Axe, and ye shall receive.

Hot off the painting table is this unit of 24 Anglo-Saxons with Dane axes. For infantry I'm leaning towards units of 24 figures in three ranks of eight. This looks like a good sized unit to me, and makes a nice target to aim for when painting. 36 figures might be even better, but I think they'd be a bit unwieldy on the tabletop unless you had a huge 12 x 8 foot table or something.

Although I normally base figures individually on 20mm square bases, I've decided to base command figures together. In Warhammer Ancient Battles, and some of its successor games, the unit champion, musician and standard bearer always die last so there wouldn't be a requirement to remove them individually. Additionally, multi-based figures are just easier to deal with.

Most of these figures are Saxon Miniatures (now absorbed into the Warlord Games mega-corp) and Gripping Beast and therefore sculpted by Colin Patten, the doyen of dark age figures. However, a few Foundry figures have also crept in so that the unit is composed of all unique poses. The Foundry figures are quite tubby in comparison and have clearly been enjoying rather too many pre-battle feasts.

Tubby Foundry on the left, slimjim Saxon Miniatures on the right

From the back you can see a number of the figures have kite shields. Very C11th!