Medieval

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Men of Iron pt. 3: The Battle of Poitiers, 1356

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Men of Iron pt. 3: The Battle of Poitiers, 1356

After playing two highly defensive battles with minimal manoeuvring I acted upon the advice of a more experienced player given via Discord and picked Poitiers as my next battle. I’m glad I took that person’s advice, at Poitiers the French let me try my hand at some dynamic movements and a dramatic flanking attack – even if the English still ended up being reactionary and defensive for the most part.

Poitiers has long fascinated me. A triumphant victory for the Black Prince (I’ll just note here that he was not known by that name during his lifetime) and the capture of King Jean II of France. Jean II joined his Scottish ally King David II, who had been captured at Neville’s Cross in 1346, at the English court. The ransom for Jean II significantly enriched the English crown’s coffers and allowed them to negotiate the very favourable Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 – a treaty in which Edward III exchanged his claim to the French throne for more French territory than its own king had. If the Hundred Years War had ended there it would be remembered as an English triumph – but of course it didn’t, and all those gains would be gone within a century.

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Men of Iron Round 2: Courtrai 1302

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Men of Iron Round 2: Courtrai 1302

Having gotten a handle on the rules of Richard Berg’s Men of Iron with my fabulous French upset last week I decided to try a scenario that was on a slightly larger scale but still didn’t up complexity too much. I chose Courtrai, also known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs because of the loot that the victorious Flemings took from the dead French nobles, in part because I’ve always found it fascinating and because it once again sees a French army trying to attack a strong defensive position – historically with disastrous results. I won’t totally spoil what happened, but I will say that things did not go as well for the French this time.

I should probably talk a bit about how Men of Iron plays, because it is interesting and unlike anything I’ve played before. Instead of being divided into strict turns, the starting player as designated in the scenario chooses one Battle – a group of units with a single commander – to activate. As an aside, I love that the game uses the medieval term Battle instead of a more modern designation like company or squad. The selected Battle can then move and shoot or engage in melee combat – usually “shock” combat but mounted units can charge instead for an extra bonus. After activating that Battle the active player can pass or instead they can choose to try to activate another Battle. To successfully do so they must roll under that Battle’s commander’s Activation Rating on a d10 - most commanders have a rating of 2 or 3 so this isn’t particularly common but it happens often enough to keep things interesting. As an aside, in Men of Iron the 0 on a d10 is actually a zero and not a ten like I’m used to from D&D, something that frequently causes me to go from elation to disappointment whenever one is rolled. Each activation after the first imposes a -1 penalty to the roll, so it’s harder and harder to activate subsequent Battles.

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Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King by Francis Young (I. B. Tauris, 2018).

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Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King by Francis Young (I. B. Tauris, 2018).

The story of St. Edmund, who was King of East Anglia from around 855 until his death in 869, is a challenging one to tell. We don’t know if he was married or had any children, although later popular belief maintained that he was a virgin throughout his life – a sign of his holiness. We don’t know anything about his parents, although we do know he was a member of the Wuffing dynasty – probably its last. Basically, you could fit the entirety of our knowledge about the life of St. Edmund into a few sentences – given that fact what is this book about and why is it interesting?

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Men of Iron First Impressions: Agincourt 1415

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Men of Iron First Impressions: Agincourt 1415

I felt a wave of nostalgia when I first opened up my copy of the Men of Iron Tri-Pack from GMT – the new release that packages three of legendary game designer Richard Berg’s classic medieval hex and counter wargames together. It’s not that I’d played this game before, or any of the previous versions. I hadn’t even played a hex and counter wargame before, not really. My nostalgia stems instead from games I played with rather than played, and memories from my very early childhood.

You see, my father was something of a wargamer back in his day. He owned copies of classic Avalon Hill games like Gettysburg and Civil War. Some of the earliest photos of me as a child show him balancing me on one knee while he pours over a classic wargame, played solo in the basement of the house my parents were renting. As an older child my brother and I would occasionally coerce him into unpacking a game and trying teaching us how to play – as Virginians we couldn’t help but take at least a little interest in battles that took place in our home state. We never successfully played them, we were far too young and the games too long, but he gamely made an effort, and they were fun evenings even if we ended up making up at least half the rules ourselves. The closest we ever got to playing one of the classic Avalon Hill games was Civilization, a perennial favourite during the intermittent blackouts that accompanied major storms in the autumn. That game would be unpacked, the rules hastily learned, and the opening turns played before it got too dark, and we were sent to bed. We would leave it out with a plan to finish it tomorrow, but usually the power would be back, and it was far more tempting to play Super Nintendo instead. The more serious wargames never even got that far.

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Peacemaking in the Middle Ages: Principles and Practice by Jenny Benham (Manchester University Press, 2010)

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Peacemaking in the Middle Ages: Principles and Practice by Jenny Benham (Manchester University Press, 2010)

Peacemaking in the Middle Ages is a truly phenomenal book, the kind of book that excites me as a historian and fills me with energy for my next project. The title would suggest that this is a very niche book without a wide appeal, but I think that anyone with an interest in medieval history should buy a copy and read it – it’s barely over two hundred pages and the paperback edition retails for a fairly reasonable £25 so you really don’t have an excuse!

Bear with me here, but the structure of this book is an impressive thing to behold. Jenny Benham’s writing is direct and purposeful, it never says more than it has to, and each point is well structured and supported without being didactic or boring. It is a master class in efficient and engaging writing throughout. I wish I could write a book this well. Benham is wading through some fairly dense material and writing about subjects that it would be trivial to make boring, but she avoids getting lost in the weeds and delivers her book in just the length it needs to be. It’s phenomenal.

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Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe by Robert Bartlett (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe by Robert Bartlett (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for two of the lectures where Robert Bartlett presented some of the initial drafts of the work that would become Blood Royal. In particular, his discussion of the use of regnal numbering in medieval Europe, from its origins in the papacy to its later adoption by various monarchies, was one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever attended. I’d been looking forward to this book ever since it was implied at the final talk that one would be forthcoming, and while I had to wait quite a while the final product did not disappoint.