He is not called Crouchback because of his back. The historians Peter Heylyn and Simon Lloyd take the name as a corruption of crossback — earned on crusade, from the cross stitched into the back of his garments — and the dates fit a man who went. Edmund embarked for the Holy Land between 25 February and 4 March 1271, arrived in September with a larger army to reinforce his elder brother, the Lord Edward, and was home again around 6 December 1272. What happened to the word afterwards is the remarkable part. In 1394, a hundred years after Edmund's death, John of Gaunt read the epithet as hunchback, and is said to have had chronicles forged to assert that Edmund had been the elder brother all along, passed over for the crown on account of his deformity. The motive is not hard to find: Gaunt's claim ran through the house Edmund founded — he had been made Earl of Leicester on 26 October 1265, after Simon de Montfort's forfeiture, and Earl of Lancaster on 30 June 1267. A piece of cloth sewn to a crusader's back had become, in a century, a crooked spine and an argument about who ought to be king of England. It is a useful reminder of how much medieval politics was conducted in the archives.

The figure is Edmund at the height of what he was: a king's son. He wears mail with the coif up, a red surcoat, and rides a horse trapped to the fetlocks in red edged with gold, while the shield and the trapper carry the three gold lions of England on red beneath a blue label sown with gold fleurs-de-lis — the royal arms with a difference, the mark of a younger son. He had been offered rather more than an earldom: in 1254 the pope proposed the crown of Sicily for him, and Edmund was nine years old, but Henry III could not raise the money and the grant went instead to Edmund's uncle, Charles of Anjou. The cross he wore on his back is explained on Crusader Sergeant at Arms, which is about the vow itself; the caparisoned warhorse he is sitting on is the subject of The White Swabian Knight, the natural companion piece for a diorama since both are mounted 1/30 figures and stand well together. For what campaigning actually cost, see Robert de Chevron — Edmund is a case in point, since at the siege of Bordeaux late in life he ran out of money to pay his army and his mercenaries deserted him. He fell ill on 13 May 1296 and died at Bayonne on 5 June, aged fifty-one; his body was not brought to St Paul's until 24 March 1301, and later moved to Westminster Abbey. Facing him across a table, The Army of Islam Standard Bearer carries the other side's colours.

Model: MK258 / King & Country / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set