The helm, shield and saddle carried at Henry V's funeral in 1422 and displayed above his chantry at Westminster Abbey.
Henry V died in 1422 and was buried at Westminster Abbey, and the achievements carried at his funeral — a helm, a shield and a saddle — were placed above his chantry chapel.
They survive, which is remarkable: leather, wood and textile almost never last, and these did only because they were hung high in an abbey and left undisturbed.
With the Black Prince's achievements at Canterbury they form the two great English survivals of this practice.
The objects belong to the early fifteenth century and to the king's funeral, and their provenance is about as secure as medieval provenance gets — they have been in one building, in one position, since 1422.
They were removed from above the chantry in the twentieth century for conservation, and replicas were installed in their place, which is now standard practice for objects of this kind.
The originals are held and displayed by the Abbey under controlled conditions.
The helm is a great helm of tilting form — heavy, fully enclosing, and built for the lists rather than for a battlefield where the bascinet had long since taken over.
The shield and the saddle complete the group. A funeral saddle is an especially rare survival, since saddles are leather and wood and essentially never last.
The helm shows damage, and that damage is where the object's most repeated story begins.
It is often said that this is the helm Henry wore at Agincourt in 1415, and that the damage to it is battle damage from that day.
The objects cannot confirm that. A funerary achievement may be a man's own equipment or may be made or adapted for the funeral, and a tilting helm of this weight is in any case unlikely battlefield equipment for 1415.
The honest position is that these are securely Henry V's funeral achievements, that they are genuine early fifteenth-century objects, and that no part of the Agincourt story can be demonstrated from them. That should be said where the reader meets the claim, not buried at the end.
Henry V reigned from 1413 to 1422, won at Agincourt in 1415, conquered Normandy and secured the Treaty of Troyes before dying at thirty-five with the French crown promised to his heir.
His funeral was a state occasion of great deliberateness, and the achievements were part of a display asserting what he had been and what his infant son inherited.
The practice they belong to — hanging a dead man's arms above his tomb — was widespread, and its rarity today is a fact about survival rather than about how often it was done.
They are conserved at Westminster Abbey, with replicas above the chantry so that the visual arrangement is preserved while the originals are protected.
The Abbey does not license modern photography of them freely, which is why this article is illustrated with a plate published in 1897 — old, small and monochrome, but the actual object.
They have been studied and published, particularly the helm, whose form and damage are the subject of the longest-running discussion.