A friend of mine growing up was all kinds of into archery and had a huge collection of crossbows, long bows, his own autographed Ted Nugent hunting bow, etc.
A recurve longbow was more accurate could be fired 2-5 times faster and had equal if not more penetrating power than any of his base model crossbows.
Sure in close close combat, a crossbow could be ready to fire and used by any moron, but... Eh, screw it. You can't win on the forums, longbows beat out crossbows on
accuracy and rate of fire, but then you also needed to be trained on them. On a full scale battlefield I'd go w/ two trained longbowman over four fools with crossbows, but if you had 500 fools with crossbows over twenty trained longbowmen... then I'd bid on the fools. Some will eventually get through.
Any fool with a gun can kill in close quarters, but I'd take two trained snipers anytime.