Hi it's Tod at Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I've got a
schnepper crossbow to show you. So this is a late 17th, early 18th century crossbow,
really used for messing about in the garden or on your country estates rather obviously,
or for hunting, and it is quite quite different to the medieval crossbows that we're more used to.
So I'll show you one of those and then I'm really going to get into the guts of this thing and show
you what this is all about. This is a 15th century soldiers crossbow fairly plain, fairly ordinary,
but whether you were fairly highborn or lowborn, whether you had a really expensive sporting piece,
or just a piece for killing your enemy, technologically they were basically the same
trigger system layout, the layout the bow, the shape of everything was basically the same,
stylistically things change, but actually the operation of it remains the same and it remained
more or less the same as an overall form, since the times of the first crusade. But the trigger
system in particular and that's something we're going to look at today with the schnepper bow, the
trigger system in particular, doesn't seem to have altered since late Roman times. So you've got the
nut here and the trigger and the string comes behind these teeth on the nut
and when you're ready to shoot, you pull the trigger and it rolls forward, spins around
and the string slides up the stock. It's a very simple, very effective, very reliable system,
but it has some faults and the main fault about it is that you have in military bows often,
not always, but often, you have a metal nut and there is inertia to spinning that around.
One way of countering that is that you have an ivory or an antler nut which is lighter
but still you need to accelerate that mass around to release the string.
It doesn't sound like much but all these little factors remove power from the bow
so you want to try and avoid that and the schnepper bow trigger system is one of the things
that does that. The other problem with the trigger system like this is the whole load of this bow
goes through the trigger system itself so you are having to overcome the power
within this trigger system and that's one of the reasons that these trigger bars are long
because sometimes they can be very stiff because if they're not very stiff, you end up with a hair
trigger which you don't want either, so it's a good and a reliable system but it's not delicate
and and it's not clever. It's not advanced. Now if we look at this schnepper crossbow here,
this is absolutely state of the art and it demonstrates your wealth, your status, your money
in different ways, because it is advanced and it, you know to our eyes it's kind of basic, but
actually there's real technological advancement in this that was not possible 150 years before it. So
if we start at the front here, you've got a bolt clip that holds your bolt in place around 1500,
you know 1480, nobody thought of that, so when you wanted to shoot downward you put your
thumb on the back of the bolt and you shoot down. You hold it in place literally, which is fine,
but you know it's not great if you're riding a horse or if you're hunting in the woods,
so that was a brilliant little advancement. Then we got the string catch here and the whole trigger
system itself, this is a really advanced piece because what it does is it demonstrates money,
but it demonstrates money through technological advancement, it demonstrates your friends that
you've got something that they haven't got. It's a rich man's thing and that's important
in the medieval, in the renaissance world, but the other thing is technically it's very useful
because you're not rotating that nut you're not having to overcome the inertia,
so you're not slowing the string down before it even starts to accelerate. It just pops out,
but the other thing is because a lot of the load of the system is pre-loaded in this, you can just
let that load off with the trigger here and that means that the trigger can be much lighter because
it's a multi-part system. The load is not going directly from this string catch to the trigger
itself because that just wouldn't be possible with a short trigger like this, so what it's
doing is it's allowing you again to have much more precision for hunting, for well target practice
and so forth. This becomes a much better system so it's advanced and it's expensive, but it's
advanced and expensive for a reason, it gives real benefits. And then we come to the sight here. Now
again in the old medieval style you had some kind of sighting ability by having notches on the top
of your stock and you've got your little thumb poking up and you can sight between your knuckle
and the bolt sticking out the front of the bow and that gives you some very crude sighting,
but that's all they really had and then around 1500 sights start to come in. Whether that's
because of guns or possibly because of stone bows, because sights were standard on stone bows and
they started to become very popular around that time and so suddenly you have a modern weapon;
you know arcane version of, but you have all the things that you would expect to have. You
have a delicate trigger, one that's easy to use, that is efficient to release the bow
and you have sights and a way of holding your ammunition in place so it doesn't fall out.
All of these we just take as a given now but somebody, at some point had to invent them
and the schnepper bow was pretty well at the beginning of that kind of process. There's one
final advancement that I've not mentioned yet and that is a trigger guard, that was not there on
earlier crossbows. So again it stops an accidental discharge you take it as an absolute given,
it wasn't there before. And the last thing we're going to talk about are the pom-poms here.
What are they about? We simply don't know, but it's a pretty common feature on hunting bows of
the 17th and 18th century, so it was a popular thing to do. A suggestion that's been made is
that the colours are to do with shooting guilds, it may just be taste; it may be somebody coming
along "I love green and white". I don't know, but half you're going to be out there screaming at me
going, "oh it's about silencing, it's about taking the reverberation, the vibration out the stock"
I don't think it is. I really don't, I know they look like string silencers that you find on modern
bows, but I don't think it's about that because I can't notice a difference between the sound
and the other thing about it anyway, is that hunting at this time,
because the bolts are actually relatively slow, they're only 150 160/170 feet per second so
what's that? 45 meters a second, maybe 50 meters a second, they're slow. A deer at
25 meters,25 yards has a good chance of jumping out the way of the bolt,
so I don't think that this is about silencing them down. You don't need to silence it because
you can't silence it enough so that the deer doesn't hear it, so there's no point in that,
so I think it's just decoration and fashion, taste. Back at the range now with my schnepper
crossbow and my very used workshop t-shirt. We don't sell them like this, we sell them mint,
but you can always make your own. So this is the position that the bow would be in after it last
shot, so the string retainer is leaning backward, the bolt clip is forward. So you need to swing the
bolt clip out of the way because otherwise it's going to get broken during the loading process
and you see that in a lot of museums. You set the trigger. Everything's good to go now.
So that's now good.
Bolt onto the track, clip in position.
And shoot second shot.
Set the trigger, swing the bolt clip out the way
and I find these gaffe levers as these are called, a little bit awkward, because
you know I'm used to goats foot levers those are the ones that I use a lot of and I'm not used to
this, but you know practice and I'm sure I'd look slick as anything, at the moment I probably don't.
Under the bolt clip.
And away we go. Again set the trigger bolt clip out the way,
Down and in. Bolt on the rail. Clip in.
And done. And there we have it, 17th/18th century schnepper crossbow. I hope you enjoyed it.