Kettle Hat

Origins

Helmets with brims were known in the ancient world, but the medieval kettle hat seems to have been a new development of the late twelfth century. Brimmed iron hats begin to appear in European manuscript pictures and sculpture around 1200, and they are common in art by the middle of the thirteenth century. The illustrated Old Testament made in France around 1250, often called the Morgan or Maciejowski Bible, shows them on foot soldiers, crossbowmen and mounted men alike. Writers of the time called the helmet the chapel de fer, the iron hat, or in German the Eisenhut. The English name kettle hat came from its likeness to an upturned cooking pot.

Design & Construction

The kettle hat had a rounded or slightly pointed skull and a brim that ran all the way round. Early examples were usually built up from several iron plates riveted to a framework of bands, in the same way as older conical helmets, with the brim riveted on as a separate piece. As armorers' skill improved, the skull was made from fewer pieces, and by the later Middle Ages good kettle hats were raised from a single sheet of steel. It was worn over a padded cap, and often over a mail coif that covered the neck and throat, and was held on by a chin strap.

Its strengths were simple. A man could see and hear clearly, breathe freely and drink without taking it off. The brim shed downward sword cuts and gave some shelter from arrows, stones and other things dropped from walls, which made the helmet popular in siege work. It gave no protection to the face from a level thrust or shot, and that was its main weakness. The shape was also much easier to make than a closed helmet, so it was cheap enough for town militias and common soldiers. Shapes varied by region and date. Fifteenth-century German and Burgundian kettle hats were often deep, with a brim that sloped down sharply, and some had eye slits cut in the brim so that it could be pulled low over the face.

Combat Use

The kettle hat is best known as an infantry helmet, but it was never only that. Jean de Joinville, who went on crusade with Louis IX of France in 1248, wrote that he gave the king his own iron hat to wear in place of a closed helm so that he could get some air. Knights and men-at-arms often chose it for the same reason, above all in hot climates and on long marches. The enclosed Great Helm gave far better protection in a charge but was stifling and nearly blind.

Among foot soldiers it was the usual head-piece wherever men could afford iron at all. Spearmen, crossbowmen, archers and town militias across Europe wore it over a quilted coat or a Mail Hauberk. Both armies in the Wars of Scottish Independence used it, and men in iron hats were probably to be seen on each side at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. A Scottish statute of 1318 that laid down what arms each man must keep allowed an iron hat as one of the accepted head defenses for men of middling wealth. Kettle hats stayed in wide use through the Hundred Years War, when lighter-armed men wore them alongside the visored Bascinet of the men-at-arms.

Legacy

The kettle hat lasted in recognisable form into the early sixteenth century. In Spain a tall version with a narrow brim, the cabacete, developed in the fifteenth century, and from such helmets came the Morion Helmet and the cabasset worn by pikemen and arquebusiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The idea returned in 1915, when the British army needed a steel helmet that could be stamped quickly from one sheet and would guard men in trenches against shrapnel bursting overhead. The Brodie Helmet that resulted was very close in shape to the medieval iron hat, and for the same reason: most of the danger came from above. Surviving medieval kettle hats are fairly rare, since plain munition armor was seldom kept once it was worn out, but examples are held in major European armories and museums. Others, along with many fragments, have come from excavations and river finds.