"I must admit to a knee-jerk reaction thanks to the traditional English portrayal of the longbow as an uber-proletariat-Feudal-oppressor-slayer: sturdy working Englishmen taking down effete French knights etc."

-- as is usually the case with stereotypes, there's a fair bit of truth to this, though the cause and effect links are not straightforward. Conan Doyle's picture of the times is romanticized, but there's a solid element of fact to "The White Company".

Serfdom decayed faster in England than France, and the landowners seem to have trusted the peasantry much more.

French armies were dominated in terms of numbers by men-at-arms and the next most important elments were urban militias and foreign mercenaries. The ruling classes weren't prepared to let the rural lower orders get their hands on effective weapons, particularly in an era before standing armies, when they'd be keeping them in their own homes.

By contrast, in English armies men-at-arms were fairly small minorities. The numerically dominant element was bowmen recruited from the upper reaches of the peasantry, what were increasingly referred to as "yeomen".

This got more so over time. Edward III's armies were usually about 50% bowmen; Henry V's were 80% archers. The Crown made continuous efforts to see that every substantial peasant kept a longbow and practiced with it.

Longbowmen (outlaws aside) rarely came from the really poor. They tended to be the sons of relatively well-to-do tenant farmers who were also employers of labor themselves, and some were from the lower fringes of the gentry. You needed some money and some leisure to master the weapon.

This showed up in an archer's wages; 6p a day was _good_ money in the 1400's, three or four times what even a well-paid laborer like a plowman made.

On 6p a day you could make the price of a bushel of oats or a sheep per week. The very best longbows cost 3 shillings sixpence each -- only a little over a week's wages -- and a riding horse of the type a mounted archer used would cost him only a month's pay. If you didn't blue the lot on whores, dice and drink you could actually save money on pay like that, and that's not counting loot.

Note also that there was only one large peasant revolt in England in this period, as opposed to dozens in France, and that the one in England wasn't some convulsive volcano from the depths (which the Jacquerie _was_) but instead a relatively orderly affair with direct political aims -- abolition of the head-tax, a change in the King's ministers, elimination of surviving feudal dues, clarification of the status of copyholders, and so forth.

Those aren't the demands of starvlings; they're the complaints of the aspiring lower middle class. The "Jacques", over in France, had a more straightforward approach; they just wanted to kill all the landowners.

Nor could the English revolt simply be put down by fire and slaughter the way most French uprisings were -- indeed, the rebels marched right into London and took it, relatively unopposed.

The yeomanry-in-arms was too formidable; these were the same people who'd killed huge numbers of the chivalry of France, and who were the core of English armies. Everyone knew it, including themselves.