Romans, they go the house?

'"Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house? '

Just a quick post.

At Newbury, I bought Magister Militum's new 10mm Roman buildings. I saw these on a flyer I received from them but as far as I can see they aren't yet on the website.

Roman - indeed most ancient - buildings are pretty hard to come by in most scales. I have picked up various examples in the past but most didn't really appeal. An option I've considered, and seen used to good effect, is to use the paper buildings from 'Roman Seas' . However, I wanted something with a bit more heft and which I'm less likely to squash. There is also Lurkio's Roman Villa. This looks nice though to be a bit hypercritical I think they could have used a better roof tile effect. It looks like theirs uses either Slater's or something similar. For scratchbuilding, you can get some very nice pantiles in various scales from Noch, though at something of a price. I have some sitting around waiting to be used one day.

So, here are the buildings:

Basically, a fairly high status but single range villa house with two outbuildings.

 
 
 
 

I've used the classic red and white look. I've seen a description of a very colourful villa exterior, but have lost the link! In the flesh the terracotta roof stands out more. I used GW terracotta paint for them with a lighter highlight. Walls are ivory highlighted in off-white to bring out the texture. The red band was, iirc, scab red with Foundry British red coat light as a highlight.

Final picture shows the 10mm buildings next to some 15mm Warmodelling Romans. While obviously the figures are out of scale the difference isn't too jarring and it allows sensibly sized buildings on the battlefield.
Hopefully the range will expand. A small shrine would be nice, or some lower class buildings suitable for a small town.

 

 
For more info,
http://www.romanbritain.freeserve.co.uk/villa.htm by Guy de la Bedoyere
This villa is quite near where I live.
Museum of London - possibly the inspiration for MM's model.
A nice overview of Roman paints is here though most would have been for interior decoration.

Medieval Village

A while back, I posted about a model church I built. I used the same method to construct some vilage houses and have finally got them finished (more or less!).

I based the church with a small graveyard.

There are some crosses to mark the graves though they are so difficult to see that they are actaully more trouble than they are worth. The fence is from Hovels as part of their Dark Age range.

There are records of a bishop ordering the enclosure of the area around the churches in his diocese dating from this period. This was seemingly a twofold reason. It kept animals from wandering around the graves. It also helped to stake a claim to the land - there was often dispute between church and village over the rights to wood grown next to the church. When I took the photo I forgot to include a tree which I bought for the purpose. It is a Skale Scenics oak though it does a fair job of being a large yew.

These are two of the three houses I built. They are cruck houses as in this diagram
They were often quite standardised in size. This was due to various factors; many villages were planned by the local landowner so plots were of equal size. The building width was influenced by the size of the animals kept inside since they shared the dwelling with the humans. This continued in many areas of Europe until really quite recently. There is a diagram of a 19th century house - French I think - where the animals tails are tied strategically to avoid slurry being sprayed around the kitchen.
This article gives a table of house widths - they are pretty close to being 16' (around 5m) across. The length of houses is given by the number of bays - again, each bay is around 16' wide - with two or three bays being typical.
The pig sty is from Hovels. It comes with lengths of fencing. I used Donnington pigs though the ones from Hovels are fine. For England the pigs should probably be similar to Tamworths with upright ears and ginger hair. Those on the Luttrell Psalter are really quite lithe by modern standards.

I've based the buildings individually for convenience and to allow the village to be varied in size. The hight of the bases is actually an advantage since each house was built on a toft - a raised area. These would have been larger in proportion to the houses than I have shown. The raised area helped with drainage and would often have continued to rise with time compared to the roads due to erosion of the road and deposition on the toft. Much of the toft would be given over to vegetables and would often have been fenced to protect against wandering animals - for much of farming history fences etc. were for keeping animals out of an area rather than keeping them in.

While I'm discussing farming, there is a great site which is useful for the whole history of British farming. It shows a typical landscape at various points in history and discusses factors such as tree cover. One of the things which surprised me was that there was less tree cover in England at the beginning of the 14th century than there is now. More land had to be cleared for farming, partly because so much was left fallow, and many marginal areas were planted which were abandoned due to the various scourges of the 14th century. By the time the population had recovered, farming was more efficient so much of the marginal land was never recleared, despite the subsequent massive rise in population.

This is a place I must get round to visiting: Cosmeston Medieval Village.

Scratchbuilding a 15mm Rural Church

  When I went to Henley last month, I also visited a couple of old local churches. One of these was at Wootton Wawen. The exterior of the church has continued to evolve since it was first built so the original form is hidden, but it has a an area withn the church which is Saxon. This is used for an historical display about the area including some great pictures of how the village and church probably looked at various points in history. Well worth a 10 or 20 minute visit if you are in the area - they also sell a nice little booklet.

 I also went to the church at Morton Bagot. This is a Warwickshire hamlet which has never been large. The church has remained almost untouched since the 13th century. There is a description of its history and likely alterations in the very useful British History Online site.



 The first thing that struck me was how small the church is. Building most churches in actual 15mm scale (roughly 1:120 or 1:100) results in a very big building but I thought this one would probably work on a table. The description in the above link gives the width and length. I had to try to calculate the height from the photos. Even though the church was quite small, as there is evidence that it was slightly extended in the past I took this as licence to make it slightly shorter than it is now.

View approaching the west end of the church. It is on a spur which also seems to have been built up into a mound. The belfry is only a couple of hundred years old!

The south side of the nave. Some rendering is on the wall next to the (relatively recent) porch. The land on this side has built up by over a metre. This may have been the effect of centuries of burials as I believe the south was the favoured side although there are actually burials around all faces of the church.

The east wall. You can see how much higher the land is here. It could be the original level. However, about 10 metres to the south the land drops vertically by 5 or so metres where there are farm buildings and the driveway to another farm which I think is on the site of the old manor - you can see its earthworks from the church.

Note how there are no buttresses along the length of the south wall.

The north wall.
The buttresses were apparently added sometime after the church was built. There is a noticeable lean on this wall which they guard against. What I was pleased to see was the rendering here. It has obviously been painted using modern materials but it gives a good idea of how many medieval buildings - including castles - once looked. We are so used to imagining them as hulking grey bastions that it is difficult to picture the effect of rendered walls. How frequently they would get limewashed is another matter but I suspect many churches would get the treatment as a priority. The render itself could also be very pale once dry. The reddish stones of the mullions are exactly the same as used at my local abbey - I know because the chief archaeologist gave me a piece as a momento when I worked on the dig there.

 As an experiment, I had a go at using Google's CAD, Sketchup. There is a program called Pepakura which will convert a CAD design into the net for making a paper model. This wasn't really necessary for a simple design like this church, but it might be useful one day for me.

I used this as a maquette for making the church using plastic card and a stuff which I think is called Depron. I bought it last year from Antenociti's Workshop for something else and never used it. It is a thin polystyrene foam which cuts easily but can have detail etched in quite easily.

The first attempt came out quite well but I wasn't happy with the height. It could well be right, but it is one of those instances where something which is right looks wrong. We are so used to looking up at a church roof that the angle looks foreshortened.

I then thought I would see how it looked in roughly 10mm scale (about 1:180). This came out quite well, though I rushed the window details a bit. I haven't painted it, but I think I might take it if I enter any more competitions with a Medieval army.

That should have been the end of it, especially as I had to get my Flemish finished for Britcon but I thought I'd have one more go, especially as I'd got used to working with Depron.

These are the main pieces cut to size. The walls are plastic card with a layer of Depron on top. The windows are cut out of the Depron to reveal the plastic card. Stone work is etched around the doors and windows.

I used Green Stuff to make the window details and doors. I had only used Milliput before and had assumed that Green Stuff would be reasonably similar. However, as I'd just bought some Green Stuff on impulse I thought I'd give it a go. I found it was much better for this kind of work - it is stickier which means that it stays where you put it (as long as it doesn't stick to your knife!) Putting the metal work on the doors took very little time and I was pleased with my results with this being my first effort.

I hadn't intended to put on the buttresses; the church was built without them and I thought they'd be awkward. Howver, I experimented by using some blue foam which I have. Stone work was carved in and all in all it didn't take a long time. The render is simply tile grout mixed with some ivory coloured paint.

This is the finished article. Rather than the Georgian belfry I put on a stone equivalent as found on various other old churches. I also had a go at giving it a thatched roof - I was surprised to find that not only was it very common in smaller churches but that some English churches are still thatched. I thought of using the various methods described on a number of websites and experimented by etching into the Depron roof and using short static grass. However, pictures of most European thatched buildings show very little texture. I did think that it could be another of those things where you show something as you expect it to be, rather than as it is, but I thought I would go with a different method. This is made out of grey felt, wrapped under the plastic card roof to give depth.

A second layer of felt was used for the apex. I wondered how to do the ties across the roof but luckily I had bought some very thin florist wire. It was cut into lengths which could then be poked into the felt.

The religious chaps celebrating and consecrating the new construction are Donnington, left over from the Papal project.

I have some crosses and headstones so I will probably make a small  base - perhaps a low mound with a graveyard, some kind of boundary and perhaps a yew tree.

The Fateful Land

In wargaming there tends to be a payoff between terrain which is attractive and that which is practical for the moving of based figures acoss it. I try to reach a happy medium though this can take a bit of trial and error. Some of my hills are far too steep and troops slide down them like sinners into the inferno :)

I like to try to use some terrain features which are distinctive for an area. This is often the style of building being used. A certain amount of licence can be necessary since manufacturers do not necessarily make houses which exactly match a particular region or time period. Chimneys and windows can often show a building to be from a later period, but beggars can't be choosers.

For Italy I initially went for 10mm Timecast buildings. They are nicely made and based on real examples. I used 10mm because terrain scale is so far out of figure scale that accurately sized buildings for 15mm can be very big, especially churches. 10mm gives a good compromise, allowing a size which isn't too far away from figure scale but which lets you put enough buildings on the table to look like a small built up area.

A common feature of Tuscany and surroundinga areas is the hill top settlement. This shows my attempt at one

The tower was scratchbuilt using textured card from Slaters. The roof was made by texturing some milliput - this took ages!

The hill was made from extruded polystyrene. This is much tougher than the white expanded polystyrene and carves well.

I may well make another at some point, with one side vertical to allow the hill to be placed against the table edge as a part of a larger city. This will also allow a larger area on top for the placement of more buildings with even more levels.

I'm still not sure I like the green building, though I based the colour on a 14th century picture by Fra Angelico.

One reason I'd like to have more area for buildings is that I bought quite a few JR Miniatures buildings from Magister Militum . These are 15mm but, as with many ranges of buildings, they are slightly underscale - especially when most '15mm' figures are now larger.

They fit in very well with the 10mm Timecast buildings:

The three buildings on the left are JR Miniatures. The block on the right is from Timecast.

Another key feature of this landscape is the olive grove. I bought some trees from Realistic Modelling Services.

 As with the buildings, I bought ones which are underscale. This emphasises the difference in height between the olive trees and ones in woods - like most people I use trees which are substantially undersized at perhaps 5 time the height of a figure rather than a more realistic 10 or 20 times taller. I have some poplar trees too, from the model tree shop though I haven't yet based these.

 I scratchbuilt some vines.

These are based on 'tongue depressor' style sticks. I drilled a number of holes along the length and put in some thick wire uprights. Wooden poles would have worked too but I wanted something fairly thin and strong. I then used some Woodland Scenics Fine Leaf Foliage. This comes on twiggy material which can be selected for the most vine like strands. A couple of pieces of this placed horizontally give good cover. I made half a dozen or so of these in about an hour and had loads of the foliage left over. I put them on a piece of painted and textured MDF to show the extent of the vineyard. Sometime I may make some hills with terraces onto which I can put some narrower versions of these strips.