I have a term paper, and am looking for a topic. The question I was hoping to research is "what effect, if any, did the English longbow's adoption in warfare have on non aristocratic society? " but I am having some trouble finding enough primary sources in english, or at least a form of English I can read. I was wondering if any of you knew where to find some primary documents on the subject that were in close to modern English or had been translated into modern english. Thank you for any help you can offer.
Two pretty much brand new secondary sources will get you to primary sources, but there is no guarantee you'll be able to read all the sources themselves unfortunately. The first is David Green's The Hundred Years War: A People's History, (New Haven and London, 2014) and the second is The Soldier in Later Medieval England, eds Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, Andy King, and David Simpkin, (Oxford, 2013).
Alongside this you might want to read, if you haven't already, Peter Coss's The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge, 2003) and maybe start looking for contemporary mythologies which began springing up in the fourteenth-century, such as a certain green-clad maiden-loving do-gooder (and test whether that is an accurate description) who was rather famously good with a longbow.
I assume you've already had a gander at what TNA has available? Just playing around with the search terms a little, I've already found a few digitized files that might be useful to you.
What type of course is this for that requires primary sources from a time that largely used a form of English unreadable to all but English scholars?
Or do you just not understand the distinction between primary and secondary sources?