The hounskull bascinet was a visored helmet whose projecting facepiece helped deflect blows and improve breathing space.
The hounskull is a bascinet fitted with a tall conical visor drawn out into a point, giving the wearer the muzzle-like profile that made it one of the most distinctive objects of the later fourteenth century.
The name is an anglicisation of the German Hundsgugel, "hound's hood", and it is a modern label for a form medieval writers described simply as a bascinet with a visor. The visor is the variation; the helmet beneath it is an ordinary bascinet.
The projecting shape is functional rather than decorative, and it survives in numbers precisely because it worked: it deflects a lance point, increases the volume of air available to a closed helmet, and moves the breathing holes away from the face.
The skull is a standard bascinet — raised from a single plate, pointed, hung with a mail aventail on vervelles. All the distinctive design sits in the visor, which is hinged at the temples and can be lifted or lifted off.
The visor is drawn forward into a cone or wedge. Its two sight slits sit under a projecting brow that shades and shields them, and the breathing holes are clustered on the lower cone. Those holes are characteristically asymmetric: many on the right side of the wearer's face, few or none on the left.
That asymmetry is one of the clearest pieces of design reasoning surviving in medieval armour. In a mounted encounter the opponent's lance comes from the wearer's left, so the left of the visor is kept solid while the right — the sheltered side — is pierced as generously as needed for air.
The pointed visor turns a thrust. A point arriving anywhere on that sloped cone is deflected outward instead of stopping against a flat plate, which is precisely the behaviour wanted from a helmet designed against couched lances and armour-piercing swords.
It was a fighting helmet, not a parade one, and was worn in the major engagements of its period; men-at-arms in hounskulls fought at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and in the campaigns leading to the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
The visor could be raised on the march, in council, or between charges, so the wearer spent most of a campaign with his face open — the practical arrangement that made the closed helmet tolerable at all.
It is the best-ventilated closed helmet of its century. The cone holds a volume of air in front of the mouth that a close visor does not, and the concentration of breaths on the sheltered side allows generous piercing without weakening the struck face.
Vision remains poor, as in any closed helmet: two slits, no periphery, and a projecting visor that limits downward sight in particular, which matters for a man fighting on foot over broken ground or fallen bodies.
The projection is also a lever. A visor that sticks out can be gripped, struck or wrenched, and fifteenth-century designs move steadily back toward flatter, more compact visors partly for that reason.
The form appears in the 1370s as visors evolve from the earlier klappvisier and spreads quickly across Western and Central Europe, becoming the characteristic knightly helmet of the last quarter of the fourteenth century.
It remains in use into the first two decades of the fifteenth, overlapping with the great bascinet, which replaces the mail aventail with plate while sometimes keeping a similar visor.
It disappears with the rise of the sallet and armet in the middle decades of the fifteenth century — helmets that offer comparable protection with a lower profile and better vision, and that do not present a projecting cone to be grabbed.
German examples tend to a longer, sharper cone; Italian ones are often shorter and more rounded, and the trade in Milanese armour spread Italian profiles far beyond Italy. The distinction is real but should not be pressed too hard on individual pieces.
Good examples survive in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Armouries and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the type is unusually well represented in funerary brasses and effigies, which often show the visor in detail.
As with bascinets generally, complete pieces with their original aventails are rare; visors survive separately in some numbers, having been detachable by design and therefore easily parted from their helmets.