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 appreciate it, and, as we stated in a previous chapter, they retained the salade with stubborn conservatism; indeed, until after the early years of the XVIth century, head-pieces of any other description are seldom found on suits of German make. England, in her slowness to adopt any new fashion in armour defence, was also behindhand in taking to the armet; but with this difference, that when the qualities of the armet as a head defence were proved to excel those of the bascinet and salade, she practically discarded all others. This was not, however, until the closing years of the XVth or commencement of the XVIth century. It is certainly safe to say that no country to-day can show such an array of closed helmets of the armet type as England; they are not in her armouries, public and private, but distributed among the country churches, where they are to be seen hanging above the tombs of various knightly families.

Passing to the individual helmets of the armet type that are extant, we find, as in the case of other armaments, that the continental collections retain most of the earliest examples. It is impossible to name a particular date and say "the earliest type appeared then;" for with one exception known to the present writer, the armet certainly fails to figure in missal or sculpture until well into the second quarter of the XVth century. The only pictorial evidence of an armet head-piece of earlier date appears in the famous fresco at Rome, attributed to Masolino, which, as most authorities now recognize, was painted some time between 1420 and 1425 (see vol. i, Fig. 200). This testimony corroborates the opinion of the Baron de Cosson, whom we look on as the greatest authority on the armet head-piece, that they were doubtless in use as early as 1410-20. Quite recently the Baron's theory has been borne out from the examination of the Italian armour from Chalcis, now in the Ethnological Museum at Athens. This armour was discovered in the year 1840 (according to Buchon who was present on the occasion) during some alterations which were being made to the Military Hospital in the castle of Chalcis in Euboea, thirteen miles from Thebes. All the pieces had been bricked up in a casement (un réduit) and were only brought to light by the falling down of a party wall. Hefner, in his ''Trachten des christlichen Mittelalters'' (vol. i, p. 83), gives indifferent illustrations of certain of the helmets and states that they were found in a cistern.

The collection consists of bascinets, salades, armets, some body armour and jambs, cuisses, and arm-pieces; in all probability they were not walled up intentionally before the evacuation of the castle; for they would hardly have been worth the trouble of preserving. But it seems more likely that