"28mm Welsh Wars?" Topic

I'm currently looking at putting together a Gwynedd army in 28mm for wrgaming the Welsh Wars, but am currently having difficulty finding any suitable Welsh miniatures.

If anybody could recommend any ranges at all it would be greatly appreciated. If anyone can recommend any suitable miniatures for Edward I's English that would also be great.

Thanks.

Old Glory Dark age Welsh Spearmen and Archers for the lower class warriors….

At one time Mark Sims of Crusader was considering making some Welsh for the 11th and 12th centuries, I think. Perhaps he had to make some business choices that precluded a Welsh line. You might try contacting Mark to see if these are still possible in the future.

Its odd that so few Welsh figures have ever been produced. The Welsh make good historical enemies for the Late Saxons, the Dublin Vikings, and the Anglo-Normans.
The advice to try the Old Glory castings for common troops is probably good, though you will need to search around for suitable figures to match the princely household troops. OG also lack command figures for the commoners, but given the nature of Welsh warfare, this is probably not an issue.

Best wishes.

Oh gosh, I just read more closely and I see you are looking for a later era. Please disregard my post above.

Welsh infantry almost certainly didn't look much different from English infantry.

The place isn't that big. From Chester to Bangor is around 70 miles. There was always a lot of cultural exchange/ trade over the border as well as inter-marriage.

Llewellyn Mawr after all had an English wife….

ditto for trade/ marriage with the Dublin Vikings….

So fashions would have been similar. Why people think the Welsh looked the same in 500AD as 1282 I'll never know. Throw away the Osprey – it's garbage.

Possibly the hairstyle would have been different – the Welsh were big on moustaches I think….

Aside from that, Welsh soldiers looked very much like English ones. Possibly less armour given the nature of the terrain, and that owned probably was… ahem… 'pre-owned'…

So, I can't recommend any ranges since I don't do 28mm, but any figures good for the English will do for the Welsh.

Thanks for the recommendations. I was intending to go for lightly armoured English miniatures, but wasn't sure if there were any ranges out there at all that I may have missed…
Definitely avoiding that dubious Osprey book on the Welsh and Scottish Wars.

Remember the English Army also had a lot of Welshmen in it.

Gwynedd was the biggest and most powerful of the Welsh principalities. She wasn't always exactly popular down south….:)

And the South Welsh were ideal for getting up into the mountains, something the English were never any good at. Ambush fodder the lot of them.

Check out the battle of Cadfan which is in your time period. Also Ewloe which is earlier, but nearly cost Henry II his life – the nature of the warfare never changed much.

Oh – a pretty good book on the subject is Anglo-Welsh Wars 1050-1300 by Stuart Ivinson.

I'm not the author, but he is my wargames partner and now works for the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

He's a total Edward I nut and was the model for the new Edward I statue in Burgh by Sands… :)

As Hobhood3 said, the Old Glory Welsh from the Saxons, Viking, Norman range are awfully close to what you'd want for the less-affluent types:

link

And they're nice figures!

As Bangorstu says, make up the wealthier Welsh with English figures from the period.

Allen

Ebob make a 28mm braveheart range. The english are what your looking for and he does an Edward 1st figure. The english archers he does will double up for welsh plus he does some very nice heavy cavalry on proper english horses.

The range is limited but i'm pretty sure it will be of interest.

Here's my buddy Dan's Welsh army – I believe they're OG, maybe some Gripping Beast picture

Curteys Miniatures are working on a range of 13th century medieval figures.
curteysminiatures.co.uk

Are the Westwind figs useful-I know they're Dark Age.
Mind you I'd want to put them against the Later Saxons.

So long as you've got a bloke in a tunic with a weapon, he's useable.

I'd say for a 13th century Welsh army you could use unarmoured Dark Age figures with no problems.

You're hardly going to wear your best clothes (where fahsion because problematical) on a battlefield.

Ditto moving back through time to the late Saxons – where the Welsh rather over-reached themselves.

Gwynedd spent a few years basically depopulating the border, which brought the wrath of Harold Godwinson down on them.

He holds the all-comers record for defeating Gwynedd at (IIRC) six weeks. The Normans never came close to this – too wedded to fighting from horseback.

That's great, thanks very much