The Great Nottingham Project (part4) or bugger I'm moving house

So noble readers (or reader more likely) the great nottingham build project for the baron wars is going to have to go on hold for now due to the fact me and the wonderful Fliss(long may she love me and tolerate my madness) are looking for a new family home in the mighty city of Nottingham, what this means is the blog may be sparse on the build side for a while however as every thing major hobby project related will be packed away. On the plus side it means I can write up a couple of hard core history post about the military side of life in the medieval world. 

Anyway last bit of building work on the Saxon burgh parts has been done and the final stage has started, this includes painting the cliffs and adding grass flowers and crops to the base board for all the cottage gardens, once I've got this stage sorted i will pack the board away as a good place to finish before i add things like hurdle fencing and gate ways.  

I've picked mostly yellow and purple flower bunches as nottinghamshire has a long connection to have spring crocuses and narcissi flowers, I will also add some batches of blue and white flowers as well because over at hodsock priory they have a beautiful woodland full of blue bells and snow drops  that can be seen every spring as well.

I can safely say that while moving is throwing a bit of a spanner into the works in terms of building i thankfully have started anything that can't be finished in a couple of evenings in between sorting the rest of the house out. 

I will sign off for now on this side of things and hopefully once we've found some where and got moved in I can return to building snotingaham in all her glory.

Fair thee well and may your life be full of tea and cake 

Kind regards 

The Angry history chef (retired)
 

Barons war(part 1)

It's a mini me

So  I'm going to talk about The Barons War rules and the miniatures that support the range. The easiest part is to explain that back when the world wasn't a hell in a handbasket kind of place and we could do things like take trips, see family, play war games, and hit each other with weapons. two noble fellows had a wonderful idea to kickstart a range of miniatures based around the time of magna carta and all that jazz, their names were Andy Hobday and Paul Hicks and boy did they have a great idea.

They set up a kickstarter in september of 2019 to fund getting these miniatures into full production through the mighty and ever helpful Footsore miniatures based hear in mighty Snotingaham(as the saxon call it). Now with this awesome project announced I sat with bated breath for the project to launch so that I may help fund it and I can safely say it was funded and then some. Now i backed the project at the highest level i could and for my sins i was rewarded with a figure of my self in 28mm being sculpted by the redoubtable Mr Hicks who is a very talented fellow I must say(if you don't believe me go look at the wonderful barons war range and for his more modern stuff pop over to empress miniatures)

Mini me and banner man sans banner

Now with one Kickstarter under their belt and shipped by the end of 2019 the fellows turned to the next wave of the project and its inclusion of a set of alpha rules and indeed in the march of 2020 the second Kickstarter was launched and again funded to a level that was quite over whelming to Hobday & Hicks . again i backed at the highest level and this time i had my beloved wife immortalized in miniature. Now alas 2020 was the year of the out break of covid19 and this meant that most things got cancelled however  not so for the BW2 project in fact it meant that the rules went from an Alpha version to a full rule book with stunning art work as Mr Hobday had more spare time to work on developing it.

My beloved wife with skillet for beating people with.

I bid thee all a fond farewell and to tune in next time for another ramble from the Angry History Chef(retired) 

The Great Nottingham Project (part3) Anglo Saxon Burgh

 Another exciting day in Snotingaham 

Why? I hear you cry or maybe not given I doubt people read this but if they do thanks. Anyway today is painting day for the Burgh. The board is covered in sand for texture and I've selected my colours for the painting project. Now as well as sandstone cliffs nottingham is also based on a very heavy clay bed for its soil, heavy enough in fact that if you want anything more than a lawn in your back garden your going to need to either know you plants or be prepared for a lot of heavy digging but before i go off on a tangent about gardening in this fair and beautiful shit hole I call home I will come back to paint and picking colours to use on the board.

So as I said nottingham is a mix of soft sandstone rock and heavy clay,  now while most people think this would mean a reddish colour for the dirt because its clay but not all clay is red in fact clay comes in a broad spectrum of colours depending on the bed rock and mineral deposits in it and the Nottingham ground soil is a thick heavy brown/grey clay that shares a lot of similarities to the soil found around the Somme and Wipers(1) in northern france. So for this project i went to B&Q and picked up a lovely shade of greyish brown colour, I've also added a little bit of a red/brown colour as a highlight colour and the cliffs are highlighted in a deep mustard ochre colour as there final highlight.

Now here some fun facts sandstone isn't always yellow and also comes in three forms of hardness, these are referred to by masons in the medieval period as the the piff, paff and puff. this terms are also used for a number of rocks when grading it for mason work. The piff is the hardest  and was used to build most of the stone work at nottingham castle, the paff is the middle stone and is often used for non vital building and as a filler and the puff is the softest and the easiest to work and is most often used as an interior dressing stone that will then be covered in render. 

Now the reason for this tangent explanation of sandstone and grading it in the medieval masons world leads me nicely into why my sandstone cliffs are not a  bright yellow and why also nottingham hasn't disappeared in a sinkhole of collapsed sandstone caves (for which our city is famous ). Most of the sandstone of Nottingham is in fact more up of this hard core strata of standstone rock refered to as piff by masons in the 12 and 13th century.

Almost there just got to order the last buildings for
the Anglo Saxon Burgh and add the small detail.

1: Wipers is the British name for the town of ypres in Belgium, I've spent so long studying history that alas I often use the name wipers rather than Ypres, I also do the same thing when talking about Byzantion /constantinople/miklagard the modern name of Istanbul is very rarely used if at all in my house.

Anglo saxon/danish history of nottingham

 Greetings to my fellow history nuts and war gamer fanatics and hey to the normal folks.

So today I've thought I would talk about Nottingham in the Anglo-Saxon period. The town was founded around the turn of the 6th to 7th century, whether this was an actual new settlement started or just a land grab of an existing settlement that was already here since the Romans I could not say. However what we do know is that the leading noble who started/grabbed this place is called Snot and that Snotingaham would last as a name until at least the end of the 11th century.  This first settlement of Nottingham is today what is referred to as the lace market and its church St. Mary's is still there. 

The town would change little until 868 when the great heathen army rocked up and captured the place. 20 years later it would be signed over as one of the five boroughs that would go to make up the area referred to as the Danelaw and this Danelaw region would be enshrined in English laws up until the Norman conquests. 

The town during this viking settlement period would expand further north but the walls of the original burgh would not be expanded to encompass it. I personally believe that this that the outer expansion from the original site was of small farmsteads that then fled to the fortifications of the original town in times of trouble. 

The defences of the town where of considerable strength according to Norman chroniclers consisting of a very deep ditch and well built wooden palisades built on a high earthen rampart. This of course disappears in 1068 when the first of Nottingham castle is built on a neighbouring rocky outcrop that also overlooked the lean and was even higher than the original town.

The Shield wall of the Danelaw Reenactment group  with other viking Society members at Whitby Abbey representing part of the great Heathen Army

The great Nottingham project(part2) saxon burh

 So I've laid down the map and started to build the base board. As can be seen in the picture to the right hand insert I've drawn up the whole Mediveal plan including the castle. these are just the rough Plans and as building and boards are bought and built the plan may change slightly.

I've build the cliffs up on one side and sloped the board away from them because I have neither time nor resources to try and build a topographical board that matches the land exactly to its rises and falls. 

The whole premise is to have a board that resembles Nottingham roughly in the medival period. Hence why St.Mary's church, the oldest in the city, sits on the cliff and overlooks the rest of the Saxon burgh, so is thus placed on the highest point on the board. 

I've also marked out and placed the houses and walk ways of the burgh and plastered the foam cliffs to blend them in the lower edge of the board, once it's all dry I will cover it in sand to texture it and then on to part 3 the painting.

The great nottingham project (part 1) saxon burh

 So first off loyal fans I've started with the oldest part of Nottingham, the Anglo Saxon burgh. It shall not include its walls due to the fact that I'm building this table for mostly 12th to 15th century games. 

The red line indicates roughly the area I've marked out on the paper plan

However do not despair noble followers for as the table will be modular if I ever have need of the burgh purely by its self for game set during the 6th to 11th century I will have some palisades made up to encircle it.

Now the burgh and the later expanded settlement is based with one side edging a cliff of sand stone that over looks the Trent valley with the river lean below it (the modern lean is now a canal that feeds in to the Trent but originally it was a large tributary of the Trent) and the other end spreading away towards the north into futile pastures and farm land. 

This original town when over laid on the modern city is a truly tiny area that can be crossed in about a 10 to 15 minutes walk, in fact you could likely walk the circumference of the original burh in about 30 minutes with out much
trouble.  

This rough plan is the basic out line of streets and areas where eventually i will have build up into a small urban settlement.

The great nottingham project.

 So fellow wanderers and weirdos of the world my first string of blogs, shall it be about great battles or random facts about clothing of the early medieval period or something else..... 

Yeah the something else I think. So we start 2021 with a new spring in our step and I have decided to build Nottingham as it was during the medieval period. (As it's for wargaming I've been a lot looser on the authentic front but I shall explain.

So the planned project is to construct a series of modular boards that when combined will represent the wonderful shit hole of fair Nottingham.( I'm allowed to call it a shit hole I live hear the rest of you can bog off)

Any way back to the plan that when finished will sit nicely at a whopping 9 feet by 4 feet or for you non imperial measurements users about 2.9m by 1.2m