What is the effective range of a longbow?
A. It depends what you mean by `effective’. I believe that the longest flight distance that has ever been recorded for a traditional English longbow is about 300 yards. In practice, most top quality longbows will shoot about 180 yards easily enough (which, not coincidentally, is the standard distance for `clout’ archery). In medieval times, archers regularly trained at distances over 200 yards. Whether you could hit any kind of target at that distance is a different matter. The first problem is that you’re going to be aiming the bow above your head, so you’ve got absolutely nothing to use as a sighting reference. Then you have to deal with the effect of `Archer’s paradox’, which is substantial at such a distance. Finally, the relatively slow speed of longbow arrows makes them very prone to wind deflection. I think that, in general, the greatest distance at which you could use a longbow for hunting (even if it were legal in the UK, which it isn’t) would be about 20 yards, and even that
