Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 2).djvu/63

 general use: "La tierce armeure" (de teste) "et la plus comune et la meilleure à mon semblant est l'armeure de teste qui se appelle sallades." Although we have accepted the Bashford Dean salade as being of French origin, we must admit that its proportions very closely resemble those of the head-piece on the Neville effigy to which we have already referred. On the brass, too, of Sir Robert Staunton in Castle Donnington Church, Leicestershire, the visored salade may be seen most clearly represented (Fig. 363). The date of this brass is about 1455, which illustrates clearly how very difficult it is, even when some marked national characteristic is present, to assign with certainty a helmet, or, in fact, any piece of armour to any given country, on the mere ground of a general similarity of form.

Venetian, about 1480. British Museum

At a date closely following that of these head-pieces come the strange high-crowned salades that are peculiar to England, and which are the virtual prototypes of the English armet. The famous Warwick pageant, designed about 1475, shows salades of the tailed order in the drawing depicting the battle of Shrewsbury. These salades have high-crowned skull-pieces, with a reinforcing piece at the front, and also the movable visor (Fig. 364). For a representation of an extant example of salade of this type we can do no better than illustrate that now hanging in the St. Mary's Hall of Coventry, known as the helmet of "Peeping Tom," a helmet which probably owes its preservation to the fact of its having been formerly used each year in the Lady Godiva procession (Fig. 365 a and b). It is a fine English-made salade of the third