At the end of the parade, as the finale, William's Norman longbowmen finally appeared in anticipation.

This longbow corps numbered more than 1,000 men, and was specially selected by William from the elite longbowmen of his Guards Brigade and the First Legion, and they were all good archers, who could accurately hit humanoid targets with their longbows from 200 yards away, and if they used longbows for rapid shooting, they could achieve a high accuracy of six out of ten shots, and the hit rate would not be lower than four or five out of ten in actual combat.

With such a high hit rate, extremely high rate of fire and far more range than the average bow, this longbow will be a nightmare for everyone, as they have proven with their record.

In the battle with the Duchy of Anjou in Dongvronon more than two years ago, William used the dense rain of arrows from the longbowmen, and the infantry line of the long-haired halberders to resist the onslaught of 2,000 Anjou knights and twice as many attendant cavalry, and defeated the Duchy of Anjou army including Genoese crossbowmen, mercenaries and knights in one fell swoop, killing more than half of the casualties.

This battle array can be said to be the first cry of Norman longbowmen in the history of warfare on the European continent, as soon as it appeared, it appeared in front of everyone with an extremely stunning posture, causing countless people to be both afraid and eager for Norman longbowmen.

However, after this war, the Norman longbowmen were hidden by William again, and no matter how the nobles searched, they could not find any trace of the Norman longbowmen or even a little news, because these elite longbowmen were trained in their own closed training camps, and they could only find some mutilated training methods of militia longbowmen.

The reluctant nobles could only start training their own longbowmen according to the training method of the crippled militia longbowmen.

However, because the longbows they used were made of hard woods such as elm, hazelwood, ash or oak, and because they did not have advanced bow taming techniques, they used simple charcoal grilling techniques, resulting in longbows that did not have good elasticity and tension, and could not be curved compared to William's purple longbow, and even the oak longbows used by Norman militia longbowmen.

Normandy craftsmen did not tame their bows by fire, because fire could easily reduce the elasticity of the bow's back; When bending the back of the bow, the craftsman uses a special bracket to bend the bow body in a way that is bent into place several times to prevent the back from breaking or losing tension.

The smoothness and evenness of the arc of the bow is the most important criterion for judging the quality of a bow, for which the bow maker needs to fine-tune the bend and tension several times.

When a suitable full bow opening is reached, the bow taming process is completed when the surface of the bow is flat, the ends are symmetrical, and a uniform arc is formed. Due to the large tension weight of the longbow, it may not be able to withstand the tension only by carving wooden string grooves into the two sections of the bow back, so the two ends of the longbow are generally covered with horns or other materials of the base and then processed to create string grooves, which is also a prominent feature of the Normanland longbow.

The best wood to use for the Norman longbow is a hard, resilient, high-quality yew wood, which is available in limited quantities and hard woods such as elm, hazel, ash or oak are also common for bow making.

It's not that they don't know that the Norman longbow is made of purple wood, but they don't have access to this precious wood at all, and they are all monopolized by William.

Yew wood is available in limited quantities and is mainly sourced from the Mediterranean coast, including Spain, Italy, and Crete, Greece. It is generally believed that the quality of yew wood from Castile, Spain is relatively good.

The origin of these purple shirts are William's allies, such as Ferdinand I's Spain, the Duchy of Apulia controlled by the Ottville family in southern Italy and Caesar's northern Sicily, as well as the Italian region under the influence of the Pope, in these areas William established timber storage and trading stations through alliances, monopolized almost all the forests that produce purple shirts, and used Venice as a central base to store and ship high-quality wood.

Greece, which produced small quantities of purple wood, was under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire, and no one would export this critical strategic material to other Western European countries.

Now that William has completed his monopoly on the resources of the purple shirt, he can generously show the Norman longbowmen and let them see and understand.

This elite Norman longbowman wears a light nose helmet with chain mail neck guards, a light half-breastplate and the rest of it is protected by leather armor, a belt around his waist, a one-handed suit or sword hanging from the front of the belt, and a pot full of arrows tied to the belt behind his waist.

Their hands were covered with leather gloves and bracer guards to protect them from being cut by the bowstring during the rapid archery shoot.

The most eye-catching thing was the reddish-brown purple wood longbow they were holding, which was generally between 5 feet 7 inches and 6 feet 2 inches (about 1.7-1.9 meters) long, with a few lengths of 7 feet.

In contrast to the high flexibility and pressure resistance of the core material near the center of the tree, which the bow maker called the "belly", the sapwood near the bark part of the tree called the "back" has good tensile resistance, which can meet the elasticity and hardness requirements of the inner and outer sides of the bow back, respectively.

Such a huge bow is enough to occupy most of the height of a person, and a person who is not tall cannot use such a powerful weapon at all.

The mere fact that such sophisticated equipment is already very eye-catching, and they are equipped with enough weapons and equipment to arm a knight, but these equipment are used by William to arm longbowmen, which cannot but make everyone sigh at William's wealth.

In addition, not only are they well-equipped, but these Norman longbowmen are as disciplined and elite as the guards knights who have just walked by, and the neat scattered formations and pace are impeccable.

William, who was sitting on the management table, looked at the nobles with a surprised look, and was very satisfied, thinking that there would be something that would surprise you even more.

When the Norman longbowmen arrived at the viewing platform, William raised his right hand and swung it downward, and the knight in charge of directing the longbowmen immediately understood, and gave the order to turn to the longbowmen around him with the sound of drums and brass trumpets.

Three hundred yards in front of the viewing platform, there were neatly arranged human-shaped targets, which were the targets of the Norman longbowmen.

"Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! ”

With a shot command, thousands of Norman longbowmen who bent their bows and arrows suddenly released their bowstrings, and countless long arrows emerged from the array of longbowmen, and a black and oppressive dark cloud gathered in the sky, covering the entire sky.

Whoa... Whoa... Whoa...

With a sharp whistling sound, countless long arrows fell from the sky over a distance of three hundred yards, and as if they had eyelids, they plunged into the fragile wooden target with unmistakable accuracy, knocking it down and nailing it firmly to the ground, and for a moment the sawdust flew and the sound of falling to the ground, punctures, and the shaking of the shaft of the arrow was incessant.