Finally managed to actually finish some painting: four bases of Rabble for my ECW armies and a coach & horses model to provide an objective or battlefield colour.

Let’s start with the coach:

This an Essex Miniatures model, with outriders from Peter Pig. It is a lovely, chunky bit of kit, and not too complicated to build.

That’s not to say it was easy (it wasn’t, and there was a lot of Superglue involved, most of which ended up on my fingers) but it was easier than the Magister Militum version that I bought at the same time. That arrived with no wheels, and had so many teeny-tiny fiddly bits that I eventually gave up trying to build it at all!

The problem for both is the way that the coach part is supposed to “float” above the carriage bit, hanging from the suspension springs that attach to uprights from the carriage. If you look at the picture above, that odd bit of blue above the rear wheels (don’t understand how that ended up there: there’s no blue on the model!) is where the suspension spring attaches to the upright. On this model, the suspension springs are very cleverly part of the main coach body, bending out from it at whatever angle you need them to. On the MM version, you had to build each part bit by bit i.e. tiny bit attached to tiny bit attached to tiny bit. I’m sure a better modeler than I would have coped, but it was too much for me.

As you’ll see, I based the model to fit with how I’m going to use it when playing the grid-based For King & Parliament rules. The team is separate from the coach, so when the coach is in a square on its own or with nothing in front of it, I shall put the team on the table; and if there’s no room, I won’t. It seems a bit odd, but works without having to use one of my double-deep bases to fit the coach and team on in one, which would then prevent me putting another unit into the same square.

The Mob

You need some Rabble bases for three of the scenarios in my newly published Marlowe to Maidenhead ECW scenario book, so I thought that I’d better finish the ones that I’ve had part-finished for some time.

The figures are a real mixture. There are all the civilian figures I could find from Magister Militum’s Hallmark range; there are the Peter Pig clubmen and peasants; there are the Peter Pig plague doctors (I had to find a use for them somehow!) and then there are a few carefully chosen “specials” from Minifigs’ ECW range. All in all, a wide variety of poses that look properly mob-like.

I always think that it’s difficult to get a good looking Rabble base, and I’m still sure of that now. These are okay, and will do, but they don’t look at good as, say, the equally-mob-like Highlanders that I painted for my Scottish ECW army. On reflection, rather than going for a wide variety of colours, I should have decided on a very simple colour scheme and used that for all the figures, making allowances only for what they are wearing.