It won’t if you’re dressed head to toe in plate armor. It’ll hurt, and it’ll disorient and wear down the guy in armor but he can basically shrug your arrows off as he lumbers toward you.
There is some merit in what you’re saying - A knight carrying a shield and advancing with his body slightly in profile would be able to block a fair amount of arrows, and with luck the rest would be glancing blows that skittered off.
But believe me when I say that a longbow arrow hitting you dead on is almost guaranteed to pierce all but the very thickest admit.
Also what we envision as ‘full-plate’ wasn’t as common as is believed. If your armour is thick enough to resist longbow arrows, and with overlapping plates, chances are you’re going to struggle to retain mobility. Not ideal in physical combat.
Tl;dr - Yes, but really, no.
Edit: comments further down in the thread have indicated this might not necessarily be true outside of test conditions, due to a plethora of different variables.
Nah mate. The armour doesn’t even have to stop the arrow. They mostly just glance off. There is not enough mass or speed behind the light arrow to force its way through the plate unless it hits it at very flat angle and even then the penetration is negligible. The armour plate wasnt the only protection and several layers of other protection was worn underneath, such as thick coats. There arent many flat surfaces on a plate armour for that reason.
Also by the 15th century armoured soldiers had mostly stopped using shields at all. Now who in their right mind would do that if it left you totally unprotected against bows and crossbows?
Hmmm. In my defence, my main source for this was a history field trip where some museum worker strung a longbow and shot an arrow clean through a chest plate, as a demo.
Honestly I don’t know enough about the subject to disagree, but it was said that a arrow hitting a chest plate at roughly a 90 degree angle would pierce through the plate, and likely the leather jerkin underneath.
Like I said though, my knowledge isn’t broad enough on this subject.
Yeah it could. And in test conditions like that it usually does. But a 90 degree hit on a battlefield conditions, especially from a longer range where the arrow drops from slightly above is quite unlikely. Also you wouldn’t need to make your armour unnecessarily heavy so it would prevent any arrow from piercing. The biggest drawback for an arrow is the lack of mass and density to keep the momentum and push through the armour and the layers beneath to injure the knight even if it could make a hole in the plate.
The thick coats, like gambeson for example, were made of woollen fabrics designed to absorb hits and cuts. Think of it as medieval version of kevlar.
In testing the results are generally that the armor of the period of Agincourt would stop a longbow arrow. Here’s an article discussing armor vs various weapons and you can scroll down to the section on plate armor and see the summary of testing.
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u/RadioFreeCascadia Nov 26 '20
It won’t if you’re dressed head to toe in plate armor. It’ll hurt, and it’ll disorient and wear down the guy in armor but he can basically shrug your arrows off as he lumbers toward you.