Bow and arrow

Discovery the other day had an interesting feature on the battle of
Azincourt which was won mainly by the English longbowmen. Interesting
fact: one man-at-arms had the price of two longbowmen. More
intersting fact: The French were interested in taking hostages for
later extorting a ransom. In that quest they completly ignored the
English longbowman: they were nobodies.

Who were these onbowmen, historically? The English and French noblity
should have the samestructure, having sprung from a common Germanic
source. But I haven't heard of Celtic Britons being especially
connected with bows and arrows.

Hans Kuhn had a long list of exclusively Germanic-Latin (occasionally
Celtic) cognates containing the vowel /a/, which he suspects of being
Nordwestblock. I don't recall whether

arrow (Gothic arhWazna, ON o,rr, gen. o,rvar) and
Latin arx "bow"

was part of it, but they should be. Latin words containing the
vowel /a/ are difficult to relate to the rest of Latin (Meillet
(of 'ta:be:s'): "vocalisme 'a', mot populaire").

Which is enough for me to suspect they these archers were descended
from Nordwestblock peoples arriving in England with the Saxon
invasion.

Torsten