A knight in fresh paint and new heraldry looks like a man who has come to make his fortune. In fact he is far more likely to be a man who has just spent one. The cost of crusading was staggering, and noble families routinely impoverished themselves to send a son east — selling land outright or mortgaging it, very often to the local monastery, which was the one institution nearby with cash to lend. The historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, who went through the surviving charters, put the conclusion bluntly: it is hard to name a single returning crusader who broke even, let alone turned a profit. Whatever plunder a man picked up was more than swallowed by the journey there and back. And the risk was not merely financial — recent studies suggest around a third of the knights and nobles who went never came home at all, with the death rate among the poor higher still. The expedition was an act of ruinous devotion far more often than a speculation.

King & Country send their French knight to war in the loudest heraldry in the range — checky blue and gold across surcoat, shield, horse barding and banner alike, with a red chevron that puns neatly on his name. He rides in the company of Richard the Lionheart, who sold offices, castles and land wholesale to pay for the Third Crusade, and of The White Swabian Knight; put Fighting Crusader on foot at his stirrup and the mounted man reads as what he was, the expensive apex of a much larger and much poorer army. In a diorama his blue and gold does real work — a single block of bright colour to draw the eye through a line of mail and dust.

Model: MK206 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set