In 410 a letter from the Emperor Honorius reached the cities of Britain. If the Greek historian Zosimus is right, it offered no troops and no money, only an instruction to see to their own defence. Rome had held the island for almost four hundred years. Now the Britons were on their own.
The century and a half that followed is the least documented and most argued-over period in British history. Our surviving written sources are few, most were written long after the events, and they often disagree with each other. Even so, the broad picture is clear enough. Picts came over Hadrian's Wall and Irish raiders across the western sea, but the real danger proved to be the Saxon warbands hired as allies, who eventually turned on the Britons paying them. At some point a British war leader won a victory so complete that people were still talking about it centuries later. The Welsh came to call him Arthur, and whether or not he existed, the war fought in his name is one of the richest subjects in historical wargaming.
This article walks through five episodes from Dark Age Britain, beginning with the Barbarian Conspiracy of 367 and ending with Arthur's death at Camlann. After each one you'll find notes on putting it on the table with Arthurian miniatures, covering the forces each side needs, how to set out the terrain and what each player is trying to achieve. We've tried to make clear which details come from Gildas, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Welsh Annals and which belong to later legend, because in this period the difference matters. Taken together, the five scenarios also work as a short tabletop campaign that follows the Britons from their first great crisis to their last battle.
The armies themselves come from Peter Dennis's artwork, printed in full colour on plexiglass. Tattooed Pictish nobles stand beside Saxon spearmen and Romano-British riders still wearing Roman mail. Because these are pre-printed plexiglass wargaming figures, a complete force can go from box to battlefield in a single evening. No painting. No assembly. No glue.
367: When Britain's Enemies Struck Together
Rome's grip on Britain was already slipping a generation before the legions left. Ammianus Marcellinus, a former soldier whose history is our best source for the period, describes what he called a barbarian conspiracy in 367. Picts and a people known as the Attacotti crossed the northern frontier. Scotti from Ireland raided the west coast, while Saxons and Franks fell on the shores of northern Gaul.
Nectaridus, the count in charge of the coastal forts, was killed, and the northern commander Fullofaudes was caught in an ambush. With the army in disarray, deserters and bandits roamed the province. Order returned only after Count Theodosius, father of the later emperor of the same name, spent the best part of two years clearing the countryside and repairing the frontier. Britain had coped with raids from one direction before. In 367 they came from every side at once, and the defences buckled.
Setting up the conspiracy on your table
For a first game in this period, 367 is hard to beat, because everything turns on where the defender keeps his reserves. Give the Roman player a modest force of armoured infantry and archers with a small body of horse. Against him come three separate raiding parties, each arriving from a different table edge. The Picts enter from the north, with Mounted Picts leading and their warriors in decorated skin following on foot. An Irish war band lands in the west and a Saxon crew beaches in the east.
Place a few villas and a supply depot around the table. The raiders don't need to beat the Romans in open battle; they score by looting a site and getting the plunder off the board. That leaves the Roman player with an unpleasant set of choices, and it's the Pictish horsemen who make them hardest. They're quick enough to reach a villa before the garrison can respond, which tends to drag the Roman cavalry north early and leave the coast exposed to the Saxons.
Britain After Rome
Why did Rome leave Britain?
There was no single moment of departure. Over several decades, men who wanted to be emperor used Britain's garrison as a ready-made army. Magnus Maximus took troops to the continent in 383, and Constantine III did the same in 407. Few came back, and the western government had Goths and Vandals nearer home. According to Zosimus, the Britons threw out the remaining imperial officials in 409 and organised their own defence, so the letter of 410 may simply have acknowledged a situation that already existed. Some historians doubt it was meant for Britain at all and think it was addressed to Bruttium, in southern Italy.
Post-Roman Britain still had its towns and villas and a population used to Roman government, but nobody to pay or command a field army. Authority passed to local rulers. You can see that shift in the Romano-British units of the collection, where Roman helmets and mail sit on men who increasingly fought as a lord's retinue rather than as a regiment.
Who invited the Saxons into Britain?
The British monk Gildas, writing in the sixth century, blames a single ruler whom he calls a proud tyrant. After a last appeal to the Roman general Aetius brought no help, this ruler and his council hired Saxon warriors to guard the east against the Picts. Gildas says the first of them came in three ships. Bede, two centuries later, gives the tyrant's name as Vortigern and dates the landing to around 449, and later tradition names the brothers who led it as Hengist and Horsa.
Paying one group of barbarians to hold off another was standard late Roman practice, and on the Rhine it had often worked. In Britain the arrangement broke down. More settlers kept arriving and their demands for supplies grew, and when the Britons stopped paying, the mercenaries turned on them.
Aylesford, 455: The Mercenaries Rebel
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, put together in the late ninth century from older material, dates the break to 455. In that year Hengist and Horsa fought Vortigern at a place the Chronicle calls Aegelesthrep, usually taken to be Aylesford on the River Medway in Kent. Horsa died in the battle, and Hengist and his son Aesc went on to rule Kent, the first English kingdom in Britain.
How literally to take this is uncertain, but its general shape matches the archaeology, though, which shows Germanic settlement spreading inland from the east coast along the same river valleys the Britons were trying to hold.
Fighting for the ford
A river runs across the middle of the board, crossable only at a single ford, with the Britons on the far bank. Their line is built around the Romano-British Armoured Warband, close-order infantry whose mail and helmets came down to them from the old army, with Late Roman archers placed to shoot into the crossing.
On the near bank, Hengist's own household is played by the Upper-class Saxon Warriors, better equipped than the rank and file and expected to lead the assault. Behind them stand the ordinary Saxon Warriors, spearmen with round shields who make up the bulk of the host. Split the Saxon command between two leaders, one on each wing, and the Chronicle hands you a ready-made twist, since Horsa never made it home.
To win, the invaders have to get a solid body of men across and keep it there until the game ends, and the Britons have to stop that happening. British players usually either meet the Saxons in the water or hold back and hit them as they climb the bank. Either approach can work, but each leaves a weakness that a sharp Saxon player will find.
In Search of the Historical Arthur
Oddly, Gildas never mentions Arthur. The only British leader he names in the fightback is Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man of Roman descent whose parents, he says, had worn the purple. Under Ambrosius the Britons began to win again, and from then on, in Gildas's telling, fortunes swung back and forth until the siege of Badon Hill.
Was King Arthur a real person?
The honest answer is that we can't tell. Arthur's name first appears in a history in the Historia Brittonum, a Welsh compilation from around 829, roughly three hundred years after the battles it describes. It calls him dux bellorum, leader of battles, and credits him with twelve victories fought alongside the British kings, the last of them at Badon. The later Welsh Annals place him at Badon and record his death at Camlann.
Most modern historians regard the historical Arthur as unproven. He may have been a real commander whose reputation grew with each retelling, or a legendary hero whose name was later attached to real battles. What nobody seriously disputes is that the Britons won a major victory in these years. The argument is over who led them.
For wargamers that gap is useful. The Late Roman Arthurian Commanders in the collection can stand in for Arthur, for Ambrosius or for a British warlord of your own invention, and they look the part as Roman-trained officers leading British armies.
The Siege of Mount Badon
Badon is the one battle of the period whose reality is rarely questioned. Gildas describes the siege of Mount Badon as almost the last defeat inflicted on the invaders, and far from the least. His Latin seems to say it happened in the year he was born, which, depending on how the passage is read, puts it anywhere from about 490 to 517. The Welsh Annals give 516.
Its consequences are easier to pin down than its date. When Gildas wrote, Britain had been at peace with the Saxons for a generation, and the archaeological record suggests their westward spread slowed markedly in the early sixth century before picking up again decades later.
Where was the Battle of Badon fought?
No one has located the site for certain. The strongest candidates are Iron Age hillforts in southern England, among them Solsbury Hill near Bath, Badbury Rings in Dorset and Liddington Castle in Wiltshire. What they share is height and old ramparts, which fits Gildas's use of the word siege. One army was very likely holding a hilltop while the other tried to take it.
Recreating the relief of Badon
The Historia Brittonum says Arthur killed 960 men in one charge at Badon. That isn't a real figure, but it shows that later Britons pictured the victory as a cavalry triumph. The idea is plausible enough. British aristocrats kept horses, and heavy cavalry had been central to the late Roman army they grew up alongside.
Put a hillfort in the centre of the table, garrisoned by a British warband with a unit of archers on the walls. The Saxon army surrounds it, with its best fighting men massed near the gate and mounted scouts covering the approaches. Partway through the game, the Romano-British Heavy Cavalry ride in from a table edge chosen by the British player. Peter Dennis gives them the long lances and armoured horses of the late Roman cavalry they descend from, and once they arrive the besiegers are caught between the horsemen and the fort.
This scenario is mostly about timing. The Saxons want the summit before the relief turns up, and a strong assault in the opening turns can get them there. If it stalls, they have to decide whether to keep pressing the ramparts or wheel their line round to face the cavalry, knowing that trying to do both rarely ends well.
Camlann and the Fall of Arthur
Under the year usually counted as 537, the Welsh Annals record the strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell. The entry names no enemy and no winner.
What happened at the Battle of Camlann?
Beyond that one line, nothing is known. Medieval romance later cast Medraut as Mordred, Arthur's treacherous kinsman, and made Camlann the last battle of the Round Table, yet the Annals don't say which side Medraut fought on. Suggested locations range from Camboglanna, a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall, to sites in Cornwall and north Wales, and none has been confirmed.
A British civil war is easy to believe in, given the setting. Gildas, writing around the same time, attacks five contemporary British kings for making war on one another and murdering their rivals. The long peace after Badon had not brought the Britons together, and Camlann, whatever really happened there, fits a people who had started to turn their weapons on each other.
Britons against Britons
Both players field British armies here, which makes Camlann a good pick for a club evening when nobody wants to be the Saxons. Each side takes Romano-British cavalry and armoured infantry, plus troops from the western kingdoms. The Upper-class Welsh Warriors work well as a noble retinue around the general, with Welsh Warriors and Mounted Welsh in support.
Play it on open ground beside a river and forget about terrain objectives. The aim is to kill or rout the enemy commander while keeping your own alive, which puts the generals far more at risk than in the other scenarios. Games tend to be short and bloody, which seems right for the battle that ends the Arthurian story.
Building an Arthurian Army in Miniature
Every army in this article is covered by the Arthurian Age Full Pack, which contains 832 figurines across 32 regiments. Alongside Late Roman infantry and cavalry, you get Romano-British horse and warband, Saxons, Picts, Irish and Welsh, with command stands for each faction. The 18mm Arthurian Age Full Pack comes on 16 plexiglass sprues and plays comfortably on a table of about 90 by 120 centimetres. If you prefer larger figures, the 28mm Arthurian Age Full Pack holds the same regiments on 32 sprues, with more room for detail on each miniature.
With the WoFun Standard Bases option, the figures arrive with printed MDF bases, 30 by 20 millimetres for 18mm and 40 by 30 millimetres for 28mm, each taking two ranks. The figures press out of the sprue and slot straight into the bases.
If you'd rather build up gradually, each regiment is also sold separately. For the battles described here, the most useful starting units are the Romano-British cavalry and armoured warband on the British side and the Saxon warriors with their nobles for the invaders, adding the Mounted Picts if you want to play 367. The complete range of Late Roman and Arthurian miniatures is in the Late Romans and Arthurian Age collection.
The artwork also earns its keep during a game. Pictish body paint and Romano-British riders in Roman mail are easy to tell apart at arm's length, which helps when three raiding forces and a defender are sharing the same battlefield.
The Last Britons
In the long run the Britons lost. By the seventh century English kingdoms covered most of lowland Britain, and the Old English word wealas, meaning foreigners, became the name for the people who held on in the west, the Welsh. For more than a hundred years after Rome withdrew, though, they fought back hard, and at Badon they won convincingly enough to halt the Saxon advance for a generation. Arthur's legend grew out of that resistance.
Whether or not Arthur was real, his battles make excellent games. Choose one of the moments above, set out the armies and see whether your Britons can do better than history's did