[Agema]

It's also acceptable to use "fire" with respect to bows in the Oxford English Dictionary and Chambers Dictionary (two of the three most-used British dictionaries) and, I think, Merriam-Webster.

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I don't support the "because they were cheap" argument for one main reason: I don't think it adequately explains the adoption of massed bowfire as a tactic itself. I think that requires military commanders seeing how a weapon can be used and adapting to it. In the ancient and medieval eras, massed bowfire was common in Eastern militaries, but the further west into Europe you got, the more the ethos was melee: archery was generally about softening up or harassing an opponent prior to the real action. That the English used such mass deployment of archers suggests a tactical doctrine at variance with not just their own history, but the prevailing cultural habits of Western Europe. Thus they would have to have weapon to make that doctrinal change viable.

This is why I suggest the English longbow is a "battle winner" - it was a weapon you could heavily base your army on, not that it meant proper scouting, logistics, good morale, disciplined troops and decent generalship became less necessary. It could fulfill this role because weaker bows could not fire an arrow far enough and or with enough penetration, whereas crossbows that had the range and power fired too slowly. Yes, I think it *was* a superb weapon; the many victories accomplished with it should be some testament to its effectiveness.

Strong bows with huge draw weights are indeed worldwide. However, that doesn't mean it's easy and anyone plucked from the general populace could do it without practice: they would largely have been specialised hunters and the like. Producing tens of thousands of such archers available for warfare is a different matter. Longbows vary, well, yes this has been agreed. In that sense you'd be right that there was nothing very special about longbows generically. However, to do so would also mask the fact that the Welsh/English version was much more powerful than your average longbow. At which point, we'd be asking instead "Which longbow does the game mean?"