I am reading about Henry's campaign in France along the Somme on the way to Agincourt, and there's a mention that the English and French armies "faced each other at about a mile distance, though several chronicles suggest they were closer." A note says that a French chronicler "makes it four bowshots." How far, in terms of the measurement, was a bowshot?
I know enough about bows to understand draw weights, etc., and I'm not asking how far a bow could shoot, but rather what distance was implied by the term.
Thanks!
Well, take a bow, shoot it and where it lands is your bowshot. If you want to say that various bows have various ranges and it also depends on the skill of the shooter and wind and isn't very precise measurement, then congratulations! Welcome to the wonderful world of medieval distances.
Various chronicles and measurements are notorious for being variable - there's not even one set pound during middle ages, one Reichsmark can be weight or number of coin (and not the same weight and not the same number) etc etc.
To get the estimate what that particular bowshot means, you need to realize that accounts in the chronicles were descriptive rather than prescriptive - when someone says that this sword is a longsword, they mean it's a sword longer than normal, not that it's a particular type of sword.
Therefore, take the maximum range of bow of that era - around 250 meters/yards for indirect fore which we know English were pretty good at - and go with that unless you find something that strongly disagrees with the measurement. Be warned, though, there are some examples of the same guy using the same measurement in different way in the same book!
For your Agincourt account, it makes the distance to 1 km, or a bit more than 2/3 of a mile, which seems to agree with the account, especially if you consider that the people writing the accounts didn't exactly have laser range finders.
For the record, it's pretty unlikely that bowshot would refer to maximum range where you can accurately pick individual targets (about 70 m) or effective armor-penetrating range (who the hell knows, but under 70 meters), since this is military campaign, the chronicler is likely to write in the context of military archery. Were this a hunt, it could well be that bowshot is the 70 meters sniping one.