Ultimate Medieval Helmet for Foot Combat! The Great Bascinet

I am Matt eon of scholar gladiatoria and this is a great bassinet I'm okay I folks Matt E here schol Gladiator so as you can see I'm having to hold my microphone there's no perfect solution to wearing a great Basset and talking into a microphone it turns out I could probably clip it down here but it might get chopped in half by my visor falling down so so this is the first great bassinet I've ever owned you will hopefully know from my channel and watching my armor playlist that I have talked about great great bassinets before um I think I've even worn one before but I've never owned one before so this is the first glimpse of my new armor many of you will know from watching recent videos I have sold my black armor the one with the salot now obviously my new armor can go with various different types of helmet you can go with a salot an armut a grap Basset they're the most common types even a chapel iron hat various other options um but it has come with a great bassinet and this is the one modeled uh fairly closely kind of well it's an interpretation of anyway it's very similar to The Frederick the Victorious one uh in Vienna so that's not to say that my armor is based on his armor um but we'll talk more about the rest of the armor in the future so this armor that I bought is secondhand but was not used very much much much like my black armor incidentally which was also bought secondhand now there's a lot of advantages to buying a secondhand armor one is you don't have to wait for it when it's up for sale you can buy it and you can go and try it on and if it fits you can pay for it and walk away with it usually getting armor made takes uh months or years in some cases uh so that's nice um also it means you can try it on for fit uh because it's already been made and uh the fact is that the person that this armor was made for was exactly the same height as me that's 184 uh centim so just over 6t uh about 6'1 and very similar build to me there are a few things which are a little bit different uh for example the gauntlets we'll talk about those in the future um uh but fundamentally it fits me very well in fact it fits me even better than my black armor did so today we're going to look at my first impressions of a great bassinet now the first thing to say is the great bassinet is a type of helmet which was very very popular in England and France but they were war on in other areas as well uh you know the Swiss and austrians the Polish the Germans uh the Holy Roman Empire the northern Italians the Spanish the Portuguese everybody wore great bass Nets to some degree but certainly in the study of armor they're probably most famously associated with the English and French and you could possibly say the iberians as well um and they are probably the most protective type of helmet being worn in the the 15th and even into the 16th centuries now uh earlier on we had things like great Helms and you do they continue in the form of jousting sort of so-called frog mouthed Helms used for jousting but they're not great on foot now while my friend austo might give you examples of the frogmouth being worn on foot the fact is that um they generally weren't worn on foot very much occasionally they're probably the exception rather than the rule because they don't have very good visibility the great Basset on the other hand offers almost as good protection as a great Helm or or jousting Helm but due to the design of the visor here just put the lock on there it's a little bit of a fiddle there we go um this locks as well so this we'll she show how it goes on and off of the head in a minute uh but due to the way that the visor can go up and down clearly I can now very easily expose my face I can see around I can drink I can talk to people I can catch my breath if I'm out of breath much more easily than I can with a uh frog mouth jousting Helm but it offers a huge amount of protection for two main reasons fundamentally one is it's very substantial and weighty so simple laws of physics if something hits me hard this has a lot of Mass to absorb it okay the set and it's very very strong as well the second reason is because it sits as you will see on my shoulders more or less it actually sits on my head and my shoulders at the same time now it must be said I'm just wearing a t-shirt here I'm not wearing my harness when I'm wearing my curas I've got my my pauldrons which sit just slightly outside of this um and I've got my male collar underneath it basically fills up the space that's currently between my collar bones as it were or shoulders and the underneath of here so it does sit a bit more on the shoulders probably more like that when I've got all my gear on but at the moment I've just got a t-shirt on so therefore if I get hit downwards that force is transferred to my shoulders brilliant it's not going into my head and my neck at least not very much hardly at all just to help you relate when I smash myself on the with this stick in fact I've just damaged the stick you feel I won't say absolutely nothing but almost nothing inside the helmet it certainly doesn't hurt you it doesn't knock you about it doesn't ring your head it's incredibly well suited to taking heavy blows for those two reasons it's heavy thick strong multiple layers you'll notice that in many cases you've got steel over other steel so for example here we've got probably about 1.5 mm steel over 2 mm steel huge amounts of Steel here that when we put the visor down you'll notice the visor brow covers the um front I'm having to put this up so you can hear me incidentally because you won't hear me properly if I put the visor down all the time the brow of the visor covers the brow of the helmet so we've got essentially steel relatively was about 1.5 mm then you've got a gap like a compression Zone crumple Zone almost little little Gap about 1 mm and then you've got about 2 two and half mm of Steel now this incidentally is made by Rous of Poland and it was made I think in 2017 uh it was only used I think a little bit well certainly judging by the armor it's used minimally and then it was put into long-term storage so the reason I haven't immediately revealed all of the armor on my channel is because I've been cleaning it and polishing it so if this looks very shiny that's me I did that um on my trusty buffing wheel which is down here so uh it was put in longterm storage it got a little bit of light rust in places and just kind of dirty anyway I've been cleaning it all up you will see the rest of the harness very soon so back to the great Basset so as many of you know the most popular helmet at this time was the salot but while the salot is a great Battlefield helmet um it kind of lacks in protection in some regards most particularly between the junction between the salot and the bever which protects the bottom of your um head the danger is that the two can separate and a Thrust can come in the middle in fact this is even shown in treaters as a deliberate technique to get through the armored defense you don't have that problem especially when the visor is locked down with a great bass net because it's all locked together into one piece another helmet which sometimes achieved the same goal as a great Basset was an armet and then a later type of helmet which comes along really from about the 1480s 1490s onwards called the close helmet which combines some features of the great Basset and the armet um because of the way that articulates maybe we'll look do a dedicated video and close helmets in the future so fundamentally this is a very protective helmet it's not as mobile now you'll notice the first thing is because it sits on my shoulders to look around there are two things I can do one is turn my body there's no big hassle a bit like Batman um or I can actually turn the head slightly inside the helmet now don't underestimate that because we've got eyeballs that can that can turn as well actually I can see 90° to the side of me that way and that way without turning my my body if I turn it just a little bit it's absolutely easy so if I combined the Turning of my head and eyes with a very slight turn on my body I can see completely 180° either side of me so it's not really a problem one of the other fantastic things about the great bass net which often gets overlooked um and which I believe is better with a great bass net compared to an armit a close Helmet or a salot is that with the visor down I'll just momentarily put it down here I've actually got really good visibility cuz this this type is perforated here here all the way around here but also it's quite far away from the face which psychologically is nice because you don't have something right up against your mouth and and eyes and one of the problems that I personally find psychologically with the salad is everything's very close to your face so the eyelit is quite close here that you've got a plate here that's quite close the bever is quite close so you feel a bit claustrophobic I anyway feel a bit claustrophobic when I've got the visor down and the bever up in a salad and I know I know people who have armets who say the same thing because armets tend to have a wrapper around the front which is a solid plate here and if you're breathing heavily if it's hot weather and you're doing something you know like fighting uh which is exerting a lot of energy and making you breathe heavily and sweat it can get very very claustrophobic in there the great Basset however from what I've experience so far is the nicest helmet to uh be fully in cased in enclosed in on foot and for that reason for all of the reasons in fact that I've just mentioned these were extremely popular for fighting with poleaxes so if we look at something like the beach and pageant uh manuscript for example um in the British Library you'll see that in war yeah lots of people are wearing salot and armaments and stuff like this when they're fighting on foot with pole axes or indeed when they're fighting um on Horseback with clubs in in tournament they were a great bassinet because a great Basset offers a great combination between protection especially to your neck and not you know not being concussed and stuff like that protection to your head and neck and just generally but also good Vision good breathing it's fantastic oh it's not as good as a fencing mask obviously but it's a lot better than most other helmet types now the disadvantages of great bass Nets is they are a bit of a FF to get on and off you'll notice I have a strap here and a strap there and that actually straps down to my curas which makes it very very secure but it means that you need someone else to help you get it on you can't whip it on and off like you can with a with a a salad for example um so you do need help to put it on it's more of a faf it's heavier debatably it's hotter um and uh stuff like this so there are disadvantages and there's one other disadvantage which I don't see mentioned often and that is if you have this type of visor with lots of perforations in the front that is fantastic for close combat that's fan absolutely awesome if you're fighting with pole axes on foot or fighting in a melee but it's not fantastic if people are shooting loads of arrows at you because of course there are more holes and slits for arrows to find a gap in and potentially penetrate through the visor now it is notable I think and interesting that the English loved this great bassinet but of course the English were predominantly fighting up until 1454 against the French and they were the ones shooting at the French and the French were shooting back with crossbows but at a much lower rate of fight and sometimes they didn't even use their crossbows properly so the English predominantly the on sending the arrows not receiving the arrows and so in that and they're fighting in close combat so so the English way of fighting seems to have favored the great Basset not to say that the French didn't like them as well but it is interesting that after 1450 their use on the battlefield declines we don't know exactly why that is but as the salot becomes more popular the great bassinet becomes less popular and also the armet comes in so maybe in some regards the armet replaces it but the armor armet never seems to really replace the great bassinet certainly in England and France for fighting with pole axes on foot and even these were used in the 16th century in Henry VII's time for uh combats on foot with two-handed sword or PX or whatever anyway so that is a brief overview to the great bassinet my first impressions so far have been that actually it's way more comfortable way cooler to wear than I Ed you don't really feel the weight very much and if anything the weight feels quite reassuring you feel almost nothing inside it when you get hit in the head it's incredibly protective very good Vision compared to other helmets anyway very good breathing everything's far away from your face which is nice for your breath not having too much of your own re recirculated air quite close to your face so it's good for all of those things I'm a big fan of it the only disadvantage is it changes your center of gravity a bit because it's quite heavy um and uh and Mobility I guess and the fact that you can't get it on and off easily yourself uh right finally we're just going to look at how this thing comes off so the first thing is I should mention when the visor is down and locked I've got a locking mechanism there that I won't lock now because it sometimes get stuck I need to adjust the locking mechanism slightly cuz they're binding a bit also the visor doesn't always stay up if you ram it up it stays up but you have to be psychologically prepared for the fact that sometimes it falls down just don't be worried about your nose cuz it can't catch that um so you have to first put the visor up then having put the visor up there is a catch at the side here on this particular one there's a catch at the side it's a bit of a fiddle there we go and that whole section now opens up and you can take your head out it's a bit difficult onehanded cuz I'm holding the microphone and there we go that's how the whole thing opens up so it closes around your head then you lock the visor down now interesting detail is when you have closed this section you can it can if you twist in the right way you can make it pop open by itself but when you close the visor that can no longer happen but as I say uh this is not uh um this needs a bit of tweaking on it um so I've already had to adjust the visor bottom lip slightly so it sits better into the bever plate oh but it is a heavy object um and uh but when it's on your head it's not too bad because it's sitting on your shoulders but there we go that is the great bassinet First Impressions I'm sure I have more to talk about this helmet in the future and watch very soon for the full unveiling of the rest of my armor soon on this channel I hope this has been interesting I hope I'll see you back on the channel really soon I have been Matt Easton and you know I'll continue to be cheers folks hi folks Matt East here thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our Facebook a like And subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 22,966

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Id: Sbxgl3ykIb0

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024