>>43349055When recruiting an army, you generally didn't get any real choice there. If you're English you have a good chance of having longbowmen available for hire. Down on the continent the missile troops available will mostly be town militia-trained crossbowmen, and later on a mix of those and likewise town militia based gunners.
Someone looking to ensure a supply of a specific troop type may need to go quite far for it, like Emperor Maximilian largely creating the landsknecht system so he could get some good pikemen on the field (and then marching around with a pike himself a bit so a few noblemen could be convinced to serve as infantry officers instead of heavy cavalry). Likewise we have the English laws pushing longbow training, and many towns welcoming fencing and shooting guild,s and making a big deal of various competitions to encourage training amongst the citizens.
Going back to the specific longbow or crossbow issue, those town militias mentioned above would generally be heavily focused on defensive siege action, and as such rate of fire was of little importance to them. They had walls to hide behind while reloading, until they ran out of ammo. And even out in the open there's certainly limits to how far a rate of fire will carry you, there's only so many arrows you can lug around, and they don't come free either. Maybe half a million arrows where launched at Crecy, substantially weighting down the baggage train (a longbow arrow might be 50g, half a million of those makes for 25 metric tons) and lightening the wallet.
See Hall, "Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe".
>>43348843The suggestion that the knights would be too afraid to go for the crossbows... There would have been a lot less dead knights in the Hussite wars if such phobia had shaped their approach.
