I just started reading (well, listening on my long and boring commute) to On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman, while not really an historical book, early on there is a quote:
The longbow would still have been used in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing effectiveness was all that mattered, since both the longbow’s firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of a smoothbore musket. But a frightened man, thinking with his midbrain and going “ploink, ploink, ploink” with a bow, doesn’t stand a chance against an equally frightened man going “BANG! BANG!” with a musket.
I was always under the impression that the problem with longbows was that a bowman needed to start training as a young child and make bowmanship his life priority. So while more effective as an individual weapon than the continental crossbow, the crossbow was ultimately cheaper to field. Later, muskets even more so, and later still rifles even more than that, to the point that a few weeks basic training could make an effective riflemen.
I have not really been able to find much on this quote on the net, so I thought I would ask for an AskHistorians opinion on it, within the historical context of course.
I've talked before a bit about the decline of the longbow in 16th century england. In short, the idea that firearms were seen as a cheap and easy to use alternative to bows at the time is almost the complete opposite of true. Yew longbows were still fairly cheap, plentiful, and already very familiar to most of the population while matchlock firearms were expensive and still relatively foreign. And while practice arrows were reuse-able, someone might need to spend a lot of money on powder simply learning how to shoot well in the first place.
The subject of accuracy specifically didn't come up as often as you might expect. Sir John Smythe, probably the longbow's strongest proponent, thought that the longbow could be more accurate while Humphrey Barwick thought that even in the hands of experts firearms were more accurate, and that any captain with experience would agree with him. It was almost universally accepted that firearms had far more range and power overall though, the musket was considered deadly at up to 600 yards and the arquebus at up to 400 yards, while few archers were considered effective beyond 200 yards except with very light arrows. Arguments for combining the longbow with modern pike and shot tactics tended to more often involve archers quickly closing the distance to take advantage of their higher rate of fire at close range or else archers being positioned to shoot over the heads of friendly pikemen or musketmen.
There is a pretty strong argument to be made that fear and confusion on the battlefield had a pretty big effect on the weapons' actual effectiveness during the early modern period (though any claims that most soldiers would miss on purpose because they didn't want to kill are far more controversial). I've written before about musket accuracy and the drastic difference between the theoretical performance of the weapon and performance on the battlefield. There are some some hints that archers may have suffered from a similar effect, at least on battlefields where muskets and cannon were also present. Barwick claimed that when the enemy got to close, he frequently saw archers start forgetting to draw their all the way to the arrowhead and instead shooting these weak, half-drawn arrows into the air at random as quickly as they could. It's really hard to know for certain though, prior to the 18th and 19th centuries or so it becomes really hard to find instances where someone thought to count up the total number of dead and wounded after a battle and compare that to records of the amount of ammunition expended.