French men at arms

Today I'm posting my unit of French men at arms, who would be a central component of any French Army being fielded. 

An intimidating force of advancing French infantry.

Part of the problem with any 100 years war army is that you’re quite limited in terms of unit types. Essentially the French used men at arms like these, crossbowman and cavalry on the field. From what I understand the French men at arms tended to have a wider variety of armour types then the English and often used cut down lances. From the reading I’ve done the English tended to have heavier armour and were more likely to use two handed weapons (poleaxes etc). The main rationale for this is that the English focussed more of their forces on archers, so had lower proportions of dedicated melee infantry. 

View from above, as you can see there are a mix of armour types. On the front ranks I've got men either more heavily armoured or else with pavises, with the less heavily armoured infantry to the rear.

Rear view of one of the units, I like the chap in the foreground with the coat of plates.

I’ve tried to reflect these trends in this unit, and as you can see there are a mix of armour types and a number of cut down lances to identify it more firmly as French. Some are in padded jacks, coats of plates and full plate. One of the other subtler differences is that the French tended to wear more coats of arms, while with the English this was less common. So again a number of the French are wearing a variety of coats of arms and other coverings over their armour. With all these things I’m not saying any of these trends were exclusive to either side, just that there were certain general differences that can be reflected.

Close up of some of the infantry. That Coat of Arms with the yellow/blue stripes took me an age to get right, making it look neat was a real challenge (for me at any rate).

One final thing to mention is the use of the Pavises. Combined with crossbows their use is more obvious, though how they were used otherwise i'm less certain. Here I've depicted them being used in the front rank to give some protection for the infantry from archers, I doubt you'd have had whole units of people with these (accepting crossbowman). 

Some mean looking French infantry snug behind pavises.

More detail of one of the bases shown in the above picture.

The miniatures themselves all come from the Perry Agincourt to Orleans range and are a mix of plastic and metal. The plastics the Perries offer in this range are truly excellent and with the mix of poses you could easily do whole units with plastics alone. I’ve used some of their metals principally because I wanted a bit more variety in the unit, but you certainly wouldn’t have to. There are 10 bases with 4 miniatures each so a total of 40 in all.

Rear of the Unit, you can more clearly see the higher propotion of cut down lances here.