Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire
29th March 2026
Now the thing that, in the last couple of decades, everyone has realized is wrong (I suspect some early Lindybeige videos had something to do with how widespread this notion is), is that you don’t tell archers to ‘fire’ because their weapons don’t involve any fire. But the solution in film has been to keep the arrow volleys – that is, the coordinated all-at-once shooting – and simply change the order to ‘release’ or ‘loose.’ Which isn’t actually any better!
Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.
More to the point, they could not shoot in volleys. And even if they had shot in volleys, those volleys wouldn’t produce anything like the impact we regularly see in film or TV. So this week, we’re going to walk through those considerations: briefly looking at what volley fire is for and why archers both wouldn’t and couldn’t do it, before taking a longer look at the problem of lethality in massed arrow fire.
This is a sure-fire laugh for any movie that tries to treat archers like musketeers.