The bascinet was a late medieval helmet that replaced many great helm functions with a closer-fitting skull and movable visor options.
The bascinet is the dominant fighting helmet of the fourteenth century: a pointed steel skull, close-fitting, hung with a curtain of mail called an aventail that covers the neck and shoulders, and usually fitted with a visor that can be raised.
It solved the problem the great helm had exposed. A visored bascinet closes the face against a lance point when closed and returns sight and air when open, and the wearer chooses which he needs at any moment rather than deciding once before the charge.
It was worn by everyone who could afford it, from men-at-arms to great captains, across the whole of the Hundred Years' War, and it is the helmet in which most of the famous fourteenth-century engagements were fought.
The skull is raised from a single plate into a pointed, ovoid form, higher at the back than the front, so that a blow arriving from any direction meets a slope. The point is not decorative: it is the geometry that turns a descending blade off the head instead of stopping it.
Around the lower edge runs a line of small pierced staples called vervelles, over which a leather band sewn to the top of the mail aventail was fitted and secured with a cord. The aventail hangs from these, protecting the neck and the shoulders, and can be removed for repair or replacement.
Visors evolved quickly. The earliest, the klappvisier, hinged from a single central mount at the brow; the more successful arrangement pivoted the visor on hinges at both temples, so it could be lifted clear or removed entirely. By around 1400 the great bascinet replaced the mail aventail with plate defences riveted to the helmet itself.
The bascinet is the helmet of the dismounted man-at-arms, which is what the fourteenth-century battlefield increasingly demanded. English and French men-at-arms fought on foot at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 wearing bascinets, and the accounts of those fights are full of the consequences of restricted vision and air.
Its combination of plate skull and mail aventail is a deliberate division of labour: rigid plate where a blow lands hardest, flexible mail where the head must turn. Nothing else of the period covers the neck so well without immobilising it.
The raisable visor changed how a fight was conducted. Men could advance with the face open and close it at contact, and the sources record commanders raising visors to be recognised or to breathe — moments that would have been impossible in a great helm.
Its strength is balance. The bascinet gives most of the protection of a great helm at less weight, with far better ventilation and the option of sight, and it sits close enough to the head to be worn all day without the fatigue an enclosing drum imposes.
Its weakness is the aventail. Mail defends well against a cut but is vulnerable to a determined thrust from a narrow point, and the great bascinet's move to plate neck defences around 1400 is a direct response to weapons designed to find exactly that gap.
Closed, it remained hard to breathe in. Fifteenth-century accounts of men suffocating in the press — notably in the crush at Agincourt — describe a hazard of closed helmets generally, and the bascinet was not exempt from it.
The bascinet begins in the late thirteenth century as a light skull worn under a great helm, which is why the earliest examples are plain and close-fitting: they were an under-helmet, not a helmet in their own right.
Through the first half of the fourteenth century it grows, acquires the aventail, and takes on a visor, at which point it no longer needs anything over it. The great helm is relegated to the tournament and the bascinet becomes the fighting helmet of Europe.
By about 1400 the great bascinet appears, heavier and fully plated at throat and neck, resting partly on the shoulders. Within a few decades it is itself displaced by the sallet and armet, and the bascinet's century of dominance ends.
Italian and German workshops produced recognisably different profiles, the Italian tending to a smoother, more rounded skull and the German to a sharper point and a more angular visor, though the export trade blurred these differences considerably.
Substantial numbers survive across the major collections — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Armouries and the Kunsthistorisches Museum among them — and the Churburg armoury in South Tyrol preserves an unusually coherent group of fourteenth-century pieces.
The mail aventails are far rarer than the skulls, because mail was recycled and leather bands perished, so many surviving bascinets are displayed with the vervelles intact but nothing hanging from them.