War of the Roses – Lancastrian DBA army Part 1

A long time ago I did a DBA army for the Yorkists – you can see that here: Completion of the DBA War of the Roses Yorkist army. Well as we have been playing a good amount of ADLG this year and a few people have medieval armies. So, I have working on getting a decent army done for this period. The first stage of that is to do some DBA armies which I have in the lead mountain. I have a Lancastrian army to face the Yorkist so here are the first part of that. Doing DBA armies allows me to use them for that game and are a great start for growing into ADLG forces.

A core of any War of the Roses army are the bowmen, so here are the 4 bases needed for the Lancastrians.

These are all in the livery of Henry VII. That said the white and green are generally Lancastrian colours it seems and may have been used by other ‘minor’ nobles as well. These models are from Essex and are part of one of their pre-made army packs. That said they do have a nice combination of poses as you can see.

I like how these bowmen also have their spare arrows in the ground. This was a period where the quiver was not that much used by foot troops from my understanding, so they work well for the 15th cent. The DBA army list wants all 4 of these in the force so they will be a core piece of the DBA army.

Next are the billmen to support those archers. There are again mandatory for the army and I did them with the same livery as the archers. This will also allow them to be easily differentiated on the table even if someone uses my other army as the the Yorkists have a variety of coat colours/liveries on their figs. You can see that in the previous posts.

You can see these follow a very similar colour scheme to the archers. There is less variety in these models – for obvious reason that they are in a fighting pose, but thats ok. The pose is also little challenging for ‘doubling these up to make them ADLG bases, as the polearm blades do overlap the bases. I hopefully have posed them so they actually will go together without too many issues though.

The view from the back shows the livery well. Note, smart readers may notice that I made a mistake on these really. I painted the while on the right and the green on their left of the whole figure. This works for their fronts but in theory this should I think be reversed on the back to they are still white then green. The livery should be in the same order as the viewer looks on them. So… the colours should have been reversed on their backs. Ah well – I am sure if anyone comments we can have the discussion about me being stupid…as I not going back to repaint them now.

Lastly for this post, are the 2 bases of Men-at-arms. There are 2 optional bases in the list, the first being as an option for the general, the second a man-at-arms as an option vs. other units. I have enough for both, although neither may get used in a game. These also make a nice foot knights base for ADLG.

One of the bases has a banner – taken from the generic Peter Pig banner pack. Note, after some web research I found that many such banners were stiffened vs, being a traditional flag. This was often done with internal poles to make sure the banner was visible. So this is much more straight and visible than a plane flag would be. It looks a little odd, but makes sense as this way it would always be visible to friend and foe. It’s needed when nearly everyone in armour looks similar. It will work well to highlight the general’s base as well.

So there we are. There are quite a few optional items in this army so I will show the rest of this next week. You can also get a hint that I have more models to come as the Peter Pig flag is just the start of models which will be adding to this force.