So that’s the general idea, vastly oversimplified, for what I want to talk about. Now let’s get specific. Studying medieval weaponry is a little bit different than working with modern technologies because it is very rare for the surviving archaeological record to align with the available textual evidence. We can’t study the crossbows that Richard I brought with him on the Third Crusade or those used by the Genoese at Crécy. Instead, we have a seemingly random assortment of weapons that mostly survive from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, often completely separated from their original context. Sometimes we can link a specific weapon to a specific person, such as the crossbow of King Matthias Corvinus now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but these are usually highly decorated sporting weapons owned by kings and members of the noble elite – they provide some insight for sure, but they are hardly a suitable stand-in for the technology of the period as a whole. And even in these cases, the association of these weapons with their historic owners is derived from details on the weapons themselves – a coat of arms for example – rather than through a specific textual reference to the weapon in the historical record.

This separation in the available evidence has created something of a separation the study of the crossbow. The technical study of surviving crossbows is usually done by archaeologists, engineers, and museum curators while the contextual study is usually left to historians. I don’t want to suggest that these two groups don’t collaborate, or that there is some impermeable barrier between the two areas, but individual backgrounds tend to inform the approach they take to the subject. Plus, the fact that the archaeological and textual records are entirely divided makes it easier to specialise in just one – you don’t necessarily need to be an expert in fifteenth-century French warfare to produce an in-depth study of surviving fifteenth-century French crossbows.

Let’s talk about me for a second. My initial training was as a historian, but my PhD supervisor was an archaeologist (albeit one in a history department as my university had no archaeology department). My PhD research focused on studying surviving examples of crossbows to analyse their overall design to (hopefully) determine whether there were patterns or shared styles in how crossbows were built, or if the available evidence suggested wild variation in crossbow types. This kind of makes me an archaeologist, but since very little of my research involved items that had been dug out of the earth (surviving medieval crossbows have almost entirely survived in private collections and museums) and I’ve never actually been to a dig site, I’m not sure if I count. What separated my research from earlier research was mostly scale – I used far more crossbows than most people had before. However, in focusing on the dimensions of the crossbow and discussing its construction I was engaging with a well-established strand of crossbow scholarship (arguably the dominant form), that remains extremely* popular – especially among German and other central European crossbow researchers. With my initial background in history, I hoped to bring in more contextual discussion into my technical study of the crossbow than others had before. However, the needs of the PhD meant that the data ended up taking priority over the context since it was the data that was brand new, and PhDs are usually hyper focused on providing new information rather than on synthesis work.

You can read my entire PhD online should you be of the masochist inclination, but as a summary of my work I measured the dimensions of around a dozen crossbows and collected measurements (usually published in museum catalogues) of another forty plus examples ranging from the fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries. I then put together charts, often box plots, comparing things like bow length, stock size, draw distance, weight, etc. to try and determine how much variation there was in crossbow design during a given time period (and where possible, across geographic region). It was interesting work, although somewhat limited by the quality of the data I had access to. It was the kind of project that would have benefited from me having a lifetime to do it and an unlimited budget. It was also very much a technical study.

Fast forward a few years to my attempts to write a book. What I wanted to do was to write the kind of book that would have helped me immensely when I was first starting out on researching the history of the crossbow. What I’d found in my PhD was that while there was, and continues to be, excellent research being done on the technical aspect of the crossbow, the contextual work has been somewhat lacking and often undertaken by people who aren’t very familiar with the technical evidence. What I wanted to do was to re-evaluate the context of how the crossbow was used by medieval people, primarily in war but also recreationally.

I want to take a short aside to discuss the one major area in which the technical and contextual aspects of the history of the crossbow frequently overlap, and that is in debates about how effective the crossbow was in comparison to the longbow. Essentially, these debates attempt to explain the remarkable military success of the English between the years 1346 and 1422, a period in which English armies contained very large proportions of soldiers armed with longbows, by drawing a line (sometimes directly, sometimes with detours) between the technical aspects of the longbow and the English victories. The contrast, made most literal in discussions of Crécy where English longbowmen handily defeated Genoese crossbowmen, is then often made between the technical aspects of the crossbow, which seems to have generally been more popular with medieval armies, and the longbow – usually with the goal of emphasising that the unique fondness of the English for the longbow explains their victories. Some forms of this argument are more nuanced, some are far less so, but it is where the technical and contextual aspects of the study of medieval archery overlap the most.

There’s a lot to unpack in this argument, and we’d be here all day were I to do it, but I do want to highlight one fallacy that some types of this discussion tend to fall down. When examining historical technologies, especially weapons, from a modern eye it can be far too tempting to assume that you, a modern person, know more about it and its uses than any historical figure could. After all, we know more about physics, chemistry, etc. than people a thousand years ago did. However, we don’t know more about medieval warfare, and we never can. Historical figures were as rational and clever as we are now (or as irrational and foolish – as a friend once pointed out, it’s a bit rich calling the Middle Ages superstitious when you can buy magic spells on Ebay), they were also experts when it came to living during their own time period. It can be tempting to use our enhanced understanding of the technical functions of a technology to determine their ideal use, but we must remember that people at the time knew far more about these weapons and the business of using them to kill their enemies than we ever can. None of us will ever fight in a medieval battle, we won’t even see one from a distance, so we can’t really judge the full value of a crossbow to someone who’s trying to survive one. The best we can do is use contextual evidence to try and piece together what people at the time thought of these weapons and how they used them to work backwards from the result in an attempt to construct the practice.

What I wanted to do was to try to understand the context of the crossbow not primarily through its technical features nor through an analysis of its performance in comparison to the longbow. I wanted to see how effectively I could approach its context on its own terms by studying battles, campaigns, and events across as much of the Middle Ages as I could to see if I could piece together any themes in how medieval soldiers and armies used it. I also wanted to frame this in the form of an introductory work, a launching off point for future research rather than a magnum opus that tried to be the final word on the subject – I’m not so arrogant as to think that my first major foray into the topic would be the definitive account! To do this I needed to take a contextual approach to the history of the crossbow, one that took accounts of the use of medieval crossbows on their own and tried to separate pre-existing baggage I might associate with certain conflicts as much as possible (something that can be very difficult, and I’m sure I only partially succeeded at). In doing this I found the crossbow to be a much more diverse weapon than the dominant strand of existing scholarship would lead you to believe. Far from being a weapon with a ‘best use’, the crossbow could be used to defend a fortified position against enemy attack – be it a castle or a shield wall – but it was also common to send crossbowmen ahead of medieval armies on the march and for them to act as a rear guard for a withdrawing army. In some battles crossbowmen might even be deployed to do both. I also learned that there are a lot of stories of English kings being shot at and often killed by bows and crossbows, but that’s more of an interesting aside.

In conclusion, technical and contextual approaches to historical technology are both essential for creating a holistic picture of the past. This is not without its challenges, however, as the two types of study tend to favour different backgrounds and types of expertise – something that can be overcome with collaboration, but some subjects are too niche to be blessed with many qualified researchers which can make collaboration challenging. It can also be even more challenging when the available technical evidence does not line up with the available contextual evidence – meaning flawed comparisons patched over with guesswork become somewhat inevitable. That doesn’t mean that this research isn’t worth doing, as long as we are clear on what the flaws in our evidence are and point out when we are guessing and when we are working from a solid basis of evidence. After all, guesswork and comparison are some of the most fun you can have when discussing history down the pub but as with many things are best done in moderation.

Hopefully this post has provided some insight into my own research methods and questions that I’m working through and hopefully that has proved at least a little interesting or insightful.

*Extremely popular may be an exaggeration, this is pretty niche stuff.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATMR5ettHz8&feature=share

Also follow-up, OK Go "This too shall pass" that looked like it involved a military college cooperating.