Mike Loades, if I recall correctly, first proposed this idea in The Longbow, one of his first books for Osprey Publishing. The book as a whole is a very sober, grounded look at a weapon and profession that has a large number of myths associated with it, and his theory that medieval archers mostly shot at short range on comparatively flat trajectories has found some purchase in academic circles. Tobias Capwell, for example, suggests that the English archers at Agincourt shot on this relatively flat arc in the famous Medieval Myth Busting series of videos produced by the wonderful Tod Todeschini.

As in the video, one of the main pillars of Mike's argument in the book was how archery is portray in medieval artwork. He's always been certain that archers are never shown shooting in a field battle at an angle, but there are several issues with this. Firstly, medieval art is not photorealistic, and may show one side shooting flat while the second side is shooting at an angle or archers shooting at a flat angle while the arrows descend at an angle. For another, Mike's contention that medieval artwork never shows archers shooting flat isn't particularly correct and there are some showing archers shooting at an angle.

Images of archers shooting at an angle in a battle might not be as common as them shooting flat, but that does not mean that these are actually accurate depictions of battle. You have, for example, instances where archers are shooting flat across a mile of water or shot at each other on a downward angle. The thing that needs to be kept in mind is that medieval art required the use of many forms of visual shorthand in order to compress a battle that occurred over several thousand square yards into a few dozen square inches - if that! - and artists were often less interested in absolute accuracy than in conveying intended meaning. While it's its own topic, a comparative example is the depiction of plate armour. Despite written evidence showing English knights and men-at-arms wearing quite full sets of plate from the 1330s on, English artwork frequently ignores this development well into the 1370s and 1380s.

Another piece of evidence used by Loades, which doesn't make it into the video, is the battle of Crecy and some tests he performed with a crossbow. These tests revealed that, after 80 yards, the crossbow bolt had lost so much energy that it would be ineffective. When Loades factored in Geoffrey le Baker's account of the Genoese crossbowmens' shots falling short of the English, he came up with a picture of very short range shooting from both parties.

Discussion of his results are partially complicated by a lack of data on the crossbow he used (beyond the draw weight, which was 300lbs) and what if any testing was done for the maximum range of the crossbow he used. I suspect that the crossbow he used had a steel lath, since these are far more common and cheaper than composite laths, which very few people can even attempt to make these days. This is important because the premier maker of replica steel crossbows believes that they had a draw length of 4-6" in general. This draw length - which others might call a power stroke, aka the distance the strong travels from the lock to it's strung position as opposed to the distance between the lath and the lock - is much shorter than approximations of a similarly powerful composite or wooden lath crossbow. This means that these will be more efficient and impart more velocity and energy into their bolts than a steel lath crossbow and offer a longer effective range.

Both crossbows also have a similar maximum range to what could be expected from a medieval longbow, but without data on the drag characteristics of Loades' test quarrel or the maximum range it could achieve it's hard to compare the performance of his crossbow to other examples that are more accurate to the crossbows of 1346.

His more recent suggestion, as in the video, that arrows lose too much energy over distance to be as effective at maximum range as at ranges of 50 yards or less, may also lack some nuance. Mark Stretton carried out some empirical tests a few years back which found that arrows had similarly penetrative abilities at both 40 and 200 yards and that the ability of arrows to penetrate his target medium varied considerably, based on the angle they were shot and how much time they had to regather energy on the descent. The penetrative potential between 160 and 180 yards might be barely more than half of that at 5 yards, but there's still going to be substantial energy and danger to areas protected only by mail or arming garments even at those distances.

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