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. This would have resulted in less firepower than the English mass armies, but far more than the crossbows they used instead (indeed, since the principal advantage of the longbow over the crossbow was rate of fire, it would have been even more important to take advantage of in an army with a relative shortage of archers)<p>Alternate hypothesis: the French lacked the experience of the English&#x2F;Welsh in making longbows and training people to use them, so struggled to see any evidence of superiority when experimenting with longbows over the crossbow technology they were more familiar with. A local maximum.<p>And the posited relationship between (in)stability and training regimes for the wider population looks more plausible flipped on its head: the less stable English kings paid less attention to the promotion of archery than Edward III not because they hoped laxity in training would result in any peasant armies raised against them being worse shots, but simply because they had more important things to worry about than archers.