Summer snapshoot

Some sundry updates,

Lots of digging in our back garden has reaped some archaeological rewards - local Boarstall/Brill ware pottery, from c1350-1450. The Boarstall kilns were less than 10 miles away from our home, and Oxford and it environs were their key market. You can read more about the kilns, which were quite an industrial complex,  here. And thanks to Emma of Trinty Court Pottery for helping identify the pieces.

 

A week in Northumberland bagged a fair few castles with a WoRs – Alnwick, Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh –  part of the gatehouse photo’d below. The latter, built in the early C14th, had a lively time in the WoRs. The castle was held by the Percys, and besieged three times, by Edwards IV and Warwick in the early 1460s. Warwick took possession of the castle after Sir Ralph Percy’s death at Hedgeley Moor in 1464. 

During these assaults, it took a pounding by Yorkist artillery. It would have been a tough duty hauling the guns along the sandy and marshy coastal route, deliberately flooded as part of the defences, to the castle.  

 

 

 I also managed to get to Flodden. Possibly one of the easier battlefield landscapes to understand, helped by some excellent interpretation boards. But as ever, that odd dichotomy between a rural idyllic landscape on the day of our visit, and the reality of day. Never sure about the ethics of visiting such sites.

And continuing on the Northumberland theme, there is a stand of Percy and some of his MAAs nearly completed. Hopefully will be done in the next few weeks. 

 

Landsknect block finished

 

The kitbash mix of WG/PG, Perry and War Hammer are finally done.

Clearing the backlog

Finally based about 4 months worth of figures, a mix of projects:

 

Some Duke of Northumberland archers. I fancied a few in different poses, not necessarily losing the arrows, one preparing his stake, two others using their side arms.

 

Two WF Swiss repurposed as Scots

Landsknecht gunners

And a Bad Squiddo undead Landsknecht.

I hope my pace this year will be faster.

Typological life and genealogy of Edward IV

 

Edward Duke of York with Salisbury and Warwick en route to Calais

 I "discovered" some excellent images from the Typological life and genealogy of Edward IV, an English produced illustrated manuscript from c1470, via a History Today article on Kingship during the WoRs.

Its great to see some different contemporaneous images than the ones that are usually used by most books and articles on the WoRs, with some good armour, tents and civilian high-end clothing, as well as the history of Edward's rise to power including the parhelion at Mortimer's Cross, depicted.

Edwards's life with the Parhelion

Edward's geneaolgy, in the former of the Tree of Jess