How many times have you seen or read about archers making very precise shots at incredible distances? The 2010 Robin Hood movie, starring Russell Crowe, has the main character make a shot over a hundred yards at a man riding a horse at full gallop, and the arrow hits him precisely in the neck. The movie character made that shot with an unfamiliar bow and arrow and a wet string. Let’s remember that a waterlogged flax string is heavier than a dry one, and the extra weight in the string will reduce the cast of the bow considerably and unpredictably. If the bow he was using was a different weight than the one he was used to drawing, he would also struggle to judge the cast correctly. Unless there’s some magic involved, shots like those can’t happen.
Precision at great distance (i.e., hitting small targets) is incredibly difficult and relies on a bit of luck. Still, archers can develop great skill at distance shooting—just search YouTube and you will see some pretty amazing shots even out to 300 yards. But he/she will not be able to achieve precise accuracy. There are too many variables involved—wind direction and velocity, the condition of the equipment, the type of bow and arrow being used, visibility and light conditions, possible obstructions, and the skill of the archer.
Long distance shots through the woods are particularly difficult. Any tiny twig or leaf making contact with the arrow can destabilize its trajectory. Trees also have a bad habit of grabbing arrows and hanging onto them. Forget about obstacles and wind currents for just a moment and consider how hard it is to hit a target that you can’t see? The human eye cannot see objects clearly at extreme distances. Targeting the bare neck of a man wearing armor at a hundred yards or more while he is bouncing up and down at a full gallop moving away from you would be a waste of time. You wouldn’t be able to see the neck, let alone determine where it would be by the time your arrow arrived. Even in clout shooting (80-180 yards), a flag is erected on a pole to help the archers gauge the distance.
English archers reportedly shot at human-sized figures at one hundred yards and could hit them, sometimes repeatedly. (The targets weren’t moving, by the way.) But this was a carefully acquired skill that took years of dedicated practice and heavy draw weights. Tartars in the seventeenth century could reportedly shoot accurately at 60 to 100 paces. Arabic treatises claim that the effective accurate range of a bow was about 80 yards (Arabic Archery). Fred Bear claimed that for the average bow hunter, 35 yards was the limit to accurate shooting. Still, Howard Hill reportedly took an elk at 200 yards, but he missed twice. Shooting at game at extreme ranges with a bow is a bit unethical in that the hunter is more likely to injure the animal than achieve a kill shot. If the archer or the target are moving, the difficulty increases considerably. Shooting from the unstable platform of a galloping horse would make long distance shots even more difficult. Some have claimed that accuracy gets very difficult from horseback past twenty yards.
Modern compound and crossbow shooters can achieve amazing results with the use of stabilizers, sights, and scopes. There are videos on YouTube of compound shooters hitting targets consistently and precisely at 90-100 yards and occasionally as far as 300 yards; but prior to the modern age, there were no mechanical aids for long distance shooting. With a lot of skill and experience and even more luck, an archer shooting a traditional bow with traditional equipment might make a crazy long distance shot once in a while, but he or she would be hard pressed to do it twice. And they would never be able to achieve a high level of precision in the shot.