Men of Shropshire

With just four weeks and two days to go before the "Wargamer" show in Birmingham and the inaugural outing of the 1314 project that has dominated my work for the past year or so, I am trying to stack up completed units as quickly as possible to save myself some late nights as we wend our way through November!!!

Latest new kids on the block (although I painted them a while ago, and did the flag, and even varnished them, but only based them yesterday!) are these "Men of Shropshire", hardened veterans of many a skirmish against the dastardly North Welsh and now set on meting out the odd beating to the more northerly Celts of this sceptre isle.

These hard-bitten veterans have damaged shields, mixed armour and bad attitudes, but will no doubt help keep the Earl of Hereford's command out of trouble for a while when they finally hit the table.

As with the "Carlisle and the Cumbrians" unit I painted and posted about ages ago, I have taken modern and older references to Shrewsbury and Shropshire and stripped them back to get something I find more plausible for 1314. The blue and yellow is here to stay, but gone are the lions' heads, the modern day ermine on the yellow chevron, etc., leaving just said chevron on its field of blue.

The figures are my usual Fireforge plastics, with just the odd conversion thrown in.

G

The completed West Mercians in all their glory

A veteran bunch of hard-bitten mercenaries

Distressing the shields was easy given their plastic manufacture. Painting some in paler, washed out tones, helped the illusion of them being in regular use I feel.

I like chevrons, especially in the run-up to florry counter-florry!

The whole unit again.

The side the Scots will not see (unless I am playing the Scots when the time comes., of course!)