Anarchy In England

   One of the big projects I wanted to do last year was an army for the Anarchy, the wars between the (true heir) Empress Matilda and her cousin King Stephen that followed the death of Henry I. Its a period that fascinates me* but I've never known where to start.

*Thanks Griff Hosker

   What I decided was that Conquest Games comes the closest to having the right models, their medieval knights are pretty perfect, along with the archers, but the infantry is where the problems start. As far as my research was showing, I was looking at somewhere between Norman infantry and the early 100 Years War in terms of figures - Footsore's Baron's War stuff gets close but is still not quite right, plus is just too expensive. So what I decided to do was use mostly Norman infantry, with some shield swaps mixed in to update those figures as needed, plus sprinkle in some early crusades figures for other armour types.

   Shields then became my next issue. My research seemed to suggest that heraldry and liveries had started to appear but this wasn't the uniform of 100 Years Wars retinues, so I decided, historically or not, to do a single (varied) shield design across the army, but let each guy have their own clothes. This would also stop it being a new second Norman army.

   As I tend to do with these projects now, I painted mixed batches of figures using the same colour. So batch one might be 10 figures in a mix of archers, crossbows and regular infantry all with orange tunics as they standard thing. The first batch was finished in February and I've painted a batch whenever time and motivation came together.

Archers

Crossbows

Thanks for reading