Thursday, January 5, 2023

English and French late HYW casualties

For this post I’ve been working on some late casualty bases for my late HYW project. These will be used for wargaming when I eventually get around to doing that. 

All the casualties together

Doing smaller projects like this give me nice breaks in between working on larger units. So these and command bases are always little bits of fun that I give myself to do, which don’t require to much thinking.

These are infantry casualties and depict both French and English examples, with some generic ones thrown in for flexibility. The figures are a mix of Perry WoTR causalities mixed in with some of their carroccio figures (these can be found in their European Armies range), the latter with the praying figures can really help make some nice era appropriate vignettes. I’d like to take credit for this idea, but credit where credit’s due it came from my friend Oli over at Camisado.


A French infantryman contemplating where it all went wrong
 

The circular bases with counter are available from Warbases and are v handy for this sort of thing
 

Another French infantryman in the process of taking an arrow

 
English billmen mourning a lost comrade


An English man at arms helped off the field by a brother in arms, perhaps from his personal retinue?

I haven’t gone in for loads of blood and gore, which would invariably be more realistic, in so far as one can be with 28mm figures, so have opted for more muted depictions of fallen soldiers. Not that I’m afraid of grisly things, it’s more just modelling that kind of thing just doesn’t hold any interest for me.

A priest gives a man at arms his last rights

A priest going about his business giving spiritual sustenence to the fallen

A lightly armed infantryman who's luck had run out

I remember reading the book ‘Bloody Roses’ about a mass grave dug up from the battle of Towton. What struck me was some of the injuries people had survived, with people having significant facial wounds that healed and then gone back into soldiering. This was no less true in the HYW and I remember reading a depiction (I can’t recall where of the top of my head) of an examination of the skeleton of a known HYW war captain who’d fought over there permanently (as opposed to on campaign). He’d had healed fractures and missing front teeth and I rather suspect this was not uncommon amongst the permanent military forces stationed over in France. A tough life was a soldiers lot.