The rippling grey shirt this man fights in was the single most expensive thing he owned. We call it chainmail, but that word is an eighteenth-century invention — to him it was simply his mail, or his hauberk, the knee-length sleeved coat that was the backbone of Western armour for six centuries. Until the 1300s a European hauberk was built from alternating rows of solid rings and round-riveted ones, the wire drawn out by hand through a draw plate and every single ring closed individually, which is why mail was slow to make, costly to buy and a prized inheritance passed from father to son. It bought him a great deal: riveted mail shrugged off cuts, and only a strong, well-placed thrust would work through it. What it could not do was stop a shock. A mace or a war hammer broke bones straight through the rings, powerful bows and crossbows punched holes in it, and its whole weight hung from the shoulders until a belt was cinched over the top to take some of the load. The dead of Visby, dug up centuries later, were cut down mostly on the legs — everyone knew where the iron stopped.

King & Country have caught this crusader mid-swing, the two-handed axe wound back over his shoulder, mail sleeves and mittens rendered ring by ring beneath a white surcoat with the red cross, and a spatter of red across cloth and blade to say the work has already started. Fall him in beside The Axeman Cometh and the Crusader Halberdier for a wedge of heavy infantry, or place him next to the lightly protected Crusader Archer Standing Ready to show the gulf between a padded gambeson and a full coat of mail. In a diorama he is the man who goes in first — set him at the head of a breach, a shattered gate or a broken shield wall, with his axe at the top of its arc.

Model: MK188 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set