The animal on this shield mattered, and we are not entirely sure why. The best evidence is the object lifted from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo: a seventh-century bar of stone with four human faces carved at each end — ancestors, or gods, nobody can say — and at the top an iron ring carrying a small bronze stag. It is read as both a whetstone and a sceptre, a symbol of power that belonged to a king, and there is a neat logic in that, because a whetstone means sharp swords and sharp swords are what a great lord hands out to the men who stand by him. That the stag was chosen to crown such a thing tells you the creature carried real weight in the English imagination. What it actually signified, no one in the seventh century wrote down. You will find confident accounts tying it to a fertility god and the turning of the year, and they may well be right — but they are reconstruction rather than record. Early English paganism reaches us almost entirely through the writing of the Christians who replaced it.

His name means "stands beside", which is the whole idea of him: mail, a conical helmet with a nasal, a cloak thrown back and the sword drawn behind the shield rim — a man equipped to hold a position rather than win a duel. He is the Saxon answer to "Svend" Viking Defending with Sword and Shield, near enough his mirror image in kit, which is rather the point about these two peoples by the eleventh century. Set him alongside "Seaver" Saxon Shield Wall Defender so the shields meet, and let "Broga" Saxon Attacking with Sword come forward past them both — a line that holds and a man who breaks out of it is a better diorama than a row of figures all doing the same thing.

Model: 62144 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set