GPLP: Cursed Crusade

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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Terminus » 26 May 2013, 14:27

True, but as I understood it, there's only one day of SS left...
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby ocelotteranian » 10 Jun 2013, 17:40

Okay, so, this is way after the fact, but! I'm just now watching the Cursed Crusade GPLP all the way through. >.< I'm not sure if Brad reads the forums, but I have a medievalist question for him if he does!

In part 9, Brad mentions that continental European iron (and consequentially armor) was much better than British armor in the Middle Ages. I'm curious if that might be why you usually hear about *archers* as the main pride of the English army in the Hundred Years War—since they'd wear less armor and rely on non-iron weaponry?

(If this was addressed somewhere in the last 17 pages of discussion, apologies if I missed it. I just sort of skimmed rather than really reading each page.)
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 11 Jun 2013, 11:19

I don't know about armour, but I do know a bit about archery; as I have understood it, bows were very cheap and effective weapons for common soldiers, but were discredited by many nobles as being unsporting/unknightly and were sometimes unused in battle for reasons of honour. The main reason they weren't used by a lot of armies, however, was that they were very difficult to use; a full-sized English longbow had a very high draw weight in the region of 300-900N, so you had to be strong and practiced to use one properly. This meant that, if one's soldiers weren't trained in using them, bows were next to useless. Across the continent, and particularly in France, a common approach was to arm soldiers with crossbows instead (easier to use and more powerful but far more cumbersome and slow to reload; a good longbowman could get off between 6 and 20 shots per minute compared to a crossbowman's 1). However, in England and Wales they got very good at making them and they were commonly used for hunting in the then-bountiful forests, so the skill was maintained.

The reason bows became significant during the Hundred Years war is pretty much solely due to Agincourt, when they suited the tactics of the battlefield perfectly. Before the battle it had rained heavily, so the English bowmen took their strings off to keep them dry. The French crossbowmen, however, continued to take pot shots and were rendered fairly useless by the wet string. Anyway, as the field dried out, the English found themselves protected by forest on both sides, and facing a muddy bog of a field ahead of them. The French decided for a full-on cavalry charge, basically because it was the noble way of doing things (the English made a similar mistake re. pikemen at Bannockburn several centuries later), and proceeded to get utterly bogged down in the wet mud whilst waves of arrows went flying into them. This caused panic amongst the French ranks and left their attack disorganised against a strong English defensive position, and their army was routed. It was a significant victory, decisively won by the bow, but it only really worked because of a string of lucky coincidences; not only had the weather negated the French cavalry, the usual weapon used against archers, but it had also given the English time to set up their defensive position. At Patay in 1429, the cavalry got there first and routed the lot of them before they managed to set up and start shooting.

Nonetheless, Agincourt made for a great story back home and demonstrated the advantage that could be gleaned from England's plentiful supply of good bowmen. To maintain this, the king later issued a dictum requiring all males over the age of eighteen to undertake two hours archery practice a day (or something along those lines), which is technically still part of British law. It didn't help; not only did the Welsh master archery just as well as the English, meaning they won the only really notable archer-on-archer battle in western history during Owain Glyndwr's uprising in the early 1400s, but when Jean d'Arc managed to keep the Hundred Years War alive before her capture by the Burgundians, she gave the French time to master the burgeoning technology of munitions. At Castillon, the battle that generally signalled that the English had decidedly lost the war, the English played pretty much exactly the same play the French had at Agincourt except without the weather, advancing full force into a strong defensive position whilst being annihilated by the French guns. The army was routed, and the English realised that their mastery of the bow had been superceded somewhat.

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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby iamafish » 11 Jun 2013, 11:38

As an addendum to that, the Battle of Crecy, which was early in the war (1346), was also won by Longbowmen, but I think that was because the French cavalry charge was poorly organised and into a well defended English position, much like Agincourt.

In answer to your question, generally, English knights were inferior to their continental counterparts, partially because of inferior armour, and because there was less of a tradition of horse-breeding and cavalry warfare in England, especially prior to the Norman Invasion. There are probably other factors at work, but I'm not really an expert on later medieval warfare.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 11 Jun 2013, 11:41

The Welsh, for some reason, had a reputation as good horse-breeders, but never really got into cavalry; perhaps for reasons of terrain (cavalry warfare in the black mountains would be... interesting). As far as I remember, you're right about Crecy, but it's got less cultural clout than Agincourt because 1. It occurred afterwards, 2. The English weren't quite so heavily outnumbered and 3. Shakespeare didn't write a play about it
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby ocelotteranian » 11 Jun 2013, 16:10

Wow! Ix, you're a fountain of knowledge! I'm a budding medievalist but my expertise tends towards religion and language, so this is a lot of fascinating new info for me. Your reasoning re: the English proficiency and notoriety in archery seems much more sound than my armor guess.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 13 Jun 2013, 08:42

I just have a total inability to forget useless information :)
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby General Michi » 30 Jun 2013, 15:27

Just finished watching this. That ending. I can't describe my emotions. A+. Would recommend.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby CaptainSpam » 30 Jun 2013, 16:42

General Michi wrote:Just finished watching this. That ending. I can't describe my emotions. A+. Would recommend.


...would recommend the GPLP, I'm really, really, seriously hoping? :-)
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby General Michi » 30 Jun 2013, 20:32

. . . sure

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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Trisha Lynn » 27 Jul 2013, 11:13

Also just finished watching this for the first time and I really, really, really can't thank Graham, Paul, and Brad enough for playing through this game so that I don't have to. Not that this type of game is normally my thing, but if I were ever tempted, I now know not to give into that temptation.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Hepheastus » 20 Aug 2013, 05:51

iamafish wrote:As an addendum to that, the Battle of Crecy, which was early in the war (1346), was also won by Longbowmen, but I think that was because the French cavalry charge was poorly organised and into a well defended English position, much like Agincourt.

In answer to your question, generally, English knights were inferior to their continental counterparts, partially because of inferior armour, and because there was less of a tradition of horse-breeding and cavalry warfare in England, especially prior to the Norman Invasion. There are probably other factors at work, but I'm not really an expert on later medieval warfare.


Because I'm English and I love rubbing in a good victory, there were actually three great English Victories during the Hundred years War, Crecy in 1346, Agincourt in 1415 and Poitiers in 1348. Like the other two battles the French charged a well defended archery line, but this time it was because the English tricked the French into thinking they were about to retreat. The Battle was notable for the capture of not only the French King, but also the crown Prince
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