The Shrewsbury Foote.

After a year spent painting Romans & their Italian cohorts I'm having a well deserved break & heading forward in time 1800 years to Stuart era England & scene of my first ever foray into 25/28mm wargaming some 30 years ago.
In anticipation of some actual gaming I've started to update the bases of my English Civil War collection, starting with the titular 'Shrewsbury Foote'

Before getting to the photos it might be useful to explain the origins of this unit:

As part of the Royalist recruiting drive in 1643 various units of the English army in Ireland were shipped back to the mainland disembarking at various ports along the Welsh coast & in the West country in late 1643 & early 1644, the units that concern us are as follows:

Col. Fulk Hunckes
Col. Wm. Gibson    all arriving 1643
Col. Henry Warren

Col. Robert Broughton
Col. Henry Tillier         arriving early 1644

The first group of regiments served at the Siege & Battle of Nantwich as part of Lord Byrons army & thereafter with Broughtons & Tilliers in Prince Rupert's 1644 Northern campaign, culminating in the Royalist defeat at Marston Moor. It was after this disaster that the remnants of these units were brigaded together as The Shrewsbury Foote.
They continued to serve the Royalist cause under a Colonel Smith ( Broughton & Tillier both being captured at Marston Moor) and are noted as being 500 strong at the battle of Naseby in 1645. After that setback the remnants of the unit were dispersed into various garrisons in Shropshire but they did have a last hurrah at the battle of Stow on the Wold in 1646. Not the most successful of military experiences, but one typical of many Royalist regiments from 1643 onwards.

As far as dress & equipment goes I've managed over the years to find a few reliable details:

Col.Tilliers. Green coats ( noted in aletter from Dallison to Prince Rupert), no info on colours but there is a letter somewhere that mentions them flying strips of green taffeta at one muster in 1645.

Col. Broughtons. Often attributed as wearing green coats, based on a correspondence noting a green coated brigade at the last stand following Marston Moor, Tilliers are known to have been present & the assumption is that Broughton's were the other regiment brigaded with them.
Colours may have been blue ( device unknown) but it escapes me where I read this snippet of info.

Col. Warrens. Red coats & noted as carrying red & white colours in Ireland, no info on what form these took however ( gyronny, red with white devices, stripy?) & whether the practice was continued in England.
I've not found any information on coats & colours for Gibson's & Hunckes's but it is noted that the first group of regiments were re-equiped with civilian clothes on their arrival in Wales in 1643 so for the campaign in the north west they would have presented a motley spectacle.

History lesson over, onto the pictures:

This more uniformly equipped unit of musketeers are Tyldesley's Regt, late of the Oxford army.

As noted above Warren's Regt. may have used red colours, the use of white balls is pure artistic licence.

Historical note: the pikeman in the fetching red britches is supposed to be me, a hangover from my days in the Sealed Knot.

The miniatures are all Redoubt Enterprises & Renegade. More to follow soon.

Yet More Romans.

Without further ado, the pictures:

I have around 30 more figures to assemble & paint plus a small unit of roman cavalry to source and that will be it for Romans for the time being. The next step is to actually use them in a game, more on this nearer the time.
Not sure what the next project will be yet. I would like to enlarge my Lion Rampant retinue with a few more men at arms & archers from Claymore Castings, but I do have a couple of packs of Orinoco Miniatures Gran Colombians to finish off first & painting webbing straps will be a nice change of pace after painting 100 plus shield edgings.

A Mixed Bag.

After last weeks sterling progress painting the rank & file this week has mainly been concerned with the  better class of Roman.

Centurion.

Signifer & Cornicen for a unit of Triarii.

A&A Miniatures Samnite. Officer for the allied legion.

The obligatory pachyderm, with hastati & triarii crew members.

All in all things progressing well with this project. There is another unit of heavy infantry in paint as we speak & another still in the raw. When these are done with their attendant velites I will have a viable force with which to fight a war-game ( hooray!). Just the small matter of purchasing some cavalry, though as a stop gap I could use the ubiquitous Tarentines from my Successor collection.

Romans! Dozens of 'em.

The headcount of hastati/princeps is now up to sixty:

Add to this the thirty odd velites also finished & there is the makings of a viable army to game with. Obviously I still need to organise some cavalry to augment this vast host but in the meantime this pachyderm will have to stand in:

I was going to replace the hoplon on the side of the tower with a scutum, but figured that the latter might be a bit of a handful in such close confines.
Once this little side project is completed its back to the legions again, this time with fetching powder blue scuta.

Republican Romans.

After a longer than expected hiatus from what was supposed to be this years main project I have taken up again where I left off & finally finished a fourth maniple of hastati/princeps.

In addition I have managed to complete another ten velites, which is somewhat of a record given my usual slow painting speed.

One thing about painting all these light troops, you do realise what a large proportion of each legion they represented. Just the thing for tenderising a nice juicy phalanx before the heavies piled in.

Paint it Black. More Romans.

While I admit to having been diverted by other new & shiny fripperies work has been progressing on my main project for 2015:

Finally got bored with using the 'out of box' signifier, so I've cobbled together a more dynamic version using various spare parts. Also thinking about revising a couple of the shields, the gunmetal/black versions aren't as photogenic as the bronze/black versions.

Scottish/ Welsh Wars Miscellany.

Following a day of hedge planting in Cheshire at the end of last week I took a short detour on the way home to take a look at one of Edward I's more unusual & less well known castles at Holt on Dee.

Unusual in that the inner ward is constructed entirely on top of a sandstone outcrop, so that its ground floor would have been level with the first floor of the outer curtain wall. This fact & the surrounding marshy ground would have made it quite a tough nut to crack in a siege, though I suspect its main purpose, given its position on a crossing point of the River Dee between England & Wales, would have been imposition of tax on livestock drovers & merchants.

There isn't a lot left to see, though considerably more than last time I drove past when the entire structure was overgrown with ivy & bramble. The structure was slighted after the 1st Civil War & further denuded when masonry was shipped off for use in the construction of Eaton Hall further along the Dee. As you can see, the builders are currently in stabilising the site & putting handrails in place so one would assume the site is going to be open to access before much longer.

Some more progress has been made with the Lion Rampant retinue, here are a couple of the Highland Archers currently WIP:

Still managing to keep up a steady output of figures from the Workbench of Doom, despite being busy in the day job, one of our current projects is an American Barn for stabling horses, but if you would like a 36'x24' war-games shed building we would be happy to oblige.