This was also shot in other parts of medieval and renaissance europe as well.  It was originally shot with live birds tethered to a pole, a stripped treetop or even a church steeple weathervane.  It was shot with crossbows as well as longbows and recurved hunting bows.
  In northern England and southern Scotland it was often called a "Papingo shoot" since a type of imported colorful parrot-like bird of that name was a popular target.  Obviously it was a much smaller bird.  It was a part of the annual shire "Wappenshaw" (weapon-show) when all of the men had to show up with their military equipment for an inspection and demonstration of minimal skill. In northern England there is a very ancient club who still do this; shooting a target on the church tower with bows, preserving a continuous tradition that goes back 400 plus years.  I have read vague references somewhere to shooting at a human shaped target with scoring that sounds somewhat like the Mann-target.
  When I was a kid there was an archery club in the Belgian ethnic neighborhood of Mishawaka IN that shot an indoor horizontal version with much reduced scale targets.  I recall pictures in the sports section of the local newspaper of the men and women posed with their recurve bows and the about-to-be shot up eagle target.  I recall scores posted for "high bird" "low bird" and "king targets".
An awful lot of our schuetzen traditions has roots that far predate firearms

mwhite49 wrote on Oct 11^th, 2012 at 8:56pm:


Hi Mike.

I am not really an expert on these traditional crossbow shooting. And I didn't participate at this jubilée match. Because one had to go for an introduction in this crossbow-overhead-shooting. But on the introduction day, I was sent to a business trip and so I couldn't go to the training lesson. And the day the match was held, I had to go to a feuerstutzen birthday match invitation in the afternoon. Too much appointments with all this shooting stuff!


In Bavaria, this overhead shooting with crossbow is still common. The eagle on the pole is only for the king's match and for jubilée events and for a friendship-match.

Normally they shoot for "points" up-to another kind of "target". Instead of the eagle, they shoot on a "star", where small wooden squares are mounted round the circle . See picture below. The star has the same diameter like the eagle.

             Biggi. 

This special overhead-crossbow has a modern diopter and adjustment like a rifle. 

I don't know the size or width of the bow, but it is not really wide.

When the match is over, kids have fun to burn down the wood of the eagle in a special concrete dump.

         Biggi. 

Hi Mike.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the thread:

feuerbixler wrote on Oct 8^th, 2012 at 6:34pm:


The common disciplines are horizontally. On 10m and 30m. There are championships from regionals up to world championships. 

The match-crossbows are different to eagle-pole crossbows. The arrow they use is also called "bolt". The target is out of wood and in the middle a center out of lead. Its easy to remove the bolt out of the lead-center, much softer than the wood.

              Biggi. 

This is the target for crossbow shooting with the lead-center. The lead center we cast ourselves, we use the lead of the airrifle-balls.
One can use such a lead center for 10-20 shots, then it breaks.

                  Biggi.