Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 1).djvu/190

 the spear and lance, which also seldom appear, may have been discarded in the heat of the battle at close quarters, when the sword and mace were called into requisition. We must note with what care all the details are drawn. Indeed, the artistic excellence of the whole illustration is far beyond that of any production of the kind with which we are acquainted. How faithful is the modelling as expressed in the outline drawing of the arms and hands, and how effective is the general grouping of the figures! The colouring, too, is most accurate, all the chain mail is clearly represented in blue, while the bulk of the swords and spear-heads are in burnished gold and silver. In the first desperate battle scene seven war helms are shown painted in polychromatic colours. All seven are of the same shape, roughly cylindrical. So carefully are they drawn that we can almost follow the methods of their construction. Each may be described as having a cylindrical skull-piece, composed of two lengths of metal joined down either side, fitted by rivets to the flat crown plate. To this flat cylindrical helmet, for purposes of better defence, a plate of metal has been added at the back, bringing the bottom of the helmet down to the nape of the neck. This is also done in the front, but with a somewhat deeper plate, which forms a strong immovable mezail, in which a series of oblong and circular holes have been made for breathing purposes. The sight aperture or ocularium is formed, as in the later tilting helms, by the space left between the lower edge of the skull-piece and the upper edge of the mezail, which here appears to be reinforced around its edge by an additional plate of metal, the finish of which at either side takes trefoil form. In one of the helms a piercing for hearing purposes is seen just below the position of the ears. It is noticeable that these helms, as indeed with every helm until we reach the end of the XIVth century, the entire weight of the head-piece is borne upon the head, and is in no way supported on the shoulders. It will be observed that despite the combined defence of the steel cap, the coif of mail, and the additional helm, the battle-axe and sword have in two instances effectively cleft the skull of an unfortunate opponent, thus proving by clear and contemporary evidence that such precautionary additional armaments were not an unfailing protection against the weapons of an adversary. We have here drawn attention to the helm on its first appearance, but from this time onwards we come across it in many effigies and contemporaneous missals.

We appreciate almost for the first time, in the helmet worn by one of the combatants in the middle distance of the battle of Ephraim scene (Fig. 141), the war hat or chapel-de-fer, so commonly in use during the XVth century.