A falling man raises a question that archaeology can occasionally answer, and one answer came out of a Dorset hillside in June 2009. Road works for the Weymouth relief road cut into Ridgeway Hill, and Oxford Archaeology lifted fifty-four dismembered skeletons and fifty-one skulls out of a single pit. All of them male. Almost all between their late teens and around twenty-five, with a few who had reached their fifties. Between them they carried a hundred and eighty-eight wounds, an average of four each. The bodies had been thrown in haphazardly; the heads had been stacked separately to one side. Isotope analysis of their teeth placed their childhoods in Scandinavia — one of them somewhere north of the Arctic Circle — and radiocarbon dating put the whole event between 970 and 1025. These men did not fall in a shield wall. They were executed, perhaps during the St Brice's Day massacre of 1002, perhaps by their own people for changing sides. It is the sharpest picture we have of how these wars ended for the men who lost them.

W. Britain have caught Leofric at the moment before the ground, sword arm still up, the shield sliding off his forearm, one leg gone from under him. It is a hard piece to look at properly, which is rather the point — a display of warriors all swinging and none of them paying is a display that is lying to you. He works with "The Contest Decided" and "Overwhelmed" as the three pieces in this range that show consequence, and he belongs a pace in front of "Seaver" Saxon Shield Wall Defender — the line he has just fallen out of, closing up behind him.

Model: 62118 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set