Before the wreckage of Henry the VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose, was discovered, there was one English longbow still in existence, now there is over a hundred and seventy. The longbow was such an important part of the armament of the Mary Rose in part because they were very effective, they could easily outshoot the guns of the day, and partly because that's the way it always had been. These men were trained for life to shoot the longbow, and it took a lifetime's worth of training in order to handle a 200 lb. pull on a bowstring. However, guns would get better quickly, and it didn't take a lifetime's worth of training to shoot one. Replacing an archer killed in battle wasn't an easy proposition, but you could replace the gunman in a relatively small amount of time.
They have found only parts of fifteen matchlocks aboard the Mary Rose. She did have big guns, but the tactics of using them were still evolving. Men mostly fought boarding actions with knives and bows and arrows. It wouldn't be long before the weapon lockers on board English fighting ships would be filled with gunpowder weapons, and the use of the broadside would be commonplace. The gundeck would be the new fighting space, not the top deck.
