vagabundo said:
I just picked those out of my hat to be honest.
Nothing wrong with that. Your hat just picked something that looked more like 'professional mercenaries'.
Actually, my second thoughts on my choices make me feel axes are a little out of character. The axe stopped being a major military weapon in the early middle ages, though rural villagers would have had a non-military axe around the house as a last resort type weapon. More than likely if we are dealing with a government backed militia, by the time crossbows appear we'd be looking at morning stars as the melee weapon of choice.
Although I suspect Bows might be easier to fashion than crossbows and it is not that hard to learn archery.
Bows are easier to fashion than crossbows, but they are nowhere near as easy to use - I speak from experience here. You can train someone on a crossbow in a few days. Effectively using even a shortbow would require months. It's been said that the only longbowmen and slingers that were any good were those raised on the weapons from birth. So if you wanted to field longbowmen, Wales/England was pretty much your only choice, and if you wanted to field slingers in any quantity you pretty much had to be able to levy troops from Sicily or Judea.
It's always annoyed me how 'sling' is considered a 'simple weapon' in 3E. In fairness, both 'sling' and 'longbow' should be exotic weapons.
But really, I'm being a bit picky when I criticize your choice of shortbow. In a truly rural setting, there is going to be a hunting culture from which to levy archers and its reasonable to claim that applies here. This is actually a resource for your average medieval kingdom, in that the only way to get a large number of quality archers was to levy them from forested areas. This is why England is so powerful in the middle ages, because as the only large medieval kingdom with a large number of freemen, it also has the only large number of citizens who come from a hunting culture (serfs are not allowed to hunt, that right being preserved for the local Lord). So at something like Agincourt, England is leveraging its advantage in free citizenry in much the same way that in the 18th century 'the Colonies' leverage thier advantage in a hunting rifle-centric culture to kick out the English.
I've only really gotten interested in how people lived in the last few years, since I have started my own vegetable patch and seen what can grow in such a small area.
Around 2-3 hundred years ago in Ireland whole families lived off of very very small patches of ground, before the famine there was 6-8 million people on this island. So many died and emigrated that it will be a long time before we reach that number again.
Scot-Irish myself. Pretty much the entire southern United States was settle by Scot-Irish immigrants fleeing either the English or the famine or both. Interestingly, there is a significant parallel between how the English settled Northern United States views Southern culture, and how the English view Irish culture. But that's a discussion for a different blog.
