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Michael Edelson
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 Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 1:40 pm Post subject: Historical correctness of 14th century bascinet |
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I am having a couple of 14th century helms made by various artisans, and one of them, who will be making a pig faced bascinet, works with both mild and spring steel.
I was wondering what is more historically correct for a late 14th century helm...mild or spring?
New York Historical Fencing Association
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Byakkokan Dojo
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George Hill
Location: Atlanta Ga Joined: 16 May 2005
Posts: 614
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 1:55 pm Post subject: Re: Historical correctness of 14th century bascinet |
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| Michael Edelson wrote: | I am having a couple of 14th century helms made by various artisans, and one of them, who will be making a pig faced bascinet, works with both mild and spring steel.
I was wondering what is more historically correct for a late 14th century helm...mild or spring? |
Well, You might start with the Historical term. Hounskull bascinet. Which sounds much better then pig face!
To abandon your shield is the basest of crimes. - --Tacitus on Germania
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Hugo Voisine
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 2:25 pm Post subject: |
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From what I understand mild steel would be more historical, but spring steel would be more durable.
« Que dites-vous ?... C'est inutile ?... Je le sais !
Mais on ne se bat pas dans l'espoir du succès !
Oh ! non, c'est bien plus beau lorsque c'est inutile ! »
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Hugh Knight
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 3:23 pm Post subject: |
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Hello,
I presume what you're really asking is whether it is authentic to have hardened armor during that period. No modern steel is much like medieval steel, so in one sense the answer to your question is that nothing we have today is "authentic". But when it comes to soft vs. hard, Alan Williams (The Knight and the BlastFurnace) did a study of 48 pieces of 14th-century armor ranging from bascinets to scraps from Wisby (which I think tend to skew the results, but we'll ignore that). Of the total, 35% of the pieces were of carbon still with at least some hardening, and 12% of those were high-quality pieces that were well hardened. So the answer is clearly "yes", hardened steel armor is absolutely authentic for a modern impression. And if you're doing a high-end impression, which, from your choice of helmets, I gather you are, those precentages would go up, too.
There's also another way to look at this: Medieval armor was often seen in period the way people see motorcycle helmets today. They hoped it would stop most of a blow, then the piece would be discarded or repaired. We usually can't afford that approach today: our armor has to withstand years of heavy use and resist multiple heavy blows, perferably without looking like it was crumpled and ruined. As a result, the majority of modern armorers make their armor far too thick and heavy--so much so that it no longer works like medieval armor did--and this leads to mistaken impressions about how armor functioned and what it felt like. By making reproduction armor out of hardened spring steel we can have it resist blows much better without taking damage and, as a result, can have it made to accurate thickness and weight. Thus, spring steel allows us to make armor that *functions* more like the real thing, even when the real thing was made of soft iron.
For years I wore thick, heavy cuisses and they were a serious constraint. My current cuisses (alogn with the rest of my harness except my helmet and gauntlets--and I'm having Mac redo those when I can) are made of hardened spring steel from Robert MacPherson, and they're light, comfortable and don't get damaged.
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Regards,
Hugh
www.schlachtschule.org
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Michael Edelson
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 4:16 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Hugh,
Thanks for the reply. To clarify what I'm looking for...I do not want a helmet for steel bouting...18 gauge Windlass helms work wonders and you don't cry when you dent them...and I don't do SCA combat. I want a helm that most closely resembles a period bascinet. I know mild steel is not exactly correct and you are right....I am really asking about hard vs. soft, or semi-hard, which can be carburized iron. Modern application aside...in a houndskull bascinet, what would be the most common among the knightly class...hard, or soft (or semi-hard)?
New York Historical Fencing Association
www.newyorklongsword.com
Byakkokan Dojo
http://newyorkbattodo.com/
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Hugh Knight
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 5:10 pm Post subject: |
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| Michael Edelson wrote: | Hi Hugh,
Thanks for the reply. To clarify what I'm looking for...I do not want a helmet for steel bouting...18 gauge Windlass helms work wonders and you don't cry when you dent them...and I don't do SCA combat. I want a helm that most closely resembles a period bascinet. I know mild steel is not exactly correct and you are right....I am really asking about hard vs. soft, or semi-hard, which can be carburized iron. Modern application aside...in a houndskull bascinet, what would be the most common among the knightly class...hard, or soft (or semi-hard)? |
The answer is that it depends on the quality of the piece. If the bascinet was made for The Black Prince I can virtually guarantee it was made of high-carbon steel and very well hardened (which they knew how to do empirically if not why it worked). If it was made for a very poor knight it might well be fairly soft iron. Both would work. So you have to ask yourself what social level you're impression will be. If it's in the top 35% then make it hard.
Regards,
Hugh
www.schlachtschule.org
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Randall Moffett
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 11:45 pm Post subject: |
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Michael,
To add to what Hugh said my own 2 cents.
Of the 35% of the Williams study. Many showed very little increase in hardness. He was not sure if the heat treatment came from any specific try to harden it or that it may have just been the process of working them hot. The 12% to me are more the area I would compare for what you are trying to gauge to getting heat treated. This is about 5 helmets of the 48. I think many average knights would have unheat treated armour at this point and most of the century that followed from what Williams wrote in the knight and the blast furnace. I think in the 15th the change is more low-medium carbon steel is used of wrought iron which gives the armour more strength alone.
Another is clearly weight. I know a person in the SCA that use 12 gauge cuisses. That is crazy to me but for him it is an acceptable weight. Helmets can get much heavier in the SCA over all but when your suit reaches 60 pounds plus it is time to start making big changes to it to me. There are few historical suits that weight that much that are war harnesses. The flip side of this is ultralight suits which do the opposite. They are so much lighter than historic armour they become sport armour for those who want the benefit of armour but no weight. In the end this goes back to the helmet thicknesses in the other post. The armour tends to change in thickness in places.
If it were me, unless I were doing a high up person along the line of Prince, King, Duke Etc. I would not do spring steel for a historical helmet. On the other hand if you are going to ever get it beaten on perhaps it might be worth it even if you do not wish it to represent the helmet of a great lord of the land. The cost of getting it made might also be a factor....
RPM
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Al Muckart
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 11:47 pm Post subject: |
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| Hugh Knight wrote: |
The answer is that it depends on the quality of the piece. If the bascinet was made for The Black Prince I can virtually guarantee it was made of high-carbon steel and very well hardened (which they knew how to do empirically if not why it worked). If it was made for a very poor knight it might well be fairly soft iron. Both would work. So you have to ask yourself what social level you're impression will be. If it's in the top 35% then make it hard. |
I haven't read The Knight and the Blast Furnace but the neurosurgery article that David Edge co-authored directly contradicts this point of view, with metalurgical data to support their conclusions. The article information is
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Head Protection in England before the First World War.
Neurosurgery. 47(6):1261-1286, December 2000.
Blackburn, T. Philip D. M.B., B.S., F.R.C.S.; Edge, David A. B.A.; Williams, Alan R. B.Sc., Ph.D.; Adams, Christopher B. T. M.A., M.Ch., F.R.C.S.
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You can get a copy from http://tinyurl.com/yomal6
They were looking specifically at head protection and the majority of pieces they found were not noticeably hardenable at all, being wrought iron with insufficient carbon content. Those where hardening had been attempted were almost universally badly quenched such that even in the 16th century when they had better technology and were starting to get the hang of quenching suits were inconsistently hardened. They cite an example of a suit from the Grenwich armory that had one well hardened greave, and one without any useful hardening at all.
It's worth mentioning that mild steel has a significantly higher carbon content than wrought iron does, and even then it doesn't harden worth a damn.
I like the motorcycle helmet analogy, that's a neat way to look at it.
--
Al.
http://wherearetheelves.net
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Hugh Knight
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| Posted: Wed 04 Apr, 2007 11:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Al Muckart wrote: | I haven't read The Knight and the Blast Furnace but the neurosurgery article that David Edge co-authored directly contradicts this point of view, with metalurgical data to support their conclusions. The article information is
They were looking specifically at head protection and the majority of pieces they found were not noticeably hardenable at all, being wrought iron with insufficient carbon content. Those where hardening had been attempted were almost universally badly quenched such that even in the 16th century when they had better technology and were starting to get the hang of quenching suits were inconsistently hardened. They cite an example of a suit from the Grenwich armory that had one well hardened greave, and one without any useful hardening at all. |
I haven't read the Edge article (thanks for the link, however, I've been looking for it for a while) but according to Williams, the highest grade 14th-century armor he examined was medium carbon steel with successful hardening by heat treatment. According to Williams only six pieces from the 14th c, at least four of them from Italy, fell into this category: with VPH ranging from 366 to 374, or 12% of the total. These had resistance to penetration about 50% better than modern mild steel.
To me, that's pretty good, and to use my example, if anyone had that, the BP did.
Moreover, I had another article about the Pembridge Helm (c. 1376) which showed it was pretty hard. I can't find the article now (I read it years and years ago), but it was the first peiece that openend my eyes to 14th-century armor. It said that a 19th-century scientist (I forget his name now) had tested the hardness of the helmet and found it to be very hard. He used the test where you scratch the metal with various tools of precisely-known hardness to test the piece. Of course, no one would ever do that today, I suppose, but I've read other things since then that say much the same thing.
According to Robert MacPherson, one of the vambraces at Chartres is actually so hard he thought it would be likely to almost shatter in combat (I am reasonably sure he meant that as hyperbole).
But to your point, there was *certainly* a lot of very variable handling of heat treatment, and I've read of suits with parts done well and other parts done poorly, too.
Regards,
Hugh
www.schlachtschule.org
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Bruno Giordan
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| Posted: Thu 05 Apr, 2007 1:06 am Post subject: |
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In ancient times there was no universal saring of knowledge, so smiths tended to keep their tarde secrets rather than sharing them.
A bit later for example the Republic of Venice would sentence to death any armorer diffusing the secret for the construction of muzzle muskets barrels.
Trade secrets were heavily guarded.
It was the opposite as what happens today.
So there can be a discontinuity between pieces of teh same era, depending upon smith\'s inherited level of knowledge.
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Kel Rekuta
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| Posted: Thu 05 Apr, 2007 5:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Hugh Knight wrote: | | Al Muckart wrote: | I haven't read The Knight and the Blast Furnace but the neurosurgery article that David Edge co-authored directly contradicts this point of view, with metalurgical data to support their conclusions. The article information is
They were looking specifically at head protection and the majority of pieces they found were not noticeably hardenable at all, being wrought iron with insufficient carbon content. Those where hardening had been attempted were almost universally badly quenched such that even in the 16th century when they had better technology and were starting to get the hang of quenching suits were inconsistently hardened. They cite an example of a suit from the Grenwich armory that had one well hardened greave, and one without any useful hardening at all. |
I haven't read the Edge article (thanks for the link, however, I've been looking for it for a while) but according to Williams, the highest grade 14th-century armor he examined was medium carbon steel with successful hardening by heat treatment. According to Williams only six pieces from the 14th c, at least four of them from Italy, fell into this category: with VPH ranging from 366 to 374, or 12% of the total. These had resistance to penetration about 50% better than modern mild steel.
To me, that's pretty good, and to use my example, if anyone had that, the BP did.
Moreover, I had another article about the Pembridge Helm (c. 1376) which showed it was pretty hard. I can't find the article now (I read it years and years ago), but it was the first peiece that openend my eyes to 14th-century armor. It said that a 19th-century scientist (I forget his name now) had tested the hardness of the helmet and found it to be very hard. He used the test where you scratch the metal with various tools of precisely-known hardness to test the piece. Of course, no one would ever do that today, I suppose, but I've read other things since then that say much the same thing.
According to Robert MacPherson, one of the vambraces at Chartres is actually so hard he thought it would be likely to almost shatter in combat (I am reasonably sure he meant that as hyperbole).
But to your point, there was *certainly* a lot of very variable handling of heat treatment, and I've read of suits with parts done well and other parts done poorly, too. |
Hugh, do you have this book or access to it? I skimmed through a good part of it last weekend, specifically looking at the bascinets. The item studies I read were listed as ferrite with no discernable hardening probably being air cooled. Maybe I missed something? Could you note which particular 14th C bascinets were hardened? I saw and heard a lot of references to 15thC German pieces demonstrating hardening, not Italian bascinets. Could you clarify this please?
Kel
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Hugh Knight
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| Posted: Thu 05 Apr, 2007 6:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Kel Rekuta wrote: | | Hugh, do you have this book or access to it? I skimmed through a good part of it last weekend, specifically looking at the bascinets. The item studies I read were listed as ferrite with no discernable hardening probably being air cooled. Maybe I missed something? Could you note which particular 14th C bascinets were hardened? I saw and heard a lot of references to 15thC German pieces demonstrating hardening, not Italian bascinets. Could you clarify this please? |
Hi Kel,
I don't have a copy, but two of my friends do. One of them posted some data on his blog, which is where I got that information:
http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html
And it didn't say anything about bascinet's specifically, just "pieces of armor", although I don't think it's much of a leap to go from that to helmets--after all, Williams only looked at a very small percentage of extant armor.
If you need him to look for something specific I can ask.
Regards,
Hugh
www.schlachtschule.org
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Kel Rekuta
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| Posted: Sun 08 Apr, 2007 9:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Hugh Knight wrote: | | Kel Rekuta wrote: | | Hugh, do you have this book or access to it? I skimmed through a good part of it last weekend, specifically looking at the bascinets. The item studies I read were listed as ferrite with no discernable hardening probably being air cooled. Maybe I missed something? Could you note which particular 14th C bascinets were hardened? I saw and heard a lot of references to 15thC German pieces demonstrating hardening, not Italian bascinets. Could you clarify this please? |
Hi Kel,
I don't have a copy, but two of my friends do. One of them posted some data on his blog, which is where I got that information:
http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html
And it didn't say anything about bascinet's specifically, just "pieces of armor", although I don't think it's much of a leap to go from that to helmets--after all, Williams only looked at a very small percentage of extant armor.
If you need him to look for something specific I can ask. |
Thanks for the link. I'll read it and see if I can use more info. I liked the book but I don't think I'd get enough use out it for 164 GBP!  I'll wait to have a better look at it another time.
During Dr. Williams's presentation at the ARS conference, someone asked about this. He offered the opinion that tempering was rudimentary and irregular on late 14thC Italian armours then disappeared in the 15thC. Meanwhile south German armourers obtained repeatable results in the early-mid 15thC and continued to improve its application in high end armours into the 16thC. This inference lead me to poke through the text in the bookshop later. The five or six studies of 14thC bascinets I recall reading were all ferrite, some air cooled if noted. There were no mentions of marstenite, pearlite or cementite that appeared in descriptions of later harness elements. And a lot of those studies were 16th-17thC artifacts. I would be uncomfortable stating 14thC bascinets were tempered based on what I read in Knight and the Blast Furnace. I don't feel so bad having a mild steel bascinet. 
Cheers!
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Randall Moffett
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| Posted: Sun 08 Apr, 2007 10:36 pm Post subject: |
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on a tangent how was the ARS conference.... They had a great lineup of speakers this year. I was very interested in MAtthew Strickland's presentation as well.
RPM
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Kel Rekuta
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| Posted: Mon 09 Apr, 2007 10:09 pm Post subject: |
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| Randall Moffett wrote: | on a tangent how was the ARS conference.... They had a great lineup of speakers this year. I was very interested in MAtthew Strickland's presentation as well.
RPM |
Yes, so was I. Unfortunately, he pretty much tossed out some quotes from the Great Warbow with very nice handouts for those that haven't read it. He was pleasure to talk to over lunch though. Very pleasant fellow and very open to questions. I really liked Ralph Moffat's talk. Tons of new stuff for me to follow up on, being a 14thC material culture buff. Who else was a treat? Jan Peyt Puyot. (sp?) He's a recently retired curator from Delft specializing in edged weaponry. Lovely new book in four languages, et cetera. A truly charming, humorous man as well. Alan Williams explaining metallurgy to the likes of me was a fantastic experience as well. My head doesn't spin over terms like pearlite, cementite and marstenite now. Fabrice Cognot had some amazing detailed photos and background on the Burgundian ducal effigies in Dijon. Lurid detail of the bascinet linings. Not interesting to everyone but after you've struggled to line a few bascinets.... Brilliant. It will be published in the ARS journal. Peter Johnsson was brilliant again. Very captivating describing his studies of sword harmonics, construction and design. Another hard core researcher sharing a great deal of his work with an appreciative audience. Well done.
Without question the best part of the weekend was the gallery tour with Toby Capwell. A good strong speaker with endless tidbits about anything and everything armour or jousting related. He was kind enough to spend some time with me in the galleries a couple days later. Very generous for such a busy fellow. Yeah. That was a great trip.
If the ARS pulls off the proposed trip to Venice and Milan in 2009, I'll have to find a way to fund the trip. Absolutely awesome adventure for an amateur researcher. 
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Randall Moffett
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| Posted: Mon 09 Apr, 2007 11:01 pm Post subject: |
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Man that does sound good.
Ralph is a great person. I meet him a while back while he was busy at work in the library at the RA. I am glad it was exciting.
Bascinet linings. Now that sounds like something useful to look at. I will have to contact Doug and get more info on it.
Thanks
RPM
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Fabrice Cognot
Industry Professional
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Kel Rekuta
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| Posted: Thu 12 Apr, 2007 6:22 am Post subject: |
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| Fabrice Cognot wrote: | Jan-Piet Puype. Former curator at the Delft Legermuseum.
Yep, a nice conference it was. Still working on that bascinet - I'll hope to take more pics soon.
Cheers
Fab |
Fab,
If there is any one thing that set my hands itching to get to work, that was your selection of photos inside that alabaster bascinet. I have four bascinets to line ASAP to get them off my commission list. I'm not happy with the way I do them now. If I'm going to change patterns, I'd like it to be in that style. Looking forward to your article in the journal.
It was a pleasure to meet you and chat about training. I hope you get the chance to wrestle with Dave Cvet as we discussed. Its an experience! 
Cheers!
Kel
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