That blog post was written by someone who views themselves as very educated on a topic they don't seem to have read much about. He starts off relatively alright- myth of longbow archers as super soldiers, pointing out the relatively similar composition of French and English armies- then becomes so determined to tear down old mythology that he created entirely new mythologies. That book he's complaining about seems to be pretty shit, but one shitty pop history book isn't representative of the scholarship available on the longbow.

I'm going to focus primarily on his description of Agincourt, because that's where he's most egregiously wrong. He claims that "Once the cavalry van was defeated there is no indication that longbow fire contributed at all in defeating the enemy." This is a pretty absurd point and one that not a single primary or secondary source would bear out. I think one of the problems here is that the author seems to think that the purpose of archery was to cause direct casualties and stop an advance outright. This isn't the case at all. His claim that "the longbow’s failure was in meeting the threat of the dismounted attack" only makes sense if you suppose that the purpose of the archers was to stop the dismounted attack. This couldn't be farther from the truth. The purpose of massed archery fire was to disrupt and slow down the dismounted attack, so that the disordered French could be picked apart by the English men-at-arms. That's what combined arms is all about. Saying that the archers were useless because they didn't "stop the dismounted attack" is like saying modern infantry is useless because artillery and air support cause more casualties. It's sort of a true statement if you squint, but it's comparing apples to oranges. Different units have different roles, and ideally work together to support each other. This is exactly what happened at Agincourt.

His point about the archers running out of arrows is confusing and strange. Running out of arrows "would have been a clear indication that the archery fire was unable to influence the course of the foot battle?" How does that follow, exactly? The archers joined in the hand-to-hand fighting because 1) a bow is kind of useless when a Frenchman is swinging an axe directly at you and 2) that was their job. The archers frequently dropped their bows to support the men-at-arms in the melee. How does joining in the melee prove that archery is useless on the battlefield? Are bullets useless because soldiers sometimes also use bayonets? If archers were so useless, why were so many of them hired for the HYW? Why did kings get so involved with maintaining archery supplies, working with bowyer's and fletchers guilds to set prices, and haul thousands of these troops to France over and over again if they were as useless as this author says? That book he's complaining about sounds pretty awful. But the solution to that would be to read actual academic work on the HYW, rather than scan through a few primary sources and write a blog post showing that he really doesn't have the first clue about the subject.

Minor historiographical note: I find it amusing that he attributes the longbow mythology to "Marxists" rather than English nationalist myth-making. Again, it shows that the author is entirely unfamiliar with even the most basic scholarship on the subject.

I have many times been on this subreddit, but this was my first post. To have so many well thought out answers that precisely answers my question is almost making me squel in happyness!

On the other hand, While the role and effectivness of the archers are thoroughly answered, the crossbowmen seems a bit misrepresented. I assume the role of the crossbowmen would be similar, but what about their effectiveness? And how come the archers were paid less than the crossbowmen in the english army? It takes more training to use the longbow than it takes to use the crossbow, after all.