Wagons Roll!

For the latest Dux Brit raid, Jeff and I played the convoy game.

I took  the Romano-British, under a new commander, following the crushing defeat I received last time. I had my hearthguard and warriors, plus one unit of levy defending the wagons, while the rest of the levy and archers, under the command of Cei, one of my nobles, was sat in the fort.

Cei and his men are out of beans, bacon and beer and are desperately hoping Tristram and Bedwyr can get to them before they die of thirst.

The game started slowly. Painfully slowly. The wagons didn't so much roll as crawl like arthritic snails, as my two units positioned themselves to keep themselves between the wagons and Jeff's marauding Saxons. Fortunately for me, the only thing moving slower were the Saxons! Jeff struggled over the hill, making terribly heavy weather of the terrain, until he finally managed to reach my warriors. Jeff had a unit of skirmishers thistime, the result of his massive win last time. This was the first time the skirmishers had been out, and we were interested to see their effect.

Finally one of his nobles, Cenric, managed to contact with Bedwyr, who was protected the back of the wagons with warriors and levy. Meanwhile, both Tristram and Aelle had several goes at rushing into combat with each other, but neither could achieve enough movement! Losing one pip of a D6 doesn't seem too bad, until you keep rolling ones and twos all the time! The satisfied themselves with insults, and ineffectual  javelins and arrows from Jeff's archers and skirmishers.

Cenric mashes Bedwyr!

A sudden turnup for the books occurred here: Jeff sent Cenric to attack Bedwyr again. With Bedwyr himself wounded, and down to a unit of levy with a couple of surviving warriors, this ought to have been a massacre. But the shieldwall held, and Cenric fell back wounded, his men reeling with shock. Bedwyr managed to  not follow up, which was just as well, and the wagons managed to crawl a bit further on.

Aelle still couldn't force a charge against Tristram, and suddenly noticed that Cei had sortied with the rest of the levy, threatening his flank!

Where the hell did that lot come from?!

At this point, Jeff decided that the beans, bacon and beer simply weren't worth it, and Aelle retreated in good order - very slowly, again. Even the skirmishers couldn't help him! Tristram decided not to follow up, and the beer arrived safely, to slake the thirst of the weary Brits.

Make mine a pint!

Jeff was stymied by the terrain, and had he entered the table somewhere he could have moved a bit faster, things might have ended very differently. As it was, there were few casualties on either side, but my hand of pursuit cards left me with a thief's horde. Better than last time!

Merry meet again!

Tristan - A Present For Me

A little while back I reviewed Musketeer Miniatures' fantastic Bors figure, that I painted as a present for a colleague.


This figure, Tristan, comes as the partner to Bors. In the Arthurian canon, Tristan (Anglicised from Drustan) was apparently a Cornish nobleman, a nephew of King Mark, who largely became famous for falling in love with Mark's mail order bride, Iseult.

There's a pretty strong thread running through the stories that Tristan could have had some Pictish heritage (Drustan derived from Drust, an attested name of several Pictish kings). Of course it's quite possible he was a Cornish noble with Pictish blood - then as now the nobility of different states/countries probably intermarried.

Modelled in a fantastically aggressive running pose, Tristan is a pretty commanding figure. This is ncely in keeping with the Arthurian view of him is a handy fellow in any sort of fight. The sculpting and casting is first-rate, with no flash and minimal joint lines. Interestingly he comes without a weapon in his right hand. I added a sword (swiped from the spares in the GB Dark Age warriors pack), but drilling through to add a spear would be facile. Here he is, bearing down on a group of Pictish raiders. Maybe there's an old family feud between him and the Pictish noble?

Stand and fight!

As Tristan is a well-equipped elite fighter, he has a mail shirt and a Saxon-style helmet, complete with boar crest. I'm perfectly happy with this - there's no evidence that the Saxons had a monopoly on viewing the tough, aggressive boar as a symbolic of a fighting man. In my view Tristan has looked at the state of the art in weapons, armour and tactics and decided that the Saxon style, complete with the small, viciously-pointed buckler, suits him best.

No backing down!

And as for where he's going, well, he might get an outing in a Dux Brit game, but mainly, this one's for my desk!

Decision time!

Merry Meet Again!

Beowulf

I first read Beowulf when I was about nine or ten years old. I don't recall who's translation it was - if I had to hazard a guess, I would say it was Rosemary Sutcliff's. It wouldn't be fair to say it was the one book that set me onto the path that has led me here: that honour belongs to The Hobbit, which I read around the same time. But that version of Beowulf was certainly one of the things that led me to other versions of the same work, and then to read The Sagas, the Fight at Finnsburg, Y Gododdin, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the works of Mallory and so many others.

I own what might perhaps be called a Beowulf bore's collection of different versions. I should say at this stage that I am far from being a scholar of Old English. I can pick out words and phrases, and understand how the language was structured, but I cannot claim to be highly qualified to comment on the accuracy of any translation!

William Morris's version has a feel I like, but there are parts where he seems to translate things differently to all the other versions I've read, so it sits uneasily. It has the advantage of being available for free.

Michael Alexander's version is my personal favourite. My copy is dog-eared, heavily overwritten with my own notes and much repaired. I love the feel and tone of it. The alliterative structure Alexander has produced, to me, really drives home the idea that Beowulf was written to be read aloud, recited in front of enthusiastic listeners, rather than pondered over in a quiet corner.

Marc Hudson makes no attempt to create alliteration, but his version is light, accessible and accompanied by a thorough, thought-provoking commentary.

John McNamara's verse translation is unfortunate in that it came out in 2005. By then I was firmly wedded to Alexander's version, but I would recommend McNamara's version without hesitation to any new buyer/reader. The poem text is excellent and benefits from a fantastic set of supporting notes and commentary.

So here's my Beowulf. This is Musketeer Miniatures version of Aelle. Their figures are fantastic sculpts and casts, and the character figures have so much life that I almost regret having built parts of my Anglo-Saxon and Sub-Roman armies with the figures I have, even though at the time I bought them I loved them. I already have an Aelle, so there was an opening for this figure to do something else.

Never have I seen

a greater earl on the earth than one of you,

a man in his war-gear. He is no hall-retainer,

ennobled with weapons, unless his looks belie him,

given his peerless form.

That description was the one given by Hrothgar's coastguard when he first sees Beowulf and his companions arrive. This mini is almost "straight out of the packet". The only difference is that I replaced the shield, with a version made from 10 thou plastic card, engraved and embossed to represent rivetted construction in three bits. When he hears about the dragon, Beowulf orders his armourers to make him a shield of solid iron, as he believes (quite rightly) that a wooden shield will fail against the dragon's fire.

The champion of warriors, the chief of the nobles,

ordered a wondrous war-shield to be made for him,

entirely of iron, since he knew for certain

that a wooden shield could provide no protection,

when fire attacked wood.

The other figure here was sold with the Aelle/Beowulf as a banner-bearer. He gets elevated to the status of a real character: Wiglaf.

This was Wiglaf, Weoxstan's son,

well-loved shieldman, a Scylfing prince

of the stock of Alfhere; 

Wiglaf is the only man among the Geats with the courage to stand with Beowulf when he fights the dragon. All the other members of Beowulf's hearthguard, the toughest of the tough, turn tail and run, and only Wiglaf remains, striking the blow that gives Beowulf the chance to make a killing stroke against the worm.

Here are the two, together, ready to take on anything that threatens the land of the Geats. I put these two on 1p coins as bases, rather than the 2p's I normally use for characters, with the plan that they could be sabot'ed onto a single base as a unit in a game (sort of "kill one, you still have a king" idea).

They killed the enemy, extinguished its life; 

by their courage, the kinsmen, acting as one, 

worked its doom. So should men do when there is need.

Of course, it wouldn't be complete without a couple of shots of the heroes confronting the dragon, so here goes:

Merry Meet Again!

Morgan Le Fay

The perfect spell, you could not resist,

I cast it well, beguiled and bewitched,

The evening fell and knocked like before,

But this time Hell had come to your door!

"Shapeshifter" - Gary Hughes

Here's the latest in the line of occasional non-historic Sub-Roman characters, Morgan Le Fay.

Morgan was Arthur's half-sister, a daughter of Igraine (Arthur's mother) and Gorlois of Cornwall. She was unhappily married to Urien of Rheged and was a student of Merlin. A powerful sorceress, but also a skilled healer, she plotted against Arthur, undermining him, his knights and even his wife, remaining a powerful adversary for many years. At the end, she was reconciled with her half-brother, and was one for the four enchantresses who went with Arthur to Avalon after his wounding at the Battle of Camlann.

The figure is a Julie Guthrie sculpt, sold via Grenadier Miniatures as a female assassin. The date on the bottom of the figure (1987) is slightly earlier than when I got it. I'd bought it and painted it, and had had good service from it in the rolegame days but had mislaid it. I'd been looking for it among the few figures I'd kept from back then, as I thought it was perfect for this purpose. It took me an age to find, and eventually it turned up behind a workbench in my garage during a massive clearout!

A quick clean-up and prime got her ready to paint, and to my mind there's only one example to follow:
Frederick Sandys' painting of Morgan. The original is in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, but this gives you the idea.

It's interesting to note the Pictish symbols on her overskirt. I don't this interpretation can be beaten, and here's my version derived from Sandys' masterpiece. Not a patch on his obviously, but I'm happy enough. The details on the mini are quite soft and subtle compared with today's castings, but at the time, these were pretty "state of the art".

Does the goblet contain some subtle poison, refreshing wine, a healing draught or some hidden spell the long-term effect of which can only be guessed at?

A powerful ally...

But if the contents of the wine-cup fail, then the dagger in her other hand will serve. I think Aelle is right to be wary of this strange lady.

...But a bad enemy

Marry Meet Again!

Yan Tyan Tethera - Strathclyde Welsh Cavalry

“Yan tyan tethera” means “one two three”, in the Cumbric language once spoken across a wide tract of the north-west of England and south-west Scotland. The language now survives in some place names, and a few vestigial bits of dialect like this, used by farmers to count.

This was the language of a country, variously called Ystrad Clud or Alclud, Rheged or Strathcylde, that once stretched from Loch Lomond in the north to Rochdale in the south.

This part of Britain is generally not a soft, comfortable landscape. Anyone who has not visited it can get a fantastically evocative and extremely accurate view of it by reading George MacDonald Fraser's excellent "The Steel Bonnets". Whilst the main subject of this book is the later Border Reivers, the geography that forms the backdrop is unchanged. Much of the country is bleak, formed of bare, stony fells and harsh-carved hills. In many other, gentler, parts there is only a thin layer of poor soil laying over the same rocks just below. Outside of the coastal plains, this makes for poor farmland, hard to plough and harvest. If it is hard to plough now, how much harder would it have been with an ox-drawn ard plough? The land does, however, provide adequate grazing, for cattle lower down, and tough sheep on the higher slopes.

This hard land has always bred hard people. Apart from Cornwall, this was the last part of England that retained its Celtic language. Long before the Angles arrived, the people of Strathclyde had already spent centuries fighting off the Picts and Scoti, and having resisted them quite successfully they went on to resist Northumbrian dominance longer than anywhere else in the North. The northernmost part remained a semi-autonomous area even later, allied to but separate from, the Kingdom of Scotland. 

Referred to in Saga as “Strathclyde Welsh”, these men, used to a mobile life following their herds, fight mainly as cavalry. Riding men, armed with spears and raiding indiscriminately, were of course a feature of this area even later. In a sense, these cavalry seem the direct ancestors of the later Border Reivers.

Here are the first of my Strathclyde cavalry warriors. These are all built using Wargames Factory Ancient Germanic Cavalry, with some weapon arms taken from Gripping Beast Dark Age Warriors, and a selection of GB Saxon thegn and West Wind Sub-Roman heads.

The only, very slight, issue is that the men with the shield arm held close to the body are problematic in terms of what shields to use. These figures are obviously designed to work with the elongated hexagonal shields in the kit, and the round shields simply do not fit convincingly, and nor did any others that I had in the spares box. A quick measure up gave me a figure for the maximum diameter I could use. A swift rifle through the workshop turned up a length of steel tube of this diameter, which was sharpened to make a disc punch. I used this to chop out a series of discs from a sheet of planked plastic card. A bead of thick cyanoacrylate added around the circumference, allowed to dry and sanded slightly flat formed the shield rim, and the boss was a small disc of plastic card, punched out, with a drop of CA in the centre. Lovely!

In order to get these finished, I built the horses "out of the box". The next ones will get a little more work, to make them more like Fell ponies. It won't be a lot - WF have done a good job with the sculpting, so a bit of feathering on the hooves and a longer mane will do it.

This first set are conveniently numbered yan tyan tethera (from left to right). Yan has a GB Saxon head and upright spear arm, tyan has a West Wind Sub-Roman head, while tethera has GB head. In the last two, the arms ars from the original kit.

Yan, tyan, tethera... 

A 28mm cavalry figure on the table for just over a pound is a really bargain, and with the tiny bit of work I've done I'd say these stand up well against figures I've paid a good deal more for. For those prepared to make the small changes required, I would recommend these without hesitation. As well asSaga, these will give good service as British light cavalry in Dux Brit or Dux Bell, which makes them even better value.

And again!

Comparisons are sometimes helpful, so here's one for you. From left to right we have a  Gripping Beast late Roman on a Conquest horse,  the three WF Strathclyde Welsh and a Newline Design Pict,.

Unlikely looking allies!

Here they are again, side on. I don't know if this matchup is any more plausible!

Let's do it!

Merry meet again!

Wagons Roll! Part 3, Beasts and Men

With the wagons assembled, it's time to make them mobile.

Here are the yokes, with the cattle. The yokes were made by laminating two layers of 40 thou styrene sheet and filing/carving out the shape. Two pairs of holes were drilled, and neck holder were made up from soft wire to fix the oxen to the yoke. The yoke was attached to the shaft with a chain on the real thing.

One final thing. A two-wheeled cart is normally "driven" by having someone walk alongside the ox and guide it. A four-wheeler actually needs someone sitting on the seat yelling and using a stick. My drivers were converted from Gripping Beast Dark Age warriors. These two photos show the original figures and how the changes will be done.

These next two show the results of the cutting and grinding. I've put them on the carts to make sure they fit. It's a trial and error process.

Here are both drivers, assembled, green-stuffed to bung up the gaps/re-texture where necessary, and given a coat of primer. 

So, here's the two wagons, painted, hitched and based, just awaiting their drivers. The basework is some flock from Treemendus. It's fantastic stuff, totally awesome to work with, totally different to the "normal" flock I'm used to. Highly recommended.

After getting the drivers painted and mounted up, all I needed was a bit of static grass to get them on the table. Here's a quick closeup of the drivers. I think the conversions have worked well enough.

Rough looking pair! 

So, time for a couple of shots of the finished articles. These two, with the two-wheeler I built here, give me enough transport for the wagon train scenarios in both the Dux Brit and Saga rulebooks. Tons of fun!

Like Arthurian Britain's answer to Eddie Stobart!

Merry meet again!

Wagons Roll! Part 2, Four-Wheel Wagons

Four wheel wagons are slightly more complex to build than the two-wheeler, but not a lot. Obviously there's twice as much wheel building, and in my case a driver's seat bench, but frankly they don't challenge the building skills much more.

Here's two: one assembled, the other a kit of parts. The keen-eyed among you will notice a couple of design differences between this and the smaller one.

Ready to assemble...

First, a two-wheeler steers by telling the ox where to go, a four-wheeler actually has an articulated front axle. To be clear, the model doesn't: the axle is fixed and the bits and pieces just give the impression that they could turn. There's such a thing as too much detail!

Second (and more importantly) a two-wheeler has ONE ox, between TWO cartshafts. A four-wheeler has TWO oxen, with ONE shaft and a yoke.

Making a functional cartshaft isn't a problem - a length of plastic stock, with a slight upward curve at one end makes it.

What was more of a problem was attaching my existing cattle to the wagon! In the two-wheeler, the oxis removeable, so it can be used elsewhere. Try as I might I couldn't find an elegant but robust way of doing the same thing with two yoked oxen. I finally gave up and bought some more cattle from Irregular Miniatures. You can see them here.

So, here are both carts, assembled and primed.

And again, with a black ink wash applied. I'm leaving final assembly to another post, so...

Merry meet again!

Sub-Roman Hearthguard - More Knights

When I built my Sub-Roman hearthguard for my Dux Brit army, they came from a pack of West Wind minis, with a total of 20 figures in it. Having built ten as the hearthguard and as the command section, I was left with ten more figures. Well and good, but those ten were all in only two different poses. I really can't handle the idea of Dark Age warbands having this level of uniformity, so it was out with jewellers' saw and bench peg, to start changing the look.

Various arms were cut off, re-posed and pinned in place, with hands moved and angled. One slight problem was that the arms on the cloaked figures didn't really lend themselves to much re-posing. Solution? I've got a boxful of arms with spears, swords and axes left over from the Gripping Beast plastics, and a bit of filing, fitting and fettling soon sorted out the problem. Greenstuff solved the inevitable slight mis-matches, mended lost bits of cloaks and replaced missing chainmail.

The results of the sculpting/modelmaking gave me this lot:

Ready for paint

Prime and paint came up a treat (I thought). I went with nice solid colours (actual dyed colours, rather than various shades of dirt) as befitting a paid, retained warband. The different clothing colours were so that if I had more than one hearthguard unit (cough Saga cough...) there is some distinction. As usual I made up my own shield decals. 

Fighting wedge

For Dux Brit, I don't actually need another ten armoured hearthguard. However, I'm not one to throw anything away (no surprises, eh?) and so here we are. They'd obviously make (all together) a smashing elite unit for WAB (Age of Arthur is a favourite of mine), or three to four points of elite troops ready for the day when Gripping Beast get round to producing an Arthurian supplement for Saga!

Single point Saga units.

Painting these was caught up in the delay caused by my chest infection, plus the fact I had run out of bases! I was only a week away from Vapnartak, so I decided to pick up some from Warbases when I was there and save myself the postage, but the sight of the figures sat there unbased was driving me mad. Made the bases up from plastic card and got them finished, just in time to get a start on the new projects I've bought at Vapnartak!

Merry Meet Again!

Fortlet - Walls for a Watchtower

Way back when I built the Sub-Roman watchtower, I said it would be no problem to add some walls. I had forgotten about this. Playing various watchtower games in Dux Brit, it became clear that if you withdraw your force to a watchtower, unless there's some sort of wall, there actually isn't anywhere much to withdraw into.

This superb post by Emilio woke me up to the reality of what I needed. Also, his post shows a nice use of the walls as a standalone enclosure. On the grounds that there's nothing about it to not like, I built one.

Here's a lump of foam. Very cheap, somewhat cheerful, not really very nasty at all.

 Never seen a start like this, have you? Not more than several times!

And here it is, measured and marked out. The dimensions of the wall are derived (fairly roughly) from the reconstructed turf rampart with a wooden pallisade built at Vindolanda. The top of the wall is designed to be wide enough to take a mini on a 20mm base, and for there to be a space wide enough for a mini to stand in between the botton of the rampart and the tower wall.

The magic of a Magic Marker!

Now, cut out. Turf walls like this are fairly ephemeral. Unless regularly repaired, they will rapidly degrade due to the effects of weather and animal action. What this means is that your structure can be fairly rough and ready, and it will be totally authentic. This one was intended to end up being a reasonably neat version, kept in good repair because the place is under constant threat. The result was, well, you'll see.

Vaguely fort-shaped now

Next, loads of posts, cut from balsa, get fitted on three sides. I deliberately didn't cut the entrance at this stage, to make use of the rigidity provided by keeping the structure intact, so I also left the posts off that side. The posts are pushed into pilot holes in the foam and fixed with a drop of CA glue.

Think of the archaeology this lot would make!

I glued it to a base made of 3mm hardboard (cheap and somewhat nasty) with own-brand impact adhesive (cheap and VERY nasty!). The entranceway is cut wide enough to allow the smaller ox cart I built here to enter (to deliver food, weapons and, most importantly, beer for any garrison). Now before anyone laughs, there's a letter among those found at Vindolanda where a fort commander is pleading with the commissary for beer as his men are becoming deeply restless! At more or less the same time, I added the posts on the gateway side.

Base? Check. Gate? Check. What am I missing?

Now, here's a thing. On the Gask Ridge, up in Scotland, the Romans built a whole series of little watchtowers/fortlets like this (admittedly several centuries earlier) and several have been excavated. Where the site is well enough preserved for decent archaeology, the remains of the turf walls, banks and ditches and of postholes marking the corners of the tower can all be found. The entrances through the banks and walls are also pretty clear. What none of them seem to have is any evidence of postholes in the entrances, as would be needed to fit any sort of gate.

So, onward. Start cutting a couple of hundred short lengths of balsa, 3-6mm wide. Planks would have been sawn or riven out of whole trunks, in varying widths, and all used.

The first of very, very many...

And stick them all to the uprights. Best done in bursts, with breaks to do something else to regain your sanity. Ask me how I know...

Raw materials stored ready for use...

Having eventually planked the whole wall (which only took two evenings...), I gave the woodwork (and then everything else) a coat of PVA to help bind all the wooden pieces together, and provide a key for the rest of the groundwork. Next thing is some details on the ground: basically, turf wall sections are not very resistant to foot traffic, and the areas where people go up onto the walls are going to become a quagmire in no time flat. 

                

Walls, completed.

So, at the bottom of the wooden palisade go loads more short bits of balsa (another really interesting job!) laid on the ground, would prevent the garrison sinking up to their knees at the wrong moment. The corners, where planking is difficult, I added some hurdle sections, cast from  polymer clay. Making them (mould and item) is covered here.

I marked out in the centre for the location of the pre-existing tower, then started a horrible messy task: carefully covering all the foam and wood with a thin layer of painters' caulk. What a grotty job! The stuff gets everywhere.

I sprayed all the woodwork black, then went over the groundwork with a mix of brown emulsion, sand and PVA. Here it is ready for colour and details.

            

Walls, walkways, centres. All ready to detail.

Flock, dirty washes, drybrushing, clump foliage, more drybrushing, ivy (moss strands and hedgerow mix) and even more drybrushing follows, applied across the whole thing. Nothing you haven't seen before. Static grass completes the appearance.

Finally, some accessories. The open gateway is a thing. One possibility is that the defenders made something like a cheval de frise to block the entrance. The basic concept was well known in Roman times, so Sub-Romans could certainly have one. And, of course, once it started to rot, it would have gone straight on the fire and left precisely no archaeological evidence! My cheval (chevaux) de frise was made up from bamboo skewer, and an old favourite of mine, headless brad nails. All of these were painted to represent weathered wood, except for the tips of the arms, which were darkened. Whether this represents fire-hardened points, horse muck to promote infection or a subtle combination of both I leave to your imagination.

Two chevaux, one for this and a spare for the ECW!

Here's the finished article. A Warbases ladder got cut down to make two short pieces, which were glued on two sides of the internal bank. It would be a bit steep to climb in a hurry, especially if it's raining (and in England, what are the chances?).

Rain? What rain?

View through the gate

 Here's the fortlet, with a garrison. It's a motley collection of levy, warriors, skirmishers and slingers, with one elite companion trying to keep order. Good luck with that.

Tough nut to crack, this.

Attackers' eye view. Don't fancy it myself.

And again, with the tower in place.

Looking down into the fort.

And another attackers' view. Like this one even less.

Merry meet again!