15th century sallet - a popular medieval helmet

I vote Matheson here scholar gladiatorial this is a mid to late 15th century style sigh and this is a rolling-pin I'm fine and so helmets work that's that's the real headline here but quite simply this is a type of helmet that was incredibly popular in the from about 1430 but really popular from about the 14 say between 1430 and 1450 onwards right the way through to the 16th century in fact so really this is a middle to late 15th century the predominant type of helmet this is one type of Sunday there are different types obviously this one has a visor some of them are made in one piece such that you try and raise or lower the visor you just tilt the helmet back on your head so let's have a little look at this helmet first of all you can see that it only covers the top part of my head why is that well quite simply this is this is an attempt I think anyway in the about the 14 30s to move away from the use of bassinet and provide a helmet that's more versatile for more types of usage on the battlefield it gives you obviously a good amount of head movement it's relatively light it can be given to all sorts of soldiers so if you're an archer or a handgun ER or crossbowmen or you know halberd ear you can wear this type of helmet either with or without trim protection if you're fully armored Knight or man-at-arms then obviously you put it with chin protection let's just have a little look at that chin protection so here we have what is called a bevel bevor which comes from the French word Beauvoir I believe and this quite simply protects the bottom half of the face and is worn in conjunction with the Sally now unfortunately I have another salad that this bevor goes with and this bever doesn't fit this Sally so I can't put this on to demonstrate because it's a little bit too wide for this particular salad but in essence it protects the bottom half of the face and the visor close down there and the bevor fills up the gut underneath and it provides pretty good protection now I have to say in modern should we say casting and even foot combats and things like batter the nations and stuff Saladin members are not popular because even when that's fully in there and even when this is down the danger is that when your heads knocked back this can open up here and this can be really dangerous obviously in the modern sporting context now you may ask then what why was the why was the helmet used well I think that the Sally is by and large it's to do with versatility and you've got to think about the use of arms and armor on the battlefield in a wider sense not simply when I'm engaged in combat but you've got to think about when you're traveling when you're marching when you're riding when you're just walking around when you're involved in a siege when you're doing jobs essentially okay so helmets not only for close combat and that's why tournament armor be it casting armor or indeed for foot combats with things like pole axes was very often different in certain ways especially helmets was very often different to war armor because clearly you know if you look at a modern comparison you look at something like battle of the nations they wear generally they wear a lot of padding quite hardcore heavy padding and their armor is often thicker than armor the was historically worn and they're going for the maximum amount of protection but if you wore generally speaking there might be exceptions but if you wore that level of padding and that thickness of equipment in a military campaign you just be overheating and exhausted the whole time you simply just can't pile on as much armor as you can physically carry and then go out on campaign your job as a soldier is to be a soldier and that doesn't involve fighting all the time if you know you're only going to be fighting then clearly you pick the most protective things so in the period of the saleh's if a knight if a man is armed was going to be engaged in a foot combat with pole axes they generally in fact almost always as far as I'm aware wouldn't choose to wear a salad embedder because they're not safe enough in fact they would choose the great bassinet the great bassinet is it exceptionally protective and it was very much favored by English Knights who fought on foot predominately until probably a little bit later than it was still favored on on the continent and by Knights who predominantly fought on horseback and it's incredibly protective but it's also incredibly big and heavy and it doesn't give you very good mobility doesn't give you very good vision you can't you can't look up and down very easily the saala at least without the bevor on and if the bevor is on you can loosen it so it hangs down we see this in period artwork a lot the salah' enables you to look up to them down look all around it's incredibly comfortable it's very much like a modern military helmet if you think about world war ii helmets it's basically a bit similar to this with the addition of face protection so the sally was incredibly popular in the second half of the 15th century i think not because it's the most effective helmet in combat far from it I think it was the most popular helmet in the second half of the 15th century because it's versatile and comfortable and we see time and time again throughout history that soldiers prefer something that is versatile and comfortable and you know there are accounts of conquistadors abandoning armor in in America because of overheating in incurious and things like this we see equipment even in modern military usage being sort of pushed to the side slightly because it's uncomfortable or or a bit too heavy or whatever and you know famous cases of people leaving out plates out of their ballistic armor in modern warfare so very simply soldiers well gravitate towards things which are protective enough ish but also convenient comfortable to carry in to wear all the time and if you're going to be wearing a helmet all the time you don't want to be wearing a great bassinet and that's why even nice switch to wearing these and so let's have a little at this specific Sally so this specific Sally is a probably will say French or English style could be Italian export style as well from from the mid mid 15th century so we're looking at kind of 14 40s through to about 14 seventies and and in fact this style does continuingly in use later and as I mentioned this is a visored stash it has a locking pin at the side for safety which is a feature you find on some historical helmets although not not all of them by any means it's a very popular feature of modern helmets for safety reasons this is made of hardened carbon steel and it's made by best armor of the Czech Republic and I'm really impressed with it it's it fits my head I've got fairly small head I only have a fifty seven centimeter head tiny head and but it's it the right size meat and it fits really snugly tight I put a small arming cap on underneath just to give it a little bit of extra padding if needed I think very often when soldiers were wearing this they probably wouldn't wear them with an army cap or at least not with padding in modern sporting context obviously we go for as much safety as possible but if you're wearing a helmet all the time with no immediate expectation of being hit in the head you probably just wouldn't bother with the arming cap because it makes you hit very hot and makes you very sweaty so as you see it's got a one vision slot that's fairly narrow and if we just look at that you can see that it's sculpted in such a way that things coming in here will naturally be led to slide away so this scoop here if something hits right there it will naturally just slide off down there if something comes above it should hopefully slide up here yes if you're very unlucky and you get something exactly there so such as spear or an arrow it will go in your face there's nothing to prevent that but you need to be able to see but you can really see that this vision slot and also it's fairly narrow it literally comes to about there on my eyes the vision is fairly good because the visors quite close to the face I've actually got quite a good field of vision up and down left and the further advisor gets away from your face generally the more protective it is but also the less field of vision you have and you'll often notice that very big visors such as the famous pound skull or pig face bassinet bassinet sort of clone those visors they sit quite far away from the face and I think partly for that reason they're very often very perforated so that you've got little breaths as they're usually known to also see through as well as the actual vision slits themselves and you'll notice also in good replicas and good quality replicas the visor here you see it's got a what's known as a brow plate or brow reinforce here so we've got double thickness of carbon steel over the forehead which obviously is where's most likely to get here and your with good quality replicas you'll notice this sits very close and snug and as the visor comes up it stays close to the helmet on cheaper replicas in the lower price ranges you'll notice that the visors don't sit quite as close to the helmets skull or alternatively they do and when you rise the visor they either kind of collide with the helmet or rise up so so generally speaking it's a good sign of quality when you have almost no gap between the visor and the helmet and it stays close to the helmet as you articulated visor itself this particular style which is more Italian French and English what we've known as the Italian export style is more often scooped in at the nape of the neck there so it follows the back of the head around and goes into the neck and then flares out this flare enables you to raise the head up and down incidentally so it's not just for aesthetic and fashionable reasons it also assists the actual functionality of the helmet and this scoop is very much a feature of generally a feature of Italian French and English Saleh's if we look at German salads and this is not always the case and also remember that in Germany they were also wearing Italian export armors in Germany they didn't only wear german armor because the production centers in northern italy were I think able to produce far greater numbers of armor so Milan was churning out huge and Florence as well huge numbers of armors a much bigger number I think than the German armor could could keep up with at least in the 15th century but the 16th century it changed somewhat and German Sally's tenth or Shallon is that I think they called in German come down to about there and then they go straight out more like almost like a modern speed cycling or downhill skiing helmet so they tend to go more like that and we also find munitions la's which would churned out in large numbers for common soldiers such as crossbowmen and halberdiers which are more this more this kind of shape the salah' itself almost certainly has its origins in the late 14th century bhasin a or bassinet and where we noticed that the which is the basically the universal helmet for armored men in in the 14th century was the bassinet the careful careful helmet as well or the iron hat Chapel the furs is sometimes known played a part and it seems that in the at the end of the 14th century in beginning of the 15th century we start see bassinets that actually have this type of scoop at the back of the the back of the skull of the helmet and that combined with the popularity of Kevlar helmets seems to have led to a gradual movement whereby we get if you just imagine this without the visor for a minute so I'll raise the visor up where you get a Bassem a bassinet that's essentially shaped more like assaleh and by about 1430 and we start to see salaries appearing more and more in period art but predominantly it's a helmet that was really dominant in the second half of the 15th century and still popular in the 16th century as well and so just you've seen the outside of it now you've got a good idea of that let's just have a little look inside so the inside is fairly universal to medieval helmets and it has a suspension system there with a band that just around the outside that is what this line of rivets are so if you're ever looking at a helmet in a museum or in period artwork and you see a line of rivets that indicates where the liner is attached they're not always attached at this level in other words around the brow they're sometimes attached lower down here okay so that you've got two main heights that you can attach that out by attaching it higher up it does mean it's above the level of your ears which obviously means you can hear a little bit better though I have to say when I was bashing myself in the head with the rolling pin and it's quite loud it is a bit like coming your head inside a bell if you have a lot more padding it protects your ears from that kind of ringing but the problem is that if you have a lot of padding then it can also make it incredibly difficult to hear and it makes it much hotter so the liner is really like a sort of web and you can see that the strips go up and then linked and see they're linked by a cord or a thumb that goes around and connects the the sort of strips together and that means it's a bit like a modern builders hammer or indeed like a modern military helmet and like some cycling helmets as well and really what it's doing is it's keeping your head away from this and so I remember back in the earlier days of reenactment everyone used to get helmets and fill them full of foam and one of the problems is that all of the impact gets transferred through to the head that way if you have a liner what it what happens is it keeps that it keeps a degree of movement of the helmet on your head such that when it's hit the force is transferred around rather than transferred straight into your head and of course as I demonstrated you can put a helmet on the smash yourself in the head and it doesn't hurt however if you get hit by something like a pole axe the it's a bit like being punched by Mike Tyson in boxing your your brain is going to get shaken around inside your skull so you want to limit the amount of movement of your brain and the amount of shock that's being transferred to your head because also that will knock you out potentially and also to the neck as well and so really you know the weight of helmets is useful because the exchange of energy and this is a momentum of when you get hit in the head if you have a heavy helmet like this and they're not you know super heavy but nevertheless they're made of made of solid steel and if you have a heavy helmet it helps absorb some of that shock and some of that energy of being hit in the head and protects both your brain and your neck and of course protecting your brain your neck is incredibly important so there we go guys there's a brief I will talk more about Sunday's I'm sure in the future and other types of helmet and armor but a brief look at the Sally and this specific example which I'm I'm very happy with and I will almost certainly be buying more armor from best armor because I'm really impressed with what they've done with this and this is actually my first piece of armor that's hardened carbon steel armor my Brigantine that i've got an order will also be hardened carbon steel and i can't explain why exactly but that really excites me also just to say that if you're interested in seeing more examples of different types of Sally from original artwork and indeed original surviving examples in museums have a look at my Pinterest I put the link below here I have several different albums on life interest and one of those is Sally's and it you can see different types of Sally and also different types of bevor and how they go together and how they were used and also just a note of course that Sally's were often worn without Bevers as well so many of the original examples in artwork you'll see they don't have a better at all they're just worn as a as a iron hat okay here we go a goodbye to the side goodbye from me see you in the next video cheers folks thank you for watching please subscribe follow us on Facebook you can buy t-shirts through Spreadshirt support us on patreon or follow us on Pinterest thank you

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 137,944

Rating: 4.9706368 out of 5

Keywords: sallet, helmet, medieval, warfare, combat, armour, history

Id: xwX2kkeMEOk

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2016

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why watch the video when i can read the title...