If you’re thinking of raiding and pillaging in the early Medieval, or writing your own epic sagas, journeying to midgard or however else you want to get stuck into the chaos of the Norman conquest you need terrain. There’s little more iconic as a defensive spot, heart of village life or fat raid target than a church, so let’s have a look at Saxon/Norman Church from Sarissa Precision to see how easy it can be to add impressive, centrepiece terrain with playable interiors to your battlefields.
Thanks to Sarissa for sending this over for review!
You’re getting a solid and imposing bit of terrain with your purchase – an mdf church in Saxon/Norman style for £22 (or regional equivalent), which competes on price with other mdf and plastic terrain manufacturers. At 14cm high, it towers over models and takes up a good amount of board space (20x13cm W/D). In the periods it was built it would have been one of, if not the, largest buildings in the area, and despite being scaled for a relatively small example of the form, it’s still an impressive structure. If you’re not familiar with Sarissa Precision kits, this arrives in a smart flat pack A4 parcel, making it storable until you put the work in to build it:
Everything is well – precisely, in fact – cut and intelligently designed. It was a real pleasure to put together, to the extent that I got far, far too into the design and did a characteristic amount of over-research! If you’re thinking “great actually I need a church”, go pick it up now – then read why it’s a good buy.
Design
This is a very straightforward and – I think – very accurate design. Sometimes with MDF kits you think “someone’s working within the constraints of the medium”, but here you’ve got exactly what you should be getting. Billed as a Saxon/Norman church, it’s dead on as a simple, aisleless construction for a small church, most likely based on the “typical” English parish church on the immediate either side of the Norman Conquest outlined in The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church by Hamilton Thompson (1911).
In fact, it’s almost certainly designed around a particular illustration from that mighty tome, which is always something I love in my historicals:
The design lends itself really well to MDF with a simple build process that looks good without a fuss. The porch opens onto the nave, which has no pillars or aisles, with a chancel at one end. The chancel is the simplest and most straightforward construction of straight walls rather than the slightly more definitely Saxon rounded chancel. This is a parish church rather than a massive ornamental cathedral like the mighty Romanesque Durham. With a couple of changes in style over the years, the Saxons were building this kind of church before the Vikings arrived, and centuries later the Normans carried on building them everywhere they went. It could do well as a church built by Augustine all the way through to the Barons’ War. It’s perfect for a small parish church built from 600 until about 1200 from the North Sea to Jerusalem, giving it a really wide appeal.
I like a good, very, very specific terrain piece, and the good thing about this one is that Norman and Saxon churches still hang around – at least as a base for further construction, but occasionally completely unchanged. It’s a classic bit of timeless terrain, simple and straightforward enough in design to be accurate and persist until the 20th century, particularly if you’re gluing the roof on to avoid needing period-accurate interior furniture!
Expanding the Church
If you do want to take this piece through time – and space – it’s worth thinking about futureproofing it when you build. You could leave a panel or two unglued, letting you take a side off and using the well-designed connection points to slide in other pieces of terrain – the Village Church set looks like this should work.
I’ve drilled a few magnets into the areas I’d want to expand – putting rows of three (very poorly spaced, but that’s a problem for future me) into the Chancel and nave walls. I don’t have anything to add on – as yet – but this will let me do so quite easily, and I plan to create an accompanying Minaret to convert the church into a mosque, and to add a tower and nave to expand it into the 13th-14th centuries. As the base piece is just barely larger than the church itself there’s nothing that should get in the way of doing this, and it should be possible to make any additions look integrated into the main structure. I’ll let you know if this works!
If you wanted to make the church look a bit more pre-Conquest, leave off the small window detailing and put a cut bit of MDF inside the windows from top to bottom, dividing them in half for more of a straightforward Saxon look, or use small bits of plasticard/mdf to give them an Augustinian church tile sill.
Building the Church
With ten wall components the majority of the build is very simple. The pieces are large and well cut into the sheet to make them very easy to pop out. The brickwork edges are a nice solution to getting corners to sit right, and guide holes are perfectly placed. The base plate and main walls went together in all of five minutes and sat well enough together with friction that I only had to smear a little bit of gorilla glue across the join to get something extremely robust. PVA would also work but beware of putting it on too heavily as it can cause warping. Just enough PVA to bead when the pieces go together is a good amount. Once glued together and stuck to the base the church is very robust – I didn’t try the toddler test this time round but did, being a clumsy person, drop the whole thing a couple of times accidentally, and no damage so far!
Fitting the porch, nave and chancel together is very easy. I’d recommend gluing the porch to the wall before adding both to the base as I didn’t do this and it caused a very momentary moment of frustration. The roof is also very well designed – and simply – with two supports per roof holding it in place while the roof itself sits on the relevant wall tops.
The only bit where you would need to concentrate enough to stop reading Goonhammer to construct the kit is around the windows. These are a nice bit of fine detail that break up the large flat surfaces. You could quite easily add glass – particularly on the large arched windows – before adding them to the church, but this only occurred to me right this minute, so I didn’t! You will want to take your time removing these pieces from the sheet, as they’re quite fine with lots of 90 degree shapes that laser cut mdf seems to find tricky. I scored a little deeper on both sides with a craft knife and all but one popped out perfectly.
Painting
Before diving into this, I always give mdf terrain a very light spray of primer before painting – pretty haphazardly in the most part – which takes off any gloss and adds just a tiny bit of texture.
The church will eventually feature in my Village in the East series, but I wanted it to look generic enough to fit in to North Africa, Sicily and even a very hot summer in the UK. I read a couple of sources suggesting Norman and Saxon churches were variously plastered, lime washed, mud-plastered or otherwise smoothly dressed depending on area, so I’ve adopted that rather than trying to paint a lot of stone/flint/block texture onto flat MDF. As a result, painting the exterior was very easy, using my biggest oldest drybrush to layer my Egypt Building colours onto it – up through the light skin tones to white from yellow ochre. The roof tiles received the same with a little extra brown and even less attention to detail. It’s all blended together quite nicely.
Painting the church appropriately will really let you take a (wonderfully) generic bit of scenery and theme it appropriately for your table. A very early Saxon church would look fantastic with roman-style white walls and the classic “we really want to project the image of Rome” red tile roof, while later Saxon and Norman construction might have darker clay tile, or even slate, roofs. Local building materials will change the colours as much as fashions, so have a think about the look you’re doing before diving in.
Detailing the exterior was relatively simple, adding a bit of faded-looking colour to arches, a bit of pigeon shit on windowsills (tiny blobs of milliput and paint), and some staining around the door and windows with washes. I also added some very simple rows of swallow nests out of modelling clay to the very very edge of the roof over the nave. Adding any more would likely make it difficult to take the roof on and off, but if I wasn’t doing a removable roof I would have gone absolutely crazy with swallow nests and bat roosts.
Interior detailing was much more fun. Keeping the Chancel a bit darker with just two colours on the walls, I thought it would be a good idea to push the Nave decoration a bit more. This includes a band of pseudo-arabic that would suit a Sicilian or Crusader church – mainly because I love the idea of pseudo-arabic decoration when people looked at islamic calligraphy and thought “how beautiful” but couldn’t read the writing so just copied the shapes roughly – and a frieze of saints inspired by Romanesque art. These churches would have been richly – if not always expertly – painted, and with a large flat space and the saving grace of the weathering sponge, I felt that it would have been rude not to.
Other than that, the interior detailing is very simple – a line of old renedra square bases painted along the lines of Porble’s guide to painted bases to create a tilework aisle, and that’s all so far. I’d like to equip it with a range of different furniture, but for now it sits empty. There’s plenty of space for several models inside – even with two five-man movement trays in there you can just about move them around.
Frieze aside, the full painting probably took less than an hour, and if I hadn’t been wondering about how I should do the swallow nests, the whole piece would have gone from flat-packed to assembled and painted over the course of an extended lunch break. For a great centrepiece to a board that’s an extremely quick build!
Overall
It might be a bit odd to recommend a specific terrain piece in isolation, but that’s why I wanted to try this out. This style of Norman-ish Church is common – and widespread – enough that this works for just about every 28mm game you might be playing, and it being a straightforward build, good value and sizable enough to have major board presence is icing on that particular cake. It’s imposing enough to form a massive bit of terrain for games like Saga, the Barons War or Nevermind the Billhooks, with a removable roof it’s great for WW2 and Pillage (can’t wait to stock it full of Saxon Gold and then steal it all out) and forms a small parish church for any number of other periods and games.
While you might skim over it thinking meh I’m not doing Normans/Norman Conquest/Britain, this has an incredible amount of utility, with the potential for expansion or incorporating into other kits. With the basic design found all over Western Europe and beyond, it’s a fantastic candidate for a piece of must-have terrain – a checklist of roads, forests, trees, field, and parish church creates a very straightforward and thematic set, so it’s well worth completing it by picking this up.
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