Setting aside the onerous task of completing the bizarrely inexplicable Georgia Income Tax form - did you know you can claim "ancestors" as dependents? Yes you can - I am pleased to present you with number two in our series of thouihts, jests, insults and the like. Our text will be taken from many sources.

The November issue of Slingshot finally arrived at chez Whitehouse this week, rather to my surprise as I had assumed it lost in the mails (Ed. I didn't get mine yet!), It is a special "Bumper Issue" of 60 pages, and reinforces my belief that a once staid, contentious and generally boring journal has really blossomed under the editorial hand of Ian Greenwood; this issue, no. 128, features the last in a series of "Alternative Roman Wargames", a solo game of strategy, trade and diplomacy set in Germania c.10 B.C. by the inventive Andrew Grainger. There are also several articles -- which go back to the real basis of our hobby, namely the 'Nature of 'Battle'. For some years it appeared that wargamers had given up thinking about such issues; debate was all about rules interpretations and plus 1s, with very little consideration of historical analysis beyond WRG. Glad to see things are changing in some quarters.

I recommend Slingshot for those interested in ancient and medieval military history, and thoughtful discussion of wargaming in all its forms. U.S. subs are $17 surface mail or $26 airmail. Your sub makes you a member of the Society of Ancients, a privileged position sure to make you a respected and admired person in your community.

I notice there is a new 0sprey 'Elite' available - David Nichol's on the Normans. Nicholle's two previous 0spreys -- on 'Arthur and the Anglo-Saxons' and 'The Age of Charlemagne' -- were excellent, and his new work, with illustrations by the sublime Angus McBride, promises well. Whilst I persist in regarding the Normans collectively as bowl-headed proto-Nazis, I look forward to seing the book.

Santa Claus brought me Tim Newark's "Celtic Warriors" in the Blandford series. Once again, the great McBride illustrates, but there are no notes to his pics, and the text is too general to be of any real interest. Like Newark's The Barbarians" from a year or so ago, the book is rather a wasted opportunity.

There has been some discussion in the wargame world of Arthur Ferrill's "Origins of War", which features a hypothetical conflict between Aleaxander and Wellington on the field of Waterloo. Whilst I hate to show disrespect to an established academic who has clearly devoted much time and effort to his work, I have to yell "What a load of rubbish!" at this point. Apart from Ferrill's fairly ludicrous belief that the worthy Macedonians would have succeeded where Napoleon's Froggies failed (Would Nelson's fleet have beaten the Argentine Navy of 1882?) the whole premise is entirely irrelevant to any useful analysis. We do no favours to history when we propose absurd what-ifs to prove a point.

I echo Hal Thing1um's admiration of "Thistle and Rose" miniatures. These are very nice indeed, and remind me a lot of the fine Dark Age and Medieval figures by Jacobite Ltd.

A few insists on the nuts'n'bolts of Dark Age warfare as seen by Peter Bone of the Ark Age Society, a serious re-enactment group in England

• On Longbows: In my opinion the important thing about later English archery tactics is large numbers of well trained archers. Archers may have been less well trained (in the Dark Ages) and the heroic ethos put the emphasis on hand-to-hand combat. The earliest true longbows I know of are from the 4th, century Denmark.
• On Shields: I would certainly feel very vulnerable in battle without a shield -- this is one of the reasons that 2-handed axes were weapons of confident professionals and why archers can be chased away. Chasing an archer is difficult and frustrating, though. A few of us tried it...we eventually got him, though, proving that if you get close to skirmishers, the best thing is to charge -- if you don't catch them, you might scare them off.
• On Lances: "As far as I can make out, the couched lance seems to have been coming into use in the mid 11th century, but was not universal. Hastings was rather an odd battle - even in the 13th century I don't think knights would have tried a lance charge uphill at wellarmed, steady professional infantry - so using spears as missiles or to poke, rather than as lances, is not very surprising.

As someone whose turf is "the Great Indoors" I find Peter's comments -- based on running about in hot armor in the mud and rain -- very useful. I remember the first time I was in the presence of a man in scale armor -- you could hear him 'chink' as he walked at 50 feet. Never let anyone tell you that armored men can 'sneak up' on the enemy unless be's drunk/stupid/shooting a gunpowder weapon. They will Notice.

Very impressed with R.B. Hartley's piece on "The Stirrup" in SAGA 3:1. I'm not convinced, though, that Carolingian horsemen used stirrups in the early 8th century, or that the 'wing' on the Frankish spears was to prevent deep penetration of the lance thrust. David Nicholle has suggested that the wings served the same function as a sword hilt, and that a "fencing" style of spear-play was usual. The Stuttgart Psalter of 825 shows an armored horseman without stirrups. My suspicion is that stirrups did not suddenly make all horsemen more efficient, but that they enabled previously poor riders to keep their seats - which meant that many people could become acceptable, if not brilliant, cavalrymen. I'm sure horse-breeding also had a lot to do with this change; the Vikings, after all, were used to riding into battle and then discounting because their shaggy northern ponies couln't take on heavier mounts on equal terms. I think the Viking was simply better off on foot.

A reference to the enteprise of Oleg and the Varangians against Constantinople in 862

"Still more of -them sailed down the Volga to the Caspian, and, by the Dnieper, entered the Bosphorus and nearly succeeded in taking the Capitol of the Sultan." Seutias MacManus: The story of the Irish Race" (1921)

Astute SAGA readers may recall that the temporal head of the Byzantine Empire was not generally known as a "Sultan."

That's all, folks!