Battle of Pinhoe 1001 AD - Dux Bellorum

In 1001 a Viking force estimated to have been around 4-5,000 men strong marched on King Ethelred's burgh and fortified city of Exeter led by the infamous Viking raider Palig Tokesen who was supposed to have been preventing such activity for Ethelred, having been paid by the king and granted a manor for his services.

The campaign area in 1001 AD and my home town front and centre in the history

The force set out from its landing point on the beaches of Exmouth and rowed up the River Exe to attack the city but found it well prepared and with the defences able to rely on the protection from the old Roman walls, built by the Legions and kept in good repair since those times.

Failing to intimidate the city to surrender the invaders fell back to Exmouth burning and pillaging the local area on their way but also spreading out further afield so that Lympstone and Topsham went up in flames and Pinhoe, a little village to the north-east of the city, was next on the list of targets.

It came as a bit of a shock to the Vikings to then find that the county army of Devon supported by men from Somerset had gathered on a hill just north of the village.

Kola the High Reeve of Devon and Viking leader Palig Tokesen go toe to toe in our mid-week test game

Dux Bellorum are really very good and I have always enjoyed playing them

Exact and precise details about this battle are not available but what is reported allows some assumptions to be made to try and piece them together.

The likely place for the Anglo-Saxon force to have gathered is Beacon Hill above the village with commanding views out over the surrounding countryside and estuary, perhaps relying on the natural strength of the site to deter any sudden attack.

The army is reported to have been led by the High Reeve of Devon called simply Kola and his deputy Eadsige indicating that the main army of Devon was gathered.

Based on the 8,000 population of Devon available to be taxed it is estimated that the county could have mustered some 2,000 properly equipped warriors plus a few extras added in from across the county border with Somerset.

Beacon Hill with its Celtic Cross where the burial pits would be dug close to Pinhoe Church that stands near the battlefield today

Thus it is thought that the Vikings would have had an advantage in numbers by about two to one and experience given that these Vikings had been making a nuisance of themselves around the south coast of England and East Anglia for a number of years previously so probably knew their stuff when it came to a bit of sword, axe and spear play.

The Vikings on arrival in force attacked immediately, uphill without hesitation and seemed to have caused havoc in that first charge.

However the local forces fought back bravely and although eventually forced off their position and to retreat back to Exeter seemed to have given a good enough account of themselves to have managed to break off and not loose any of their leaders in the process.

The two forces gathered before our game - so nice to get the collection out again and I must plan to get some more!

In addition to that and despite, as one chronicler reports, 'The heathens had the power of the battlefield' the result gained them little and they immediately returned to their ships and Exmouth splitting their forces and with Tokesen hurriedly making his way to London to make his peace with Ethelred.

The game was the first chance to try out my new hills

Thus with this amount of information I thought it might be fun to re-fight this local battle which was fought only about a mile or so from where the Devon Wargames Group meet at next month's club gathering and give myself an opportunity to get the Dark Age collection out in 2019.

As before, my rule-set of choice is Dan Mersey's Dux Bellorum and to help sort out trying to capture the key aspects of this fight in a table-top encounter, before taking it to club, I enrolled the help of my regular wargaming partner Steve M who offered himself up in the role of the Viking leader as we both got reacquainted with the rules.

Kola and his force of Devon Fyrd

With Beacon hill being the key feature of this battle and that the Vikings charged up it in spite of its commanding position I simply put out my new modular hill terrain as seen, sprinkled a limited amount of terrain in the form of the odd set of open woods, small copses and sorted out two armies to fight the standard 'Annals Battle' scenario which is basically a line em up, go at it affair.

Tokesen's veteran Vikings with all those pesky archers

Both armies arranged for battle with Steve's Viking force arranged in three distinct groups on the left of picture 

I opted to set the Anglo Saxons up as per the army list in the book but with 49 points rather than the suggest 32 and with a predominately warrior based force , with only a couple of noble warrior/foot companion bases. In addition I made the Saxons up as a Shield-Wall force.

You can almost hear the shields being beat upon as the war-cry goes up heralding the Viking charge

The Vikings on the other hand were based on the Sea Raiders list with predominantly noble warrior/foot companion bases and a few basic warrior types to make up the numbers. To this force I gave the Viking one extra skirmish base with all of them counted as archers and an extra Leadership Point (LP) token bringing the total to 48 points.

The Anglo-Saxon line waits braced behind their boards

We played through about eight turns of play before calling it a night  with the Anglo-Saxons well on top having neutralised three Viking skirmishers and a warrior base for no loss at that point.

The two lines close and the Saxon skirmishers in the woods closest to camera prepare to ambush the Viking archers with a surprise charge of their own

As always, Shield-walls are tough to break down but the added rule we used to dice to see if LP's used to cancel a hit was effective on a 4,5 or 6 helped to reduce the effectiveness although all the set up is under review following this first test game and we will change rolls and a few set up rules prior to our next rematch next week.

The Saxon line fought in two parts with the bulk of the force on the hill with Kola

We both really enjoyed getting back into Dux B and if you are thinking about playing this set and haven't done so I would readily recommend getting them and playing them.

Crunch! The two lines come together as the Vikings make an impetuous charge on the Saxon shield-wall. However the Vikings are getting the worst of it with the figures behind the lines indicating where casualties have been taken

The decision points for the players throughout the game are many and highly entertaining with the playing of LPs at critical moments in the battle a real highlight that we both thoroughly enjoyed.

On the Saxon left Kola's foot companions met head on with Tokesen's 

Once I have worked out the right balance for this scenario and given the chaps at the DWG the first sighting and playing of it I will report back on how it played and share the set ups and orders of battle in full detail.

The end of this first test game with the Viking line looking battered and with Saxon skirmishers closing in on the rear of the left flank (left of picture)

Kola's companions hold the Viking right as their left collapses

Until then I thought I would share these pictures of out test game to whet the appetite.

Thanks Steve for a fun game and for your input into the scenario and looking forward to next weeks re-run.

References used:
Battlefield Walks Devon - Rupert Mathews

Next up - I'm off to Crusade tomorrow and plan to do my normal report on all the fun of the day plus the long promised Museum of Somerset and visit to Taunton post is done so I will probably get that out next week.

Terrain Build Update - Breached Walls, Finished

The final 'table test', seeing how the completed model looks on the terrain mat

OK, so picking up where we left off in part one of this series of two posts looking at creating breached wall sections from Warbases excellent range of MDF Roman walls we now move on to finishing off the prepared breaches together with the bases for them and the rest of the wall sections and gate house designed to marry the whole thing together.

Terrain Build Uupdate - Breached Walls Part One

This next part of the construction uses all the skills and techniques covered in other posts I have done recently, looking at creating scatter terrain and modular sloped hills, namely the application of and sealing down of the coats of ballast and scatter that create the final terrained look and just as importantly sealing the whole model against constant handling by wargamers.

I will just cover off the basics here in this post but if you want to get a fuller description then you will need to go to my Labels tabs in the right hand column and find 'Terrain' and start with my series of posts looking at trees and scatter terrain from December 2018 entitled similarly to this post 'Terrain Build Update' and follow the series where I go into the basics of terrain work.

Ballast and sand added to the breaches to create the rubble look

So with the breached sections carved into shape, bits of large chunks of masonry added and a coat of plaster smeared on to lessen the larger, stranger looking air pocket holes formed in the expanding foam it was time to add the different sized pieces of sand and ballast to the coat of watered down PVA and allow the the whole thing to dry thoroughly.

It is now that the large pieces of masonry start to stand out and add that extra level of detail

In addition to the breaches the wall section bases got their texture added to their bases

As well as working on the breaches I needed to add texture to the bases on the other wall sections designed to help marry the whole thing together.

Note the little areas of grittier ballast designed to allow me to leave areas of the ground work showing through the turfed areas - I don't want this to look like a golf course when its finished!

Strictly speaking you would expect a gate house like this to have a 'cobbled stone' entrance but that would have required laying down a textured approach and sanding back the bottom of the gates so I decided on sticking to a more 'new build' look and plenty of dirt.

Once the ballast has dried thoroughly it was time to apply my trusty mix of PVA/water/chocolate brown house paint to apply the first sealing coat to the model and to provide a nice shadowy undercoat to the rest of the paint job.

You can be quite liberal with the brown and not worry about covering the detailed bits of masonry as all that detail will still get picked out by the next paint coat and areas of brown left give an impression of shadow in the recesses and great depth to the overall look.

Once the brown undercoat is dried thoroughly it is on to the first west-brush coat of highlight for the breaches where a going over of dark grey, dry brushed light grey was the first step.

Then the lighter chunks of stonework were picked out with the Coat d'Arms Field drab, highlighted Horse Tone Roan, as for the wall tops and pavement stones and I used a bit of both those colours to lightly dry brush areas of the rest of the breached rubble to add variety to the grey colour overall.

Dry brushing the detail into the rubble and the facing stonework just showing at the edges of the cracked plaster

Finally some of that lovely creamy white wall plaster would likely show especially at the outer reaches of the rubble spill where the top of the wall would have fallen out furthest from the rest of rubble spill.

Not too much though as most of it would be in among the core stone rubble.

This is also an opportunity to dry brush and accentuate the parts of the facing stonework revealed at the edges of the broken plaster which was created using the foam-board in part one.

One other touch that I didn't mention in part one was that I carefully scored crack lines into the MDF around the breached areas implying the stress to the remaining sections of plaster work still standing.

Note the areas of cracked plaster work showing around the breach, together with a few small pieces lying among the rubble

Once the rubble work was done I simply painted the wall that remained in the same colours as the standing sections (you will need to refer back to my posts from early 2018 to see the first build of my Roman wall and buildings to see what I did).

After that it was simply a case of dry-brushing the ground work with my light golden brown craft paint as per the scatter terrain posts.

All the painting done and left to dry overnight ready for the final coats of scatter to create the turf work

With all the painting done and the sections brought together to be left to dry thoroughly overnight you can already get a sense of how the walls will look once the turf scatter and clump grass tufts are applied.

Needless to say I went to bed satisfied with a good days work and really looking forward to the following day to bring this project to a close.

The next day was all about getting the ground work finished which means applying the three colour ground scatter, grass tufts and sealing with a final spray of PVA and water to lock the scatter down and blend the colours.

Again the detail of doing the scatter terrain work is covered in the post looking at the modular hills, suffice to say I was primarily looking to put the darker shade turf in close to the wall footings, along the border of the road entering the gate and around the broken groundwork.

Once that was done I applied a few areas of lighter scatter around randomly to create some variation to the turf, followed up by an overall finish of the mid green.

The colours when first applied can be quite a contrast, but a spray of water and PVA through an atomiser, the ones women use for perfumes and such like, will cause the colours to leech into each other and bring the whole thing together to create a more natural look.

Darker shades are applied around the foot of the wall with a few lighter patches randomly applies on the open turf. Then finished off with tufts. Note this turf has just been sprayed and already the colours are starting to blend as it dries.

One important thing to remember when applying the turf is to let the pieces dry off above any flat surface. The picture below shows all my sections drying on top of paint tins. This is really important as excess PVA/water can run off under the bases and will dry, firmly sticking your sections to the surface they are left standing on if you are not careful.

A little grass texture was applied to the inside section of the breaches to imply an internal grass verge

The base I planned for my gate house did not allow for the steps projecting from the back of the two towers and so I added left over wall capping to make a new layer of paving to go under each step

Once the turf was on, I allowed the bases to dry out a bit before adding the grass tufts and a few meadow flowers for variety.

The picture below shows all the sections turfed and now dry allowing me to put them out on the table together without any concern for them sticking to each other or the table cover.

Grassing the breached sections was a little different in that the bases had internal parts as did the gate house and I wanted to imply a small grassed area between the outer wall and the internal streets so added a small amount of turf on those internal parts of the base.

However in the wall is not the same as outside it and so I did not put any tufts on the inner parts, implying a better kept area of grass than that outside the wall.

Another consideration is that I intend to run battering rams and siege towers up against this wall and so I decided to be sparing with the grass tufts to allow plenty of room to get models placed on flat ground up against the wall.

My games are all about large scale battle with multi-figure bases and I am not really a fan of the individual figure based rules popular with WAB and some of the fantasy sets.

The breaches will accommodate individual figures placed on them to indicate the struggle when fought over, but are principally designed to show when a breach has been effected and where on the wall it is.

Finally we have the new walls and their bases displayed on one of my mats to show how they will blend into my table set up.

The next stage will be to populate the interior with other suitable buildings most likely from the Warbases range of Roman buildings and I already have an idea on how to create a road surface to place those buildings on, within the walls, to have it looking quite different from the surrounding countryside outside.

I am really pleased with how these walls have turned out and have confirmed my own thoughts when Warbases first released them about how suitable they are for scratch building and conversions, with the price making them very competitive with other resin options.

MDF is a very flexible product to work with but I am a firm believer that to make it look good a little work, preparing it and painting it, is still required just as you would with resin or most other materials.

The rear of a breach section next to my improvised paving supporting my tower door step.

With the amazing selection of excellent quality MDF buildings now available and with manufacturers wowing us with even more amazing things they are able to produce and at a price that is very affordable, good looking terrain to compliment good looking armies has never been so possible as it now is.

The next time you see the walls from inside I hope to show you my new set of internal buildings and internal road base

So that's the breached walls done  and I now have a mind to have a look at other types of hills together with a bridge or two, not to mention some roads I have my eye on, so a few more Terrain Updates to come going forward.

Lots of stuff to come on JJ's with my visit to Taunton and the Museum of Somerset, Steve M and I get some practice reacquainting ourselves with Dux Bellorum and the Battle of Pinhoe 1001 and I and a few of the chaps are off to Crusade in Penarth this weekend so lots to, no doubt, tell you about from there.