This is the first unit of my Saxon Warband, twelve stout hearted conscripts. These troops are recruited from the villages and settlements of the warlord's territory. They are not highly trained soldiers with good equipment, but farmers and herdsmen, hunters and woodsmen, armed with a spear and a shield and maybe a helmet or axe.
The bulk of the unit is made from the Wargames Factory Saxon Fyrd boxset, with a few bits courtesy of Gripping Beast. I wanted to arm them with mostly spears, as this denotes their lesser status. Swords would be restricted to the warlord's elite troops, but axes I reckon would be fairly accessible to villagers and commoners.
For the palette I had a good look around on the web and in my history books. There's no definitive answer to how the clothes would have looked, so I went with a pragmatic approach of fairly neutral and muted colours. The shields I decided on a fairly uniform palette, to tie the unit together. There's no real world evidence that I can find to describe how the shields would have looked, what colours or symbols would have been used, only that they would have probably been made from wood with leather stretched over the rims. So I scraped off the nails and treated the shield rims as leather rather than metal.
The bases are pennies, they are the ideal size for these figures. There's a bit of work building up the ground to level with the raised plastic tab, but it's nothing too complex - I just glued on two layers of sand. Modern pennies are magnetic, so I can re-use these figures at a future date in a magnetic movement tray, if I want to progress to element or unit based games, such as Dux Bellorum, Clash of Empires or Hail Caesar. But for now, this is the first unit of my Saga Saxon warband, weighing in at a whopping one and a half points. Next up, a dozen armoured saxons.
