I recomment reading Bernard Cornwell's book Agincourt.<p>It has some very interesting (and gruesome) reconstructions of battles with English longbowmen - from the point-of-view of the longbowmen.<p>In the actual battle of Agincourt [1], ~5,000 archers and ~1,000 men-at-arms took on ~20-30,000 French infantry.<p>As the ~5,000 archers could fire ~12 arrows a minute, with 72-100 arrows each, the French would have had 360,000-500,000 arrows hit their lines during the battle - 10 to 20 for each Frenchman.<p>The article talks about the impossibility of shooting 10-12 arrows-per-minute, however it doesn't talk about how the English trained from childhood to fire a longbow - in fact, it was written into law for hundreds of years.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt</a>