&gt;There&#x27;s another major problem: preventing peasants from being a threat whilst still yielding some benefit from the longbow could easily have been achieved by restricting archery training to nobles and selected privileged guards, who had more time and inclination towards military training than the peasantry anyway.<p>That was pretty small number of people in the middle ages, and they would already have been trained as mounted knights or men-at-arms so retraining them as archers would not be a net gain unless one archer was more valuable than one man-at-arms which I don&#x27;t think is likely.<p>The advantage of the longbow is that once trained, you could raise a large army quite cheaply but that army only worked as part of a combined arms operation that also had armoured infantry and cavalry. That means that you don&#x27;t want to sacrifice the other elements of your army in order to build a longbow capability.