I apologize in advance if this has been covered before but I did not find any other posts pertaining to this topic. More importantly, I have been reading a lot of contradicting information comparing the English longbow and the Mongol composite recurve bow online, so I want to get this straight.
Other than the English longbow being for infantry and the Mongol recurve bow being for cavalry, how would the bows pull strength in pounds, or range of the bows compare? Total range? Accurate range?
There's nothing special about the longbow. Nothing. As a wooden stick with a string on it, it's as simple a bow you can make. There are bows from 7000BC which are made with a more advanced design and shoot better than the longbow.
What made the English longbow successful were the men wielding it. They had a culture of archery, laws requiring males over 15 years old to own a longbow and arrows and eventually mandatory practice after church. This meant that when they needed military archers they had a large population of people who already had years of experience with a bow. This gave them a distinct edge over other European nations who would have had to make do with giving recruits only a rudimentary training or using crossbows (low rate of fire).
How did the Mongols compare to the English? Well the Mongols were no slouches either, they learned to use a bow as infants and practically lived their lives with a bow at their side. Everyone was impressed by the Mongols' archery and that makes sense. The average Mongol would have more experience shooting a bow than most elite archers from sedentary civilizations they came across.
Specifically we know English longbows were anywhere between 100-180lbs based on longbows excavated from the Mary Rose wreck. Mongols are said to have had 166 pound bows. There's some doubt about this figure as it's merely mentioned in passing in the 'Secret History of the Mongols' which was basically a history book the Mongols wrote about themselves. However since there are records of Chinese military archery exams involving 160~170 pound bows I feel it's entirely plausible.
In any case, how heavy the draw weight of the bow was depended on the archer, not the bow design. It's not particularly difficult to make a 200lb bow, finding people to draw it is the tricky part.
The design of the bows though means composite recurves shoot with about 30% more energy than an equivalent draw weight longbow. This means they can shoot farther and hit harder. Accurate range is really more dependent on the archer again, both bows are plenty accurate, it's human error that will throw a shot off.
And finally when people talk about Mongol v English archer scenarios it's important to consider the scales of conflict they were involved in. At Crecy the English had about five thousand archers. The Mongols went into battle with tens or even over a hundred thousand horse archers..