I have recently been going back to the early part of the war to start building out my English forces, which I’ve put together 3 sets of archers for. There are no plastics available for the early part of the war, so I’ve used a mixture of Claymore, Foundry and V&V to give me suitable variation. All the manufacturers are good, the only slight issue is with Foundry where the miniatures tend to be on the smaller side. An easy fix for this is simply sliding in a bit of plastic board underneath the miniatures to give them a bit of a height boost, so not a major issue.
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3 units of English archers
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The variety of manufactures generally work well together.
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A lot of the miniatures came with arrows stuck in the ground, which I would ideally liked to have removed. Often the arrows were too integral to the miniature to consider removing them, and there were too many with them for me to reject them all (miniatures aren’t cheap!). So I decided to roll with them, even though I understand this is a bit of a debateable point historically.
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Archers in various stages of prepping and loosing arrows.
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Close up of one of the archers, in fairly typical gear for the era.
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For the command basis I generally used a more armoured figure (this one is by V&V), they aren't representative of anyone in particular just leaders of the unit. Typically I've used simplified colour schems to set them apart, my command basis with individual leaders will typically be done seperately and will (if my brushwork is capable) have the relevant coat of arms.
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Another command example
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To give them a bit of a theme I’ve referred to the English Longbowman 1330 to 1515 book and their take on the Cheshire/Welsh archers used by Edward III and the Black Prince in their retinues. This involved them wearing a top green on the right and white on the left. I wanted to avoid making them too uniform, so I made one item of clothing (normally a top, but sometimes a hood) per miniature in the split green/white and then varied the rest. This gives some semblance of uniform without it appearing too prescribed. I’ve also tended to avoid having split padded jacks, and instead generally have shirts underneath in the split colour. This was mainly a stylistic choice to help bring more variety to the unit. I painted the red cross of St George onto most clothing/armour to help provide another layer of uniformity and help to tie the unit together.
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Rear view of the units hopefully you can see that they're relatively uniformed, whilst still retaining some variety.
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These would be fine for Crecy to Poitiers kind of era and I’d probably use them even without Edward III or the Black Prince on the table. I know these would have largely exclusively been part of their retinues, but I can’t limit myself too much unless I go down the route of painting retinues of troops for each individual lord. I may do other units in colours for some of the major players like Sir John Chandos for example, but I can’t realistically cover every single one.
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The guys on the right are from a set Foundry do of walking archers which is really useful.
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You can't really see it, but the guy in the middle of this pic has a beard. I didn't not want to use him as he's a nice miniature, but typically soldiers of the era aren't depicted with them.
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I’ve got a couple of early Hundred War projects lined up in the immediate future and will likely then turn back to other eras of the war.
