Thoughts on medieval terrain (UPDATE 1st January)

[Charlie_]

Does anyone have any thoughts on what terrain works best for 'realistic' medieval-era battles?

I originally got into wargaming back in the day through Games Workshop, and so my approach to terrain used to be 'gamey' if that makes sense. A battlefield would consist of a bunch of random terrian features arrayed on a flat field, with usually little thought for realism or consistency. For example there would always be a little round hill or two, a so-called 'wood' consisting of a few trees, perhaps a river with a bridge, and usually a random house or tower somewhere in the vicinity.

Coming back to the hobby 10 years later with my interests now being almost entirely historical, I'm re-thinking what sort of terrain would be suitable for a large-scaled 'pitched battle' kind of scenario. I'm in the process of building up a scenery collection and making some nice terrain boards.

Though there is always a level of abstraction involved with wargaming, I'd like to have a battlefield that looks believable and makes some sort of sense, not the random hodge-podge of terrain features I described above.

Reading a lot about historical battles has made me think a lot. Osprey Campaign books have been very insightful!

For a while I didn't like the idea that a 'wood' in wargaming terms consisted of usually half a dozen trees. But now I'm approaching it differently. Battles weren't thought with huge woods and forests in the middle of the battlefield! They were often thought with woods and forests on the edge of the battlefield though. So as well as building lots of stands of trees based either singly or in small groups, I'm also going to build a few large pieces with straight edges, or corner pieces, to be placed on the edge of the tabletop to represent the borders of larger woods and forests. They will be full of undergrowth and feature the largest trees I can get hold of, and will mostly be impassable in gaming terms. I feel this will look much better than having the smaller oval-based tree groups just placed to the edge of the table.

Everyone loves rivers, but I'm leaning more towards small winding streams / brooks etc. Also, ditches! Either pre-existing ones alongside roads or those recently dug in preparation for the battle.

I've got some boards with roads / tracks, and have taken the opportunity to have some of them sunk into the boards, which looks really cool.

Hedges. Not neatly trimmed garden hedges, but big wild-looking things full of small trees that would be definite obstacles, often alongside roads and streams.

I've also got some nice low stone walls and wattle fences.

Hills... I have no plans to make any hills any time soon, and don't really like the idea of small random 'wargamey' hills. I might in the future make one large hill piece that would span most of a table edge, for battles where one side has taken the higher ground.



Anyway, what thoughts do you all have on making a 'realistic' battlefield for the medieval era, with terrain features that make sense rather than a random mix of things?

Any ideas of other features I should consider building?

[Gracchus Armisurplus]

Well, most 'realistic' battlefields would be a simple flat, empty field.

What you really want is terrain that is authentic looking, but still provides an interesting battlefield with terrain pieces you can interact with. You also have to consider the scale of the game you're playing. For instance, a massed battle game will often have a flexible scale of maybe 1 model = 5 men, or 1:10 or even 1:50 or 1:100.

Then your terrain sort of scales as well. A few trees in a copse becomes a large patch of woodland, a house or two becomes a village, a small hill becomes a large ridge, etc. Whereas if you're playing a skirmish game like Blood Eagle or then the terrain is much more literal.

In any case, I find if you keep realism in the forefront of your mind then you can't really go wrong. Arrange buildings in a sensible fashion, with hedges or fences surrounding them. And as for the terrain itself, the devil is in the details. Add weathering to your buildings, moss, ivy, dirt, wear and tear, weeds and grass growing in the cracks, etc. This is what brings terrain to life.

[Harry Faversham]

Weeds and grass growing in yer cracks, etc.

  You can get tablets for that! 

[Arlequín]

I think you are already on the right lines, as are the commentators. A couple of points to add;

Hedges were quite a rarity back then and are more a feature of 'enclosure' farming. Open field farming in particular needed all round access to the fields, rather than a single entry/exit point for all who worked them.

Fields were typically avoided in any case. Open field farming, where it was common at least, used land-wasting berms and ditches as barriers, both for internal strips and the external limits of the field itself. For both horse and man, such fields would be obstacles, so heath or common land would be preferred to fight a battle on; the spaces between settlement areas in other words.

Barring the trees themselves, medieval woods were remarkably clear of fallen branches and dense undergrowth, if they were anywhere near to habitation. Locals scoured them of fallen branches for firewood (typically they could not actually just cut down trees, as the wood itself would be owned by someone) and usually set their pigs loose in them to forage. They would indeed form a table boundary though, rather than being randomly situated in the middle of a battlefield.

As Gracchus says, the typical medieval battlefield would be void of any real features, barring possibly a road and/or watercourse. Woods and settlements (or their fields at least), water courses and marsh, would all usually form table boundaries, rather than central features. Numerically weaker forces would tend to be in defence and would seek to have the benefit of terrain to secure one or more flanks (woodland at Agincourt, Cock Beck combined with high ground at Towton etc., etc.,). Have a look at the battlefields in your area of interest and try to mentally erase modern features.

Where thatch is used for the roofs of buildings, it's only 'yellow' when it has been relatively recently replaced. More usually it's a dirty grey with green moss growing on it. Most rural buildings had small walled or fenced (to keep wandering animals out) garden enclosures in which the occupants grew vegetables and herbs to supplement their diet. As what land was typically allowed to them was largely taken up by their dwelling itself, these were not very expansive and also had to accommodate a pit latrine.

Relative wealth was usually expressed in terms of what land surrounded your dwelling; the wealthier you were, the bigger the home and the bigger the area of land it stood on. A typical small settlement might only have one or two houses with two or more habitable rooms/levels, with the bulk of buildings being single room occupancy, with or without built-in animal stabling.

[Charlie_]

Thanks for the thoughts guys.

Then your terrain sort of scales as well. A few trees in a copse becomes a large patch of woodland, a house or two becomes a village, a small hill becomes a large ridge, etc.

Of course. I guess you could say I am looking for a compromise between the two extremes. I never liked the idea of 10 men representing 1000, but at the same time will accept that my battles aren't on a 1:1 scale, and 10 men will represent 50 or possibly 100. For what it's worth, my project is aiming towards say 200 models a side, so if that represents 1000 or 2000 men a side I'm happy. I'm not looking to represent massive battles (numbers in 5 figures).
And that translates to terrain. I don't want 6 trees to represent a wood. But at the same time I know the battlefield is representing an area quite a bit bigger than I can fit onto my table!

Hedges were quite a rarity back then and are more a feature of 'enclosure' farming. Open field farming in particular needed all round access to the fields, rather than a single entry/exit point for all who worked them.

Interesting, this is something I've been wanting to find out more about. I love a nice big hedge, but perhaps I should restrict them to roadsides, and where they are on the table they should be major obstacles that dominate the battlefield, as opposed to loads of them cris-crossing the table?

What about stone walls and wattle fencing? What would they be likely to be enclosing?

Barring the trees themselves, medieval woods were remarkably clear of fallen branches and dense undergrowth, if they were anywhere near to habitation.

Interesting....

Reading about the battle of Tewkesbury, there is reference to “evil lanes and deep dykes, so many hedges, trees and bushes", I'd be interested to get a picture of exactly what the battlefield (or part of the battlefield) was like. What were these lanes and deep dykes?

[katie]

Hills are probably better represented using long "slope" elements (I bought some from TSS) that will let you do things like build a valley to contain the battle; it was common for the hilltops to remain wooded.

Hedges/fences/walls would really only be present in the village -- they're there to stop the free-roaming animals eating your vegetable patch, stop the chickens wandering too far and so on.

Fields would be large; people were allocated around 15 acres in 5 per field in distributed strips (2 growing, 1 fallow at a time giving the 10 acres for a family's annual grains production). There'd be a lot of households each with those 5 acres, so the total area of each field could be 400 - 500 acres in some cases.

Within that, the strips were divided by either ditches, mounds of stones (pulled out of the growing ground) or larger marker stones; they're probably too small to depict on the scale battlefield but they would impede progress compared with (say) open grazing land.

[painterman]

Agree with all the helpful comments.
could try looking for details of late medieval paintings - Flemish are best - for possible views of north European countryside.

Open fields, tree lined roads, orchards with fences, little copses, like these:

Cheers, Simon.

[westwaller]

Pollarded trees. Actually you can see some in one of the pictures that painterman has posted. Flooded or marshy land. I wonder if 'Evil lanes' are hollow ways?

[Silent Invader]

Pollarded trees. Actually you can see some in one of the pictures that painterman has posted.

Good spot!

There are pollarded trees in each of the three images but I don't think I've ever seen them represented on a wargames table. While they add arboricultural flavour they're not very pretty to look at, when what is generally aimed for is 'representative' terrain.

[OSHIROmodels]

It would be interesting to see them in a game but I thought the term was 'pleached'?

cheers

James

[Silent Invader]

Pleached trees are a bit like a 'trained hedge in the air' while pollarded trees are more akin to 'coppiced in the air'.

In practical terms, pleached trees retain trained branches usually for harvesting of fruit, etc, whereas pollarded trees have their upper branches removed for a multiple of uses but including structures and firewood. Both are a form of managed production that is geared to the local environment (for example, preaching and pollarding would be used where animals might graze on the new shoots at ground level and fencing was impractical).

[Arlequín]

Reading about the battle of Tewkesbury, there is reference to “evil lanes and deep dykes, so many hedges, trees and bushes", I'd be interested to get a picture of exactly what the battlefield (or part of the battlefield) was like. What were these lanes and deep dykes?

I'm stabbing in the dark here, but given the proximity of 'Bloody Meadow' to the Avon, Swilgate and the brook which runs in the deep of the two areas of high ground (50m), I can only imagine that that part of the battlefield was largely wetland with drainage ditches (or dikes as they are called thereabouts, rather than the huge banks we imagine today). Good case for growing hedges, as it would be the best way of stopping livestock falling into them.

If it was dry, then they were probably passable, while possessing enough greenery to obscure Somerset's flankers and their guides ... maybe.

'Evil Lanes' I don't know. Maybe those rural paths and tracks that end up abruptly partially submerged in places? 

[jamesmanto]

Take a look at the Perry brothers tables and Captain Blood has posted some nice game pictures here.

Even though the battlefield is level and fairly open, you can make it come alive with trees and small hedges that have no effect on the game, except to make it pretty.

[westwaller]

The the case of the Tewksbury battlefield, another feature was apparently the remains of an iron age fort.

[Charlie_]

I'm stabbing in the dark here, but given the proximity of 'Bloody Meadow' to the Avon, Swilgate and the brook which runs in the deep of the two areas of high ground (50m), I can only imagine that that part of the battlefield was largely wetland with drainage ditches (or dikes as they are called thereabouts, rather than the huge banks we imagine today). Good case for growing hedges, as it would be the best way of stopping livestock falling into them.

Yes I'll have to consider some areas of wetland, perhaps alongside some of the small streams I'm planning.

Take a look at the Perry brothers tables

Oh don't you worry, I've spent a long time studying every photo they put up of their games on their facebook page. Truly inspirational.

Here's some quick snapshots from my phone of the boards I've been working on.....

A WIP board with a ditch of some sort.... There will be a road alongside it. There will be other such boards later on to link up to it.



A sunken road or track section. I'm VERY pleased with how this has turned out.




And with some trees and hedges around it.



I'm not entirely convinced with the bases and general layout of the individual tree / hedge pieces. But I've got lots more of these to come, so I think I'll just adapt how I base them. As mentioned before, I'm going to do a couple of large table edge and corner pieces... Perhaps all other trees in the future will just have discreet individual bases? And I think I want the hedges to be taller and bushier.