The Pembridge Helm is one of the very few surviving English great helms, associated with Sir Richard Pembridge and formerly hung above his tomb at Hereford.
The Pembridge Helm is a great helm of about the third quarter of the fourteenth century, and one of the very few English examples of the type to survive at all.
It is associated with Sir Richard Pembridge, a knight of Edward III's reign who died in 1375, and it hung for centuries above his tomb in Hereford Cathedral.
It is now in the national collections in Scotland, having left Hereford in the nineteenth century.
The helm is dated to roughly 1350 to 1375 on its form, which makes it contemporary with Pembridge himself and with the last decades in which great helms were made.
Its documented setting is funerary. Like the Prankh helm and the Black Prince's achievements, it belongs to the tradition of hanging a dead knight's arms above his tomb, and that is why it survived.
It passed out of the cathedral in the nineteenth century, when such objects were being collected, and entered the Scottish national collections where it remains.
It is a fully enclosing helm of riveted iron plates, covering the whole head and resting on the shoulders rather than sitting on the skull, with a vision slit and breathing holes.
By this date the form had become tall and shaped rather than the simple cylinder of a century earlier, and the Pembridge helm shows that developed profile.
It carries no crest today, unlike the Prankh helm, and whether one was ever fitted to it is not established.
By the 1360s the great helm was no longer the fighting helmet of choice. The bascinet with an aventail had taken over in war, being lighter, better ventilated and far better for seeing.
What kept the great helm alive was the tournament and ceremony, where its enclosure and its capacity to carry a crest still mattered, and where being recognisable was the point.
A helm of this date is therefore likely to be tournament and display equipment as much as battlefield gear, which is a caution to apply to Pembridge as to Prankh.
The association with Pembridge rests on its presence above his tomb, which is good evidence for whose achievement it was but not proof that he wore it in war.
A funerary achievement can be a man's own equipment or a piece made for the funeral, and the distinction is frequently impossible to settle.
What is secure is the date, the type and the English origin — which is what makes the object valuable, since English great helms are otherwise almost unknown.
It is held by National Museums Scotland and displayed there, and its condition is good for an object of its age and history.
A replica hangs at Hereford in place of the original, which is the usual modern arrangement for funerary achievements.
Its removal from the cathedral is itself part of the object's story, and a reminder of how nineteenth-century collecting redistributed medieval material.