Quote:Friggen amazing!
Now how about the old yarn that the English longbowmen could get 5 arrows up in the air at the same time?
That's actually trivial, if what you're attempting is specifically "getting a lot of arrows into the air at the same time".
I and a couple of my friends had a nasty (and somewhat dumb, it must be said) trick that we would pull during battle re-enactments, which is an illustration of this...
When you're taking part in a big battle re-creation, the archers of each army (each typically commanded by a Captain of Archers, which is a fun job) will generally arrange themselves in lines. Shooting towards the "enemy" is done using hard rubber blunts at a distance which varies considerably but might typically be around 100 yards. The blunts have to be fairly hard to prevent injury from the shaft of the arrow penetrating the tip on impact. (Fowling blunts - padded leather, more often than not - are used at much shorter range, are much heavier and don't fly particularly steadily so they wouldn't be suitable.) The point here is that those "safety" blunts
hurt if they're travelling at speed.
Anyway, the archers shoot on command ("Knock! Draw! Loose!") and loft the arrows up high. This has two effects: one is to give a great crowd-pleasing cloud of arrows for the watching members of the public; the other is that the Captains of Archers can take it in turn to volley and make sure everyone in their bloc (all wearing helms of one sort or another) can get their eyes down so they don't catch an arrow to the face.
That's the theory.
Of course, if a few of you have much more powerful bows than those typically used in re-enactment - say, um, 120lb+ instead of 40lbs - then you can aim more vertically and send the arrows much, much higher... which means they fall many seconds later than everyone else's, even though you all shot at command. Which means you can bag yourself an enemy Captain of Archers as he's no longer paying attention; and he has to fall over 'cos the whole crowd is watching, and nobody knows it was you, because you were careful to shoot at the same time as everyone else ('stragglers' are generally evicted from the battlefield if it looks like it was on purpose).
Like I say, it was dumb; I'm going with the 'young and stupid' explanation.
But yes; I've never specifically tried getting as many arrows in the air as possible, but if all I care about is getting enough height to put the next arrow up, and the next, and the next, and aren't also trying to hit something... I'm certain I could beat five.