Having not done a post for some time I wanted to showcase a unit I’ve been working on intermittently for the last few months.
I managed to produce a unit of French cavalry, these are heavily armoured so are full blooded men at arms. They’re all Perry mostly plastics with a few metal figures included for variety. It was fun painting them, with the various armour styles and options you could have a lot of fun experimenting with painting. I will in time add more specific commands, which will mean attempting my hated coats of arms, but it needs to be done in HYW armies alas.
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| Cavalry command, in this instance depicting Poton de Xaintrailles though the banners are interchangable. |
In this instance I’ve done them with generic clothing so they could be any commander, though have attempted to make them look more continental with jupons and loose sleeved items of clothing. I’ve not gone in for too much in the way of patterns, though have done a little to bring them to life a bit. This is more to do with the limitations of my painting ability, I can manage simple patterns and quartering for instance, but would struggle with full blown coats of arms. In reality of course most of the garments in question would have undoubtedly been highly decorated, almost garishly so in many cases. This is in stark contrast to the almost monotone way they’re often depicted in film and TV, if someone actually troubled themselves to make a movie capturing some of the vivid colour of this period I think they’d set themselves apart.
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| Close up of the unit. |
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| Two men at arms in all their glory, note the barding. Barding would apparently mostly have been used on the outside of the unit, with the more lightly armoured horses protected when the unit clustered together on the charge. |
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| Nice close up of the unit from the front. |
An interesting question to ponder is why the French didn’t manage to develop an effective counter to the English tactical doctrine of dismounted men at arms flanked by wings of archers? I won’t get into all the details of why, but the French did apparently experiment with different ways of countering it by outflanking etc. What seems to have really done for them more than anything (this is true in almost all the major English victories) was a lack of effective coordination between their battle formations for various reasons. This was mostly either due to poorly defined command structures, terrain or over eagerness to engage. In all these instances (Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Verneuil) it led to a pell-mell attack that denied the French the opportunity to attack with the full force of their superior numbers.
The French did however work out a very effective strategy that was even employed right at the start of the war by Philip VI, which was to simply deny the English a pitched battle. Philip had used this effectively before Crecy and the wily Charles V used it more effectively after he took the throne in 1364. It was difficult to maintain the discipline, effectively allowing the English to ravage the land, but it meant that eventually they’d run out of money/resources and be forced to retreat. Through using this strategy of non-engagement (well not completely, they still attacked where they could and used sieges extensively) Charles V managed to undo almost all of the English conquests, except a small portion of Bordeaux and Calais, before Henry V re-started the war in 1415 some 35 years after his death in 1380.
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| The coronation of Charles V 19 May 1364, who proved a much more wily adversary for the English. |
Anyway hope you enjoyed more of my ramblings and the Miniatures I’ve produced, I’ve got a small project for the earlier period that I’m working on that I’ll hopefully be able to post next month.
