The sallet was a late medieval helmet with a swept-back tail and, in many forms, a visor or bevor pairing.
The sallet is the characteristic helmet of the fifteenth century: a smooth, close-fitting shell drawn back over the skull, usually swept into a tail at the rear, and worn with a separate plate bevor covering the chin and throat.
It represents a change of approach rather than a refinement. Where the bascinet closed the face with a visor hung from the helmet, the sallet divides the job in two — helmet above, bevor below — with the join covered by the wearer simply lowering his head.
It was worn by everyone from archers to princes, in forms ranging from a plain open shell to the fully enclosing German type, and it dominates the visual record of European warfare from about 1440 to the end of the century.
The shell is raised from a single plate and shaped to the skull, then drawn out behind. The German form carries a long pointed tail over the neck; the Italian celata is shorter and more rounded, hugging the head and often ending near the nape.
Vision is provided either by a slit cut into the shell itself, or by a short pivoting visor, or simply by leaving the face open — all three exist, and the same workshop might produce them alongside one another for different customers and purposes.
The bevor is the other half of the system: a plate defence strapped around the neck and rising over the chin, sometimes to the lower lip. Helmet and bevor overlap when the head is lowered into a fighting posture, closing the face without any hinge or mechanism at all.
The overlap is the design. A man in a sallet and bevor lowers his head to close the gap and lift it to see and breathe, which gives him something close to the protection of a closed helmet with none of its permanence — the posture itself is the visor.
The long tail of the German form protects the back of the neck, the area a blow finds when a man ducks or turns away, and it does so without the weight of a full gorget. That combination made it popular with men who fought on foot as well as mounted.
It was worn on every side of the century's fighting. Sallets appear in numbers in the armies of the Hundred Years' War's final campaigns, including at the Battle of Castillon in 1453, and across the Burgundian, German and Italian wars of the same decades.
Its strengths are lightness, comfort and the ability to choose. A sallet weighs less than a great bascinet, sits closer to the head, and lets the wearer decide moment by moment how much of his face to expose without operating any mechanism.
Its weakness is the join. Helmet and bevor meet rather than lock, and a thrust arriving upward at the right angle can find the gap — which is why the armet, with a genuinely enclosed and hinged construction, eventually displaced it for the fully armoured man-at-arms.
The tail can also foul a backplate or a raised collar, and the deeper German forms restrict downward vision considerably, which matters for a man on foot watching his footing among the fallen.
The sallet emerges in Italy in the early fifteenth century, apparently developing from the earlier open-faced barbute and the bascinet tradition, and spreads north rapidly through the trade in Milanese armour.
German workshops take it in a distinct direction from about the 1440s, lengthening the tail and adding a visor to produce the fully enclosing form that is the most familiar version of the type.
It is displaced from the 1490s onward by the close helmet and armet, which enclose the head completely with hinged cheek pieces and do not depend on the wearer's posture. The kettle hat's brimmed logic and the sallet's shell converge in the sixteenth-century morion.
The German and Italian traditions are genuinely distinct here in a way they are not for every helmet type: the long-tailed visored German sallet and the compact open celata are different objects addressing the same problem, and both were widely exported.
Numerous examples survive in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Armouries, the Wallace Collection and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the type is unusually well represented because it remained in municipal store long after it left the field.
Bevors survive separately in some numbers and are frequently displayed apart from any helmet, which obscures how the system worked — a sallet shown without its bevor looks far more open than it ever was in use.