Medieval Sallet Helmet and Bevor - A DIFFERENT WAY TO WEAR THEM

Let's talk a little bit about the 15th century sallet helmet and the beaver. Hey folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Guided Touring. Now this is going to be a relatively short and looking at a very tiny little bit of the subject of medieval armour. We're looking at the 15th century here and the type of helmet which you've often seen me wearing and bashing myself on the head with, with a rolling pin quite famously, is a sallet. Okay, now I'm going to dispense with this stuff so we can look at these individual components together and we're going to look at one specific way of wearing the sallet with the beaver which is not that widely known or understood. Right, so I've got my beaver off and now here is the sallet. So you've seen this helmet many times and in fact those of you who follow the Facebook page will have seen me in the rest of my armour. I was adjusting some things and messing about with some things yesterday in preparation for something that's probably happening tonight. More about that in the future. And essentially I didn't have the helmet on. It's funny because a lot of people said, Matt, you always rant in about movies that people aren't wearing helmets and they should be wearing helmets. Yeah, okay, I was just wearing my armour, chill out! Yeah, I was just wearing my armour and trying to adjust things and so on and so forth. But here let's talk about the helmet which goes with that harness and this is called a sallet or sallet. I'm trying to reform my pronunciation. Most people will call this a sallet incidentally but I think etymologically speaking in English, in medieval English anyway, it was probably referred to as a sallet the same way as we say a bassinet. So anyway, Knight Errant convinced me of that. But people are probably fairly familiar with this type of helmet and if you're not you should be because in the 15th century and indeed into the 16th century this was just an insanely popular type of helmet and this was almost the standard go-to helmet across certainly Western Europe throughout the 15th century and as I say into the 16th century as well. And who wore it? Everybody! Okay, literally the most lowly of soldiers, at least the most lowly soldiers who could afford any kind of helmet or were provided helmets by their lord, would have a sallet of some kind. They didn't all look exactly like this and more about that in my future video, part two, looking at medieval helmets. They didn't all look like this but they were all roughly similar to this. So you'll notice it covers essentially, if I put it on, it covers halfway down my face. And that's one of the characteristic features of these helmets and that's what we're talking about in this video. So everyone from a crossbowman, billman, all the way up to a knight, a lord, a king, emperor, maximilian, whoever could wear one of these and did wear one of these. That's not to say that other helmets weren't also worn as well at this time. Things like the armet, later on the close helmet, and various types of helm as well. But anyway, more of that in the future video. But one of the things that's characteristic about these helmets is whether they have a lifting visor or not, they only come down usually somewhere around half the face. Now, towards the end of the 15th century, yes indeed, there is something that commonly gets called the bellows sallet which actually has a visor which does come down all the way. So it's kind of funny in a way because they went away from things like bassinets which had full face helmets, they went to sallets with a separate bellows. We'll talk about the bellows in a second. And then they went backwards again to a full face visor. But for whatever reason, the sallets were hugely popular in the 15th century. Now, if they do have a fixed visor here, incidentally, if this doesn't raise on hinges, then indeed, another way of getting it out of your face is just to tilt it back. And undoubtedly, their ease of use and similarity in some ways to the the iron hat or sometimes called kettle helmet, and I'll talk again, that will be in my future video. I don't know if it's a coincidence at all. So they're very versatile. You've got good vision and hearing and whatever when it's open like this. When the proverbial really hits the fan, then you can put them down and protect the face. And if you really know you're going into battle for definite, then you would have a separate bellows on. Now, let's talk about that bellows for a second. So if we put this helmet down, you will see that the bellows basically protects the bottom of the face. These actually come in various different types. I won't go into a huge amount of depth on bellows. Maybe I'll do a future video just on bellows. But generally speaking, they protect some parts of the bottom half of the face. They don't always meet up with the sallet. This one actually goes under the sallet, so they overlap. But some of them don't go up that high. Some of them actually finish around here and do actually leave a bit like Robocop, leave a little bit of the face exposed and open. Some of them are one fixed forged plate. Some of them have articulations like this one does here. This has got some articulations here. And this has even got a dropping section here. So you can expose part of the face with a little spring catch to keep it up. So this is a sort of this composed. This is composed of more parts than a lot of bevers are. There are some bevers which go and take that even further such that when the helmet is on here, the bever actually concertinas up much like how this does, but kind of exaggerated even more with lots of plates and it goes all the way up to there as well. And it's got the vision slits in the bever. This was something done in Germany in the late 15th century. So there is a variation between how much the sallet covers and how much the bever covers. But fundamentally, they're designed to work together. Now, in the world of jousting, for example, sallets and bevers are not very popular for safety reasons. If you look at the design of helmets designed specifically for mountain combat, but jousting in particular, then they are designed to receive lance strikes. OK, but not only are they designed to receive lance strikes and therefore they're often strapped or sometimes even bolted to the breastplate and the backplate so that they become a rigid solid unit sitting on the shoulders instead of the neck. But in addition, they don't really have many openings. Now, one of the great things about the sallet is you can look around everywhere in it. You've got lots of nice air and vision and hearing and things like this. Even if you wear the bever, these two things can still move independently of each other. So you've got a lot of versatility. What you haven't got is a colossal amount of front on protection. So the simple fact is that wearing one of these, even with the visor down, the danger when you're wearing a separate bever and sallet is that this can always get knocked up or indeed you could just be riding in the saddle and accidentally a little opening comes here. And if you've got a breaking lance in your face, then shivers of lance can come in and hit you in the face, which very likely might kill you or badly injure you, blind you, whatever. And we know this happened. In fact, in the Wars of the Roses, there are many accounts of people getting wounded in the face when they were wearing sallets. And in addition to this, this is even wearing the bever. OK, we know from historical records from both from art and written accounts and descriptions of people's deaths, like at the Battle of St Albans and stuff like this, we know that sometimes people went, ah, that bever's such a nuisance. It's just it's uncomfortable. You know, it gets all soggy and sweaty inside. I don't like it. I'm going to leave it off. I'll be fine. Bam! Arrow in the face, poleaxe in the face, sword in the face, dagger in the face. So the problem is you're wearing full weight harness. You've got a nice sallet protecting the top of your head. Whether you've got the visor down or up. This, like Robocop again, why did Robocop never get shot in the mouth? I don't know. Why didn't people just aim for it? Good question. Same thing in 15th century Europe. This is what happened. This got hit because if a load of arrows are coming your way, thrown weapons, swung weapons, and they hit you in the jaw, they hit you in the anywhere around here, even if you've got obviously you'd have a male collar coming, a standard as it's called, a male collar coming up here. So your throat would be protected to some degree but a full-on thrust from a poleaxe or a shot from an arrow will probably go through the male collar or at least hurt a lot. And obviously if it hits anything from your chin upwards then that's bad news because even if you don't die you're going to be very badly incapacitated and you'll probably die quite soon after. So these were a very very important way of completing this helmet set. But as I've mentioned they have a weakness. They have a weakness that they can come, even with the visor down, they can open up and create an opening in here to get you. So what was one solution? There were other solutions but what was one solution they did to overcome that? Well I'm going to put it on and show you. So first things first, normally you put the helmet on first and you put the chin strap under your chin, unsurprisingly, and then you put the bevel on. This is the usual way, seems to be the conventional way, of wearing a bevel with a sallet. So the bevel was the first thing to come off and the last thing to go back on. That's possibly another reason why people often got wounded in the lower part of their face with this particular armament combination. But you know, you will notice that I have now put the bevel on first, okay. Now this bevel in fact can interact with the male collar underneath. It can be attached to that, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly with pointing. It can be attached to the breastplate, we're not going to worry about that now. But the fact is I put this on first instead of the helmet, okay. Now you might notice a slight resemblance here between me and Darth Vader when he's dying in Return of the Jedi. I think there's some parallels certainly in how they looked at how Darth Vader's helmet was on. And now with my dark armour, much like Darth Vader's, I now put my sallet on second. So I'll keep my, you'll notice my, I can put this down, there we go, you can probably hear me a bit better now. I'll put that down for now. Now you'll notice the straps are on the outside of my helmet and surprise, surprise, I have put an extra hole in this strap so that with a little bit of fiddling, if I can get the strap, it's not that, usually you'd have obviously servants to do all this kind of gubbins for you. If you just do it nice and tight, where's the hole? Oh, fiddling around. I can feel it with finger. So this is a good, there we go. So you can do a lot of things with armour yourself, but it's a lot easier if you've got a servant or just a helpful friend. Now you'll notice I've got both of these bits still open. I've got the lower opening part of my bevel, but my helmet and my bevel, yes, they're a little bit less mobile now, especially if this is interacting with my armour down here, maybe my pauldrons, maybe my male collar or standard, maybe my breastplate, or even if it's not attached, the fact that these two are now attached to each other means that, yes, I do lose some degree of mobility compared to before, but I've got a lot more protection because now this can't move away from this because they're attached. And this is shown in a few examples in art. So we know that it wasn't the normal way of doing it, but we know that it was sometimes done. And now if I push that up, when I push that down, there we go, make sure that's nice and tight in there. Those are two now units that can't easily, you probably can't hear me very well, so I'll speak up, but they can't now easily come apart if this is hit from any direction and anything bad happens to me. So this is now a much more safe option. Now what's nice about this, I'll just put this down so you can hear me a bit better again, what's nice about this combo is I can still open it up like this, I can still get breath, I can still get air, I can still hear pretty well because sound can come up through the sallet up here to my ears, my ears are not blocked at all, so I can still breathe, see and hear really, really well. But if I really know that bad things are going to happen, then I can, like a turtle, close my bits and I'm now, so to speak, and now much better protected. So this is a really good makeshift way of making this helmet combination safer for combat when you absolutely know you're going into combat. And the funny thing is, I actually think it's kind of more practical putting the bevel on first than the sallet on second. We know some people did it because it's shown in period art. Now the natural evolution of this, what came next, we've got things like the close helmet, we've got the armet, of course, and there is a crossover. If you look at Toby Capwell's new book, there is a crossover between the sallet and the armet, there's also a crossover between the sallet and the close helmet, and the sallet and the great bassinet as well. So all of these different helmet types, they weren't operating in separately, they were sometimes operating in unison. And there was a certain type of sallet which actually operates with a bevel, which is actually attached to it. Now this only seems to have been done at very high-end armours, because probably the engineering of it was quite difficult, whereby the bevel is actually attached via a pivoting point up here, so you can actually close the bevel like a visor, and this is related to the way that a close helmet operates as well. So it does seem that this, probably what was originally a makeshift soldier's way of making this a safer unit to use, actually probably fed into the armourer and the high nobles thinking about armour design, and actually influenced lots of later designs as well. And they kind of copied the idea and made it more official with some engineering essentially. So there we go, I'm sure most reenactors who do Wars of the Roses or 100 Years War Period know all about this, but a lot of people that look at these helmets or know a little bit about the sallet and the bevel maybe didn't know about this. So I hope it's been moderately interesting, if so remember to give me a like, and if you're not subscribed, why the devil not, please do so. Share the video around and I hope I'll see you really soon back on the channel again for another video. Cheers folks!