This
helmet was created as a compromise reconstruction intended
for full-contact batton combat in the Society for Creative
Anachronisms ("SCA").
It is intended to represent a round domed helmet with sliding
Nasal, a Curtain of Bands, and Bevor of bands.
Due to requirements of SCA combat, the face had to be fully
protected with no gaps that would permit a 1" dowel.
To this end, I made the Nasal rigid (only retaining the look
of a sliding Nasal) by riveting it underneath the Nasal Bracket.
I made the lower finial to the maximum size that extant examples
would allow and then added crossbars to the Nasal.
As the Cross Bars would need to be supported at the sides,
I needed to attach them to something. In order to retain the
flexibility of the Curtain of Bands, while making the face-bands
rigid, a hidden support would need to be used -- attach rigidly
to the helmet dome and face bands.
Constructing the Curtain and Bevor:
The individual bands which form the Curtain and Bevor are
laced together with leather thongs.
There are two common ways of doing the lacing - Verticaly
or Horizontaly.
Here, I have used two variations of the first method. In the
vertical method, a thong runs vertically through a single
set of holes of all of the plates. The next thong runs through
the set of holes next to the first, and so forth.
The first, more common, variation was used for the Curtain.
This variation uses a set of three pairs of holes for each
pair of laces.
 The
Laces enter the plate at the top pair of holes from the back
forward. They cross each other in the front and enter the
next set of holes from the front to the back. They cross each
other once more at the back, and come out of the lowest set
of holes.
The second
variation was used for the Bevor. Here, two pairs of holes
are used for each pair of laces.
The Laces enter the plate at the top pair of holes from the
back forward. They cross each other in the front and enter
the same set of holes from the front to the back. They cross
each other once more at the back, and come out of the lower
set of holes.
The second lacing method, which I did not use here, has a
single thong run through all of the holes of two adjacent
plates -- connecting the upper to the lower plate. The next
thong connects the lower plate of this set to the next plate
below, and so forth.
A third common method of attaching plates, which was used
in the East, is to rivet the plates to leather straps which
connect the plates vertically -- similar to the method used
by the Romans.
Because of SCA safety requirements, I attached the upper plate
of the Curtain to the Dome of the helmet using rivets -- so
that this plate does not move in relation to the dome or faceplate.
Bevor attachment is at the same time conjectural and dictated
by needs of the SCA.
While there are many art images showing Bevors of bands or
lamellar sitting fairly high on the face, there are no surviving
helmets I know of that have this. Here, I went with the rest
of the helmet structure and hung the Bevor from the over-sized
lower finial (after looking at alot of the art, it is my opinion
that the vast majority of these Bevors were attached to full-faced
anthropomorphic visors).
|
