next Q: "were able to shelter their bows." - what was the usual technique for that in the field?

@DVK: I'm not quite sure of the details. But he Genovese, who had marched all day, arrived without even their wooden "stands" that would normally have provided some cover. The English were on the ground, and "dug in," meaning that they could put their bows underground. They also had time to take off spare clothes and use those to cover their bows.

This is an interesting answer, but I'm not sure it meets all the criteria of the question. The OP asked for a battle in which both sides intended for the "vast majority" of fighting to be done with ranged weapons. By the numbers given here, half the English force, and something like 80% of the French force, weren't equipped with ranged weapons at all. Why march thousands of men to the battle field if you're not expecting them to fight?

@RoseAmes - Not sure about the French, but for English, footmen could be protection for defenseless-in-close-combat archers.

I did say it was "accidental." But it was (arguably) the first battle when MOST of the fighting was done with missile weapons. And DVK is right; the other cavalry and infantry were there for the defense of the archers, and for "mop up," but basically in a secondary role. And the battle DOES go down in history as "advancing" the role of missile weapons.

"The French cavalry charged, completing the slaughter of the Genovese" -- I was about to ask about this (the Genoese were on the French side), but according to Wikipedia the Genoese tried to retreat and the French knights killed them for cowardice. Ick.

@DVK - I believe that instead of covering the whole bow Archers would remove the string from their bows (Which was common practice anyway, to preserve the power of the bow) and hide them on their person (under armour, hats, clothes etc.) when it rained. Seeing as re-stringing a longbow takes a matter of seconds this practice compared to a crossbow it was one of the advantages of the Longbow. I believe that this technique is mentioned by Bernard Cornwall in many of his books (Crecy is the subject of Harlequin).

Nice answer, but I doubt that Crecy was anywhere close to the historic first battle of such sort.

As an archer, I'd expect that in the face of rain the longbowmen would simply have unstrung their bows and put the strings into their pockets or some other sheltered location. At most it takes 5 seconds to string a self bow, such as the traditional English long bow, or a recurve.

Longbows much more often killed mounts and killed men. Most of the actual killing at Crecy was done with a knife, by archers wandering amongst the French wounded retrieving arrows, and unranged men-at-arms wielding swords.

@TomAu My knee-jerk answer was the Battle of Agincourt, where the English archers decimated the French,but you've outdone me by about 100 years! ;)

So the knight in Europe pretty much seal their own fate. If they let their crosbowmen retreat, attack and bring their shield they would have won

I've downvoted for the same reason that Pieter Geerkens mentions: most of the casualties of the battle were caused by blades, not by arrows. While the longbows of the English army forced the French to attack uphill against an entrenched position, so you could say that "longbows decided the battle", they didn't kill that many.

@Rekesoft: You could argue that more DEATHS were caused by blade weapons. But these were mostly deaths of wounded men who couldn't get out of the way or fight back. So the "casualties" were mostly caused by bows, even though the deaths weren't. Also, with the state of medicine in those days, most of the "wounded" would have died in a few days or weeks, just off, rather than on, the battlefield.

@Tom Au Nope. Look this video of a longbow against medieval-style armor. Even at point blank, it fails to penetrate: youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE The English bowmen started raining down arrows towards the unarmored french infantry; the genoese crossbowmen, being downhill and outgunned, couldn't do anything about it, so the french knights killed them and charged uphill against trenches and pikes. Those were who dismounted the french knights. NOT A SINGLE KNIGHT WAS EVER HARMED BY AN ARROW. history.stackexchange.com/questions/46757/…

@Rekesoft: Strong argument not backed up even by your source. Armor is not perfect, leaves parts weaker or uncovered. Not all arrows hit the strongest part of the breastplate head-on. Which is why plate armor started with just a breastplate and ended up as late-medieval full plate -- because missile weapons became ever more effective and ubiquitous, thus the need for more and more plate covering. Also, "mobility kill" counts for armored knights back then just like for tanks on today's battlefields.

@Rekesoft Please work from the assumption that your fellow contributor knows what they're talking about. I never said that archers looked or aimed for a vulnerable spot. But when thousands of arrows are shot every couple of seconds, chances are weak points are hit. The comparison with howitzers is not a good one. Rather, archers were an early form of machine gun: Suppression fire, area denial. Also, while a rider can carry full-body plate armor and be halfway functional, a horse cannot. In your (valid) criticism of the "bow sniper" trope, you're too far down the other end of the scope.

@DevSolar Dare to calculate the probability of a weak point being hit? By a conservative estimation, shooting with a longbow against a static target at 300m or against a moving target at any distance, it's below 1 in a billion. Which, given that the Welsh bowmen only shot a few thousand, leads us to the same conclusion than before: no knight was harmed by arrows. By the way, horses are more than capable to work with armor. Actually, barding was invented partly in response to Crézy, since quite a few horses were hit when they had to stop in the trenches the English army had dug.

@Rekesoft sigh Please. Stop. You're starting from a false assumption (as if range or movement of a target would matter while shooting clout), and then follow your own confirmation bias to come to a counterfactual and unsourced conclusion. That's not the way historical research is done.

@DevSolar Wow! Ad hominem much? Please, show me your historical research. Explicitly, tell me about the percentages were an arrow went through a weak spot on an armour. Or even single recorded evidence of that. Isn't that how historical research is done? Like, finding a single evidence of that ever happening? Because your false assumption of "surely some of those arrows must have hit some weak point of the armor" is a very much an unsourced conclusion. That's not the way historical research is done. Has anybody tried to found the corpses of that battle looking for arrow injuries?

@Rekesoft Oh, so now I have to come up with percentages to falsify your blanket claim of "no knight ever"? All I would need is one documented case. Like, I don't know, Jeanne d'Arc perhaps? Being "wounded by an arrow which penetrated half-a-foot between the neck and the shoulder" despite wearing a full plate? Which, by the way, did not make an appearance on the battlefield until the very late Middle Ages. No plate armor on the Bayeux Tapestry, for instance, but plenty of knights on the ground with arrows sticking in them.

@DevSolar My bad. I was refering to a single evidence of that happening in the battle of Crécy. Accidents happen, but they are that: accidents. Phyrrus of Epirus was killed by a tile thrown by an old lady from a rooftop, but that didn't made ancient generals to march to battle with hordes of old ladies armed with tiles. Crécy is not a valid example of "first shooting battle" because every historian, despite their opinion about the efficacy of the longbow, they reckon that 80% or more of the casualties were not caused by arrows (actually, most of the dead were actually executed post-battle).

@DevSolar And on a different note I don't know how much historical value has the Bayeaux Tapestry. Turner painted the Spanish sailors of the age of sail wearing muslim turbants. The tapestry was commisioned and made way after the battle, and the artists were'nt there at the battle. An artistical representation may provide some historical clues about what people wore in a certain time, but you have always to contemplate the possibility of artistic licenses. Nobody thinks the spartans at Thermopilae were actually naked but shield and sword.

@Rekesoft No, you were not talking about Crécy specifically, you claimed (in all caps) that no knight was ever harmed by an arrow. As for further sources on Crécy in particular I'd like to direct you to WP: Battle of Crécy - Cavalry charges, in particular the first paragraph and its sources. Do read those sources. Kelly DeVries is very much an individual opinion.

@DevSolar That's the problem with comments: they are indeed unsuitable to extended discussions due to the limited space, and when you start deleting words to make it fit you end up with much more categorical affirmations that you had initially written. We both agree that bows were an important asset in medieval warfare (minor nitpicking aside about whether machine guns or howitzers are a better metaphore) that they were area-denial and suppresion weapons, intented to harass the enemy.

And Rogers Clifford is very much an individual opinion. A very patriotic, moreover, individual opinion. Crécy had also cannons, but we don't know how effective they were. Pressumably low, because they were so primitive, but again, like most things about those times "pressumably". We don't know how many people those cannons killed (if any), and we don't know how many people the arrows killed - if any, but the genoese surely had many loses to arrows, or they wouldn't have fled.