Medieval Warfare: Warfare In The Middle Ages

Medieval Warfare Ready! Aim! Fire! Warfare in the Middle Ages occurred with little to no guns, but it had a few items in common with the way armies fight now. Instead of guns, the people of the Middle Ages used the bow and arrow to harm the enemy from a distance. The army still had to protect their home, which was usually a castle or a small town. To win a battle, there needed to be a strategy and a formation that the army fought in. Armies needed archers, a good defense, and strategies in order to win any battle in the Middle Ages. In order to win a battle, armies needed archers to shoot the enemy before they charged. The bow and arrow in the Middle Ages was very important to armies. The bow and arrow was not very common at the beginning of the era, because knights found it dishonorable to kill with arrows. The crossbow was one of the first bows but only fired two bolts per minute, so it was replaced by the longbow, which fired 10 to 12 arrows per minute. English soldiers started using the longbow to help with the population disadvantage; they had 3,000 archers, altogether firing 30,000 arrows per minute. Archers were especially helpful when defending a castle. Archers would stand on top of the castle walls firing arrows at the enemy below. Soldiers in the Middle Ages were especially needed to defend the castle. Stone walls (which were fireproof, so the wall would not burn down) were built around castles to make a height advantage for the defenders. Moats and ditches helped add to the height advantage and made it hard for the enemy to get to the wall and break it. Wooden planks, called …show more content…
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