Medieval Helmet: How Its Shape Is Designed for Protection

I've been doing some thinking about this helmet that got battered by the lance the other time. I've been doing some training with a wooden waster, a wooden sword, much like the ones they actually would have trained with in medieval times. I think it's quite fun to have a wooden sword on a real horse. I've been thinking quite a bit about this helmet and how battered it's got, but in fact how protective it is. The shape of it allows for my lance point to slide off in a number of different ways. So the actual hound skull shape, whilst this one is not the same kind of shape as an original, it's similar to it and it does the same job. This one's actually a conical piece of steel, well it's a piece of steel that's been welded down the bottom there from the inside, you can see that, which is not the way it would have been done in medieval times, it would have been raised from one piece of steel. But nonetheless, this piece of steel did work quite well to deflect that pointy lance going at speed. And the fancy brasswork that I spoke about actually was a bit of a problem because it caught the tip of the lance. So if you were wearing this helmet and you put this fancy brasswork on to show off, you'd be regretting it because the tip hit just above the eye slot. I thought I'd got the eye slot. I missed it by, must be an eighth of an inch, you can see the impact point of the tip of my lance, it's about, I don't know, it could be about a millimetre or two millimetres above and it's quite dented, the actual steel itself, but the tip slid up and caught under this piece of fancy decoration. Now, there's an example of decoration getting in the way and causing you difficulties. We do know that certain periods in history, brass decoration around the edge of helmets was favoured, it was high status, it was gilded, it was silvered, but maybe it wasn't as attached as firmly as this was because if that happened in real life, that might break your neck. Depending on how the helmet was fastened, whether it was fastened with a chin strap, it would probably have an avontail of mail around it protecting you, that would create some weight downwards, but basically, that brass edge strip caught the end of my lance. It actually meant that the helmet itself was lifted upwards and outwards and if that had been attached, it might well have broken somebody's neck who was wearing it, which is pretty terrifying, but there is some evidence from battlefield analysis and battlefield injury that in fact, broken necks were a big component of the medieval battlefield and whilst the impact of my lance wouldn't have actually skewered the person's face, potentially, because it didn't actually get into the eye slot, it probably would have broken their neck and a dead enemy, I guess, is as good as a stabbed and dead enemy. So if you take them out, you've done the job. So fancy brass work is probably a bit of a liability on the battlefield, as we've proven here. The other thing is this shape, the shape of the dome is quite important. These plates all form a ricochet surface, they all form a surface that my sharp lance can't get a grip on. So if you are not precisely on target and you don't get lucky with a piece of rivet or an edge of a plate or something, the point can just slide off and if it slides off, it deflects the lance and you miss. If the lance hits and sticks, then a lot of that energy will go into the head and to the helmet. It might not go through, but that doesn't really matter. One thing that occurred to me was that whilst this is a replica, not a particularly good replica, but nonetheless a useful replica of a medieval helmet, it is still a helmet, it still did its job and it might have been cheap, but it's made of steel and it stopped the point of my lance from going into that person's head or face and as such, I guess it did the job. In a way, it did its job just as well as a fantastic and expensive custom-made helmet for a lord or a king might have done. It actually stopped that point going into the person's head, theoretically. So in many ways, we can be a bit snobbish about the style of armour and how expensive it is and the type of finish, but at the end of the day, some armour is better than no armour whatsoever and in fact, you could argue that any armour is infinitely better than no armour at all. I have ridden against this helmet on a number of occasions, so the poor thing probably thinks I hate it, but I don't actually. It's actually worked really well for me as a physical metal target. It's very different from chopping at a cabbage or chopping at a tennis ball or an apple or something like that, because it does represent a semi-authentic medieval target. But there are other bits that remind me of what I've done. So for example, on the back of this helmet, there is a nice little hole there. I rode at this helmet with a horseman's pick and hit it, not particularly hard, just to see what it would do, and the horseman's pick went through, so the point on the horseman's pick went through this and caused that injury, but it probably didn't go far enough in to actually do much more than put a lot of pressure on the person's head, so it wouldn't have killed them, and the helmet itself did the job of protecting. You might also notice that this helmet is covered in quite a lot of downward scrapes. That's because when I'm messing around hitting something from horseback, I am hitting and the sword, whether a wooden sword like this or a practice sword that's blunted, slides off and down the helmet, and that's also quite interesting because if you hit on the wrong side of this point, your sword will slide off one way or the other. If you're riding that way on a horse and you hit on this side, as opposed to this side of the point, your sword, good boy warlord, your sword can slide down and that goes towards the horse, so you have to be very careful. This way is safer, but it does wrench your shoulder around a bit, so even hitting a target like this in practice requires a certain amount of skill and understanding. If occasionally, as I've done, you manage to hit it right on the tip there, it goes clunk and creates quite an effect back on your wrist, but that doesn't happen very often. Usually you're one side or the other of this particular point, which is exactly what this helmet is supposed to do. The design of this helmet with a point is supposed to take an impact and effectively your sword or whatever it is is at an angle and it then glances off and it redirects the force of the blow away from you. It might be onto your shoulders depending on where you are, but that's a lot better than just having a blow square onto the top of your head. So this design itself actually works very well and that's the whole point of armour. There is absolutely no point putting up with the encumbrance and discomfort, let alone the cost of armour, if it doesn't actually do something positive for you on the battlefield. On balance, wearing armour has to be better than not wearing armour at this stage, otherwise people simply wouldn't have bothered wearing it. So this trusty, rusty reproduction helmet that was probably made somewhere a long way away from England, has actually served to illustrate quite a lot of different things to me and in a way it's sort of a bit of a historic piece for me as well because I've been using it. I've literally found it in the rubbish bin and I've been using it quite a lot and so it's had quite a few stories. It's shared quite a few adventures with me so I'm quite fond of it, but I shall continue to hit it and I hope it doesn't mind being the target of my attempts at learning some of the secrets of medieval knighthood.