The English use of longbows was a part of a larger development of infantry with new weapons and tactics to take on heavy cavalry. Please give us some dates and places.Īnd to that you single out longbows, which is incorrect. And then it seems to me that you kind of fall back on the medieval, or rather popular image, or even Disney version, of the medieval, chivalry to explain why it was abadoned and failed.įurthermore I don't know when this "1v1 battles of honor" way of war is supposed to have existed. I find it interesting that you first, correctly, state that chivalry in the Middle Ages isn't the same thing which people in later eras mean by it. I understand the appeal of the whole romantic image of chivalrous knights, but why are people surprised that chivalry is dead, and more importantly, why do they want it back? Any man strictly bound to an inflexible code will always lose to an enemy not bound to said code. Many officers in the 19th century chose pragmatic, but non honorable tactics to win battles. Now I understand a form of chivalry had been revived in the 19th century for nobility and military officers, but this was just essentially imitation, and it was quickly abandoned when expedient. And even romantically, it was actually rare for a knight to actually get to marry a lady he swore to serve. The knights of the late medieval period with their plots of land and oaths of service started to be heavily outclassed economically by merchants, and nobility who served self interest rather than codes of honor. But it doesn't just lead to failure on the battlefield, but in all aspects of life. Binding your self to a strict code of honor started getting knights killed on the battlefield when their enemies stopped engaging in 1 on 1 battles of honor, and started killing them using longbows, and later, firearms. Now granted, the modern perception of chivalry isn't identical to the medieval version its based off of, but the problem with it remains the same, in that chivalry inherently leads to failure. People even today make strange statements about Chivalry being "Dead".isn't this old news, like, over 400 years old? I mean Don Quixote was published in 1605 and one of its points was about how Chivalry was no longer a thing.
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