[Corey Skriletz]

Hi again,

My men and I made a walled encampment a while back and now I'm working on filling it in with medieval furnishings, weapons, etc. It's coming along well, but one thing I can't seem to acquire is a medieval archery target. At first, I was just using some round shields that I made out of pine, but the tips of my bodkins kept breaking off when I tried to pull them out. In many of my books, I see pictures of archers shooting at something like this:

http://www.getdressedforbattle.co.uk/acatalog/Targets.html

But on my current part-time salary, GDFB's is just too expensive for me. Does anybody know of any places that sell them for cheaper or where I might find instructions to make them?

Thanks.

[Josh Wilson]

I've been toying with the idea of getting a length or large diameter rope, whipping the ends, and coiling it up and then stitching it all in place to make one of these...

[Josh Wilson]

Another period option is a dirt mound. Stand a stick up in front of it for a wand shoot, or hang a wreath on it and shoot to group your arrows in the wreath.

[R. Kolick]

Most archery butts where just long dirt mounds and then fire away for accuracy they would hunt small game like squirls they average archer was trained to fire vollys en mass the "snipers" ie anyone with consistant long range accuracy was useualy a hunter

[Bjorn Hagstrom]

Making an archery target from straw such as the ones that GDFB sells is not complicated, and require very little tools and materials. But takes a but of time of course. And helps a lot to be two or three people to do this together.

What you need is good quality straw, some sort of string and a funnel (Cow horn with tip cut of will usually be about the right size for it)

What you do is to grab a bunch of straw and feed it through the funnel, and wrap it with string as it pushes out the tight end. Keep adding straw and pusing and you should get a continous wrapped strand of straw. (The tighter you wrap, the tighter the target will be) Then the strand of wrapped straw can be coiled and bound together. If you are confident enough you can wrap and coil all in one go.

[Corey Skriletz]

Thank you all for your help.

Josh: I have been thinking about the rope idea, as well. If I can't find the time to do Bjorn's idea, that's what I will have to do.

Josh and R. Kolick: I can't create a butt, because there's no room in the encampment for it. The walls, however, are made of tightly woven waddle, so I think I can just hang a target on it without fear of losing my arrows. I remember when watching those old Robin Hood shows (the ones with Richard Greene) that some of the archery competitions would involve shooting at a moving target, where they would tie an apple to a string hanging from a stick propped up on two other sticks, then push it so it would swing back from one side to the other. Any idea if something like this was really done.

Bjorn: Thank you very much, that sounds like something I can do. How big should the diameter of the hole in the tip of the cow horn be?

Thanks again to everybody for your help.

[Bjorn Hagstrom]

The small diameter of the funnel will decide the thickness of the target, so somewhere between 3/4 - 2 inches should work well.

[Corey Skriletz]

Fantastic, I've got just the horn for the job. Thanks again.