managed to shoot down at least one German during the war, his bow was wrecked by a truck early into the campaign.