Iain W 28mm New period, new army Anglo Saxons for Dux bellorum 360 points

I remember buying a wargames illustrated in Carlisle ,I'd just walked Hadrian's wall (which was great fun).  It  had an article on the War of the Roses and on the cover, an illustration of the battle of Barnet 1471 which continues to be a battle I want to cover again in better detail, but I digress.

There was another article on a new rule set,Dux Bellorum by Dan Mersey covering warfare in  Britain between 400AD to the Norman era and seemed to have nice mechanisms of differentiating between each group of hairy psychopaths, and appeared to offer rather more than a shoving match with spears that dark age battles can become.

In the article there was an example of building two armies out of two of the new gripping beast plastic sets, at the same time another dark age skirmish game  Saga  came out and I duly bought the plastic boxes and both rule sets, clearly advertising in magazines work!

Some years later and very little/ nothing had happened, I'd bought some metal dark age figures on Ebay but that was it, I'd initially gone off the great idea because I didn't really want two dark age armies in chainmail,  it seemed a bit silly, anyway dux bellorum got bypassed by  Lion Rampant/Dragon Rampant and dux bellorum and Saga gathered dust.

I then went to Colours a couple of years ago and found someone selling lots of cheap Blacktree design ancient Germans which I had no use for and late Romans, obviously I bought them.  I hadn't bought the Picts which I deeply regretted and then saw the same chap at Salute and was able to buy the Picts, phew! With a few more purchases I now had enough figures to give me a pagan Saxon army , Pict army, Late Roman ,Irish and Romano Brits  the armies aren't that big ,the Saxon one is eight bases , I've chosen  ten figures a base-ish , so there are 70 figures here, one more base to go, they're mostly Black tree design Germans with round shields,  the armoured chaps are gripping beast plastics in  the back rows are various unknown Ebay types. I quite like the barbaric hairy, fur covered pagan Angles, looking at them now they look a bit like a bunch of Game of thrones extras!

 A unit of companions.

 A noble unit

 Some back row chaps

 Another unit of nobles

 More back row types.

 Final unit of nobles.

 Back row types.

 Ordinary warriors

 Second unit of ordinary warriors

 Final unit of ordinary warriors.

Big mass of hairy pagan English.

I know the helmets are slightly anachronistic (too late on the companians and too early on the nobles) having uniformed shield colours is also wrong but makes the disparate force hold together, plus they're my toys and I'm happy with them!

If it doesn't work out with Dux Bellorum there are plenty of other rulesets I could use them with so I'm just happy to have completed them!

Points 70 x 5 gives me 350 points so I'm halfway to my total.

The shields are handpainted but were pretty straightforward so I wouldn't bother with extra points.  I won't be doing quite so many in one go in future, I thought dark age figures, surely I can knock them out but that wasn't the case,  next post will be 4 figures!

All the best Iain

Wow, the back story on this project is an epic saga fit for the annals in own right Iain.  I'm someone who has just about every flavour of Hairy Psychopath DNA covered by Dux B in my own genes, so I can certainly appreciate a mass of Dark Age infantry.  I've done Late Saxon stuff in my past and am solely tempted at times by the earlier end of the time span.  

Excellent work on this horde.  I fully appreciate your issues on painting lots of these types.  Painting one DAIS (Dark Age Infantry Slog) type is fine but when you do a bunch you want to differentiate between flavours and it tests the brain.  I like these guys a lot, don't give a fig if the helmets are slightly off and am giving you 10 points for the nice shields regardless of what you say!  So that's 360 points for a nice complete circle (which seems appropriately Pagan to fit the army).