The Covenant Man
korinzu
The Covenant Man
korinzu
And you are absolutely right. Though frankly I have no idea how expansive the faceless king or northwode pagan religions are, which is why I didn't bring them up because I didn't want to be stepping on ideas some may have with them because their is an element in the story where religion play a major role, in the form of David and team odd ball. So I decided to focus instead of what I did know were going to be fairly accurate to the theme and period the roleplay can be considered to be loosely based off of.
The first step to bring halle from the current position to a higher one is to increase their agricultural efficiency and livestock raising, IE. perishable food stuffs and associated resources. Halle's land would be better served to corn crops, where as eyre territory would be better suited for the potato, as part of the major crop for their territories temperament.
But once those have been established and improved, that will be the gateway leading to other reforms, possibly bringing in a new method for creating quality steel from limited resources, known as crucible forging, which has the characteristics of a good modern steel, which was significantly better than what our forefathers in mideival times could have achieved on their own. Tough a lot of this will take time and require some investment, but the returns would be well worth the wait.
If one side wanted to defeat the other than all one would need to do would be stifle their economy. There was a reason why traveling on roads was so dangerous, usually caravans would be stopped and either raided or burned. Usually raided as the needless sacrifice of resources would be pointless in and of itself. However the house of Eyre seems to value honor above a lot of things so they would be a bit more of a trivial sort when it comes to hiring bandits and other riff-raff in order to complete tasks not suited for actual military men.
I figure the only way to really wage a war in this time period is to take land and harvest what you can from it. The Eyre house is well situated in the north and is guarded by heavily forests surrounding their main keep. I'm sure we can harvest wood fairly easily and there may very well be villages set up for just this reason. While wood might not seem to be a very valuable resource initially when it comes to warfare, keep in mind that arrows have been known to pierce thinner variants of plate armor with use of the bodkin arrow. Not only that, but the sheer strength of the longbow is enough to destroy any band of enemy units due to its excessive strength and the lesser forms of armor men-at-arms typically wore during this time (leather and chainmail being popular).
For reference, a longbow averaged to be more than 6 feet tall and could have a draw-weight of roughly 130-150 lbs. Some people here might doubt the legitimacy of that but keep in mind that the English had trained young boys in archery and probably had a sort of ladder-system where a boy would get stronger and then get a bow with a higher draw-weight.
Theoretically, one side could rule the battlefield with nothing more than perhaps 1000 archers and 500 men-at-arms. Of course trenches would be dug and spikes placed into the ground. But theoretically this would be able to destroy any opposing force that isn't head-to-toe in thick metal armor.
Economically speaking this would be VERY easy to do from the Eyre's location as they are situated very closely to large swathes of forest and, what can be assumed, pinewood. As it is easy and one could get perhaps 20-25 bows from a single tree, you could arm a majority of your peasants and teach them how to use a bow for very little cost, mostly because a bow is a very simple weapon to use.
As far as the bowman aspect, look to my outlaw character, he's a professional archer built off the english longbowman with some tweaking.
All very good points. But even with sufficient wood, they must have feathers, and fletchers to fletch those arrows. It's cold up there, so their avian pupulation might not be that high. And historically, one of the kings of englad almost drove their local bird population to extinction just to have feathers so they could fletch their arrows. An arrow without fletching will not fly. the longbow is at minimum the archer's own height, upwards to more than 7 ft, with some bows drawing at 180lbs even, from a soft wood like yew with horn nocks, and sinew braided cord for the draw string.
Archers could fire an average of 6 arrows a minute and with high number of archers, that's a lot of aerial force coming down onto an enemy, where men could rally around the defending army who were under fire, and as soon as the arrow rain was doe, the soldiers rush in and start attacking. But renches and spikes weren't always used, sometimes mainly because commanders didn't feel it was honorable to use such tactics.
But trust me, My archer will be covering a lot of these points himself in rp.
Disrupting your enemies trade by attacking caravans is a damn good way to hurt your enemies, even better if they hae an establshed army at location x, you attack their supply train, and that army is suddenly crippled.
I could go on, but eh.
Well in regards to avian populations also consider they live in a forest which is where most birds would likely lay their nests, so perhaps for one part of the year (Summer) They harvest maybe 3000 feathers from the birds an use those to fletch some arrows and slowly build up their supply. The Eyre also have many allies in the warmer parts of the north who could send them arrows in return for some iron because, as I've been told, the Eyre household is situated very near to a rich supply of iron ore.
At the moment talking military strategy is somewhat of a pointless ordeal, but very fun to do so regardless. I wasn't expecting many other people to share my same sentiments and knowledge on the subject, it being something I've studied since I watched Patton when I was 8 years old with my father.
With the vast supply of steel and iron that would mean that Northern knights could be much more well supplied in terms of fighting gear though. A lot more heads for arrows, spear tips, swords, maces, axes, all of that. They could make a great profit off of this war.
Eh, it may be pointless, but there is a catch that, just because we're talking, we're talking in the OOC, which means this gives leiton and happiness some ideas and concepts to work off of hopefully.
Iron production and the subsequent refinement to steel though was also an issue, because while it could be mined, actually smelting it presented inefficiencies, where large plots of forest were cut just to smelt iron from an ore into a usuable bloom, and that's not even forging it out, or making steel out of it. Steel production wasn't that great, because carbon content couldn't be very reliably introduced into iron at the time until forging methods improved, which was why a sword was a knights only weapon, they weren't cheep. At the cost of 20 Ox, or 8 human slaves in comparison to gold, it was bloody expensive. The earliest european example of good steels would have to be spanish steel, or the viking ulfbert, which actually came from asia via the vulga trading route, which was crucible steel. But yes, the nothern forces would be better equipped with proper metal gear, that isn't in question in the slightest, and that's the problem the south will have is access to that metal. But even if they do go to war, the north and south still have to trade because most of the food comes from the south, and most of the iron and such from the north.
Trade with allies for resources they don't with resources they have in plenty is the way to go in prparing for war time, though consider that during Mideival times, the archer was not conidered to be honorable in the slightest, because you were killing men from a distance, like a coward, as the idea of honor was fighting toe to toe against your opponent in up close Melee, not from a distance. House Eyre is extremely honorable, which may play into their use of archers as well. And having a line of archers at the ready wasn't put into play that much until in england at least, armies were reformed into the more continental variation where every soldier was well equipped with gear that met a certain standard and there was expected to be a host of archers within that army.
Consider Hannibal Barca of Carthage, his strategies of how he moved his army were brilliant, he specialized in the unorthodox and the ridiculous by some standards, such as marching his army, war elephants and all, across the mountains for an ambush on roman forces they thought would be impossible and had ruled out. Another time he presented with a weak frontal force to the opposing army, who retreated and the enemy followed, but their ranks divided around and began to surround the enemy force via the terrain, where they then reingauged from the front and both sides, before crushing the enemy force.
Trench warfare, to my knowledge, was unheard of until the world wars, But it would be extremely useful against archers and calvary, if situated into the right terrain that is. If every soldier was equipped with a shovel, then digging a tench that is at least 6 ft deep, and say 6 ft wide is possible in a quick manner, where the dirt can then be mound up in the front of the trench as a block of sorts. If you dig a double trench, one to fool calvary so that, when they trie to jump it, they end up crashing into the second trench and likely breaking the horses legs. As far as archery goes, if they can use crossbows, where one man shoots, and the other man loads the second crossbow and hands it off to the shooter and this repeats, then they have a defensible position from which to lay a near constant suppressing fire so long as they have crossbow bolt, and when the loader gets tired, or before that happens, loader and shooter switch places so that they can rest while shoting since they aren't having to load just shoot. And making it defensible may come into armed soldiers behind the double trench, with wooden bridges at ready, all holding shields and long spears, who would move the bridges forward and then rush infront of the trenches to do fighting and then cme back, drawing back the bridges. Though I suppose the front of the trenches could also be further reinforced with a burried spike barricade to dissuade calvary all together.
Best thing though if you ca get a strategic location, such as a narrow pass, to make this trench at, it'd bet it could increase the effectiveness f the trench by at least 10 times, especially of the enemy has no other pass to go through, meaing a relatively small force could take on a larger army, because that pass would make numbers count for nothing, similarly to the Spartans at Thermopylae.
I feel the same wa, t's nice to meet someone who has similar views to yourself, especially historical warfare. I'm a big fan of greco/roman warfae and combat, though sadly I havent been able to do as much study here recently, and I tend to forgt things.
