Swiss Mounted Crossbowmen

Thanks for all the feedback on the last post. For 2025, I need to turn my attention and pretty much all the spare painting time I have, to expand my Swiss army to a size that I can game with it. Plans are afoot for a demo game and more on that in a later post.

Late last year, I added a unit of mounted crossbowmen. In fact I did 4 bases, which doesn't tally with my usual 3 bases for a gaming unit, so I'll probably need to add more. They are Perry plastic riders, largely from the versatile Light Cavalry box, with some arms pinched from Perry HYW plastics. The inspiration for these were some done by Matt Bickley, the images of which he shared with me - so these are a bit of a homage to those. I took a couple of pics of the asssmbled figures, so you should be able to see some of the attachments of limbs to bodies etc. I decided to use standing horses for these, as my understanding is that crossbows were fired from the saddle - certainly there are images from hunting and warfare of this. Whilst the Swiss Chronicles and the Battle of Dornach illustrations depict horses at the gallop, I decided on showing them firing and loading whilst taking shots from the edge of the battlefield, in a skirmish-type role. So for the horses I had to pick out Perry metals in walking and standing poses, largely from their Wars of the Roses/European Armies range. I also prefer the size of the horse, as they're slightly smaller and so look more akin to modest mounts (not destriers). The fit to the rider is OK, with a bit of trimming of the rider's legs and of course the need to build saddles from putty.

I added small pavises to some of them, as I wanted to use the plastic ones that I have left over from the Perry plastic HYW Knights box. They represent Berne, so a couple of bears were painted.

I'm happy with the results.