The premise was simple. Could modern archers replicate the mass shooting of their medieval counterparts? Could a group of modern archers shoot into a formation of troops and get the same results as those at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt? We could get the English archers, could we get the Frenchmen to stand in a field and be shot at? The answer for that was "non", but we could use a good substitute; balloons.So, after placing out nearly two hundred balloons in a field we then shot at them for a "generous" minute. We expected the balloons to be wiped out. Decimated. Crushed. Eradicated, expunged, exterminated, obliterated, quashed, rubbed out, wiped out, no more. They would be ex-balloons. The balloons would be singing with the choir eternal.But after trying several times at closer and closer ranges we found that a dozen archers had immense difficulty in shooting anything other than grass, mud and the occasional overhead power cable.

What we were doing wrong?

We were in fact getting the vast amount of arrows inside the formation area. It’s just a sad fact that the balloons offered too small a target. Take at look at my highly scientific reasoning;
The Differences Between a Balloon and A Man

Figure 1. Man/Balloon Target Area

From figure 1 we can see that a balloon is a lot smaller than a man (really, I know it’s hard to believe but I’ve done the sums and everything).

Figure 2. Direct and Indirect Area Shooting

From figure 2 we can also see what basic common sense tells us. Namely that shooting at a balloon will offer a significantly smaller target than a man. In fact the sums show there is thirty to forty times less target area (based on the dimensions given in figure 1).

So, can we produce targets that have roughly the same size as a man and are cheap enough to mass produce?

Taking the above formation as a template I propose the following solution;

Using paper towels, hung with a weight over one end and slung across two pieces of string set at the appropriate depth to cover the footprint of an armed man, we should have a viable and cheap target. See below;

Conclusion

This works, but it'll be fiddly to set up. Anyone attempting this would need to be properly organised into teams doing specific jobs. The most important part of the whole thing is to get the top rear line nice and rigid. If you fix and throw the towels over a loose top rear line and then try to adjust it, the towels will break.

If it’s raining, it will not work. If the ground is wet, care must be taken not to get the towels wet. Don’t blow your nose in the towels, if they’re wet, they’ll break. Did I mention not getting the towels wet?Take care with the tape too. If it sticks to the towel when you don’t want it to, you have to throw the towel away.

The two main drawbacks to using these paper towel targets are; firstly it's possible for the target to need more than one hit before tearing enough to break.And secondly, one arrow could pass through and ‘kill’ four, five, six targets if they were in a straight line. Care would need to be taken to ensure the targets were in a staggered formation.On a more positive note it's theoretically possible, by widening the depth of the poles, setting the rear line higher and then looping the towels around both twine lines a few times, to build targets the size of knight on horseback.