Lobster-Pot Helmet

Origins

The lobster-pot helmet came to western Europe from the east. Ottoman and Hungarian horsemen of the sixteenth century wore a helmet the Turks called the chichak: a conical or rounded skull with a peak over the eyes, a sliding nasal bar, hinged cheek-pieces and a neck-guard. Hungarian and Polish cavalry adopted it, and the German name zischägge probably comes from the Hungarian word for a helmet, sisak. By about 1600 armorers in the German lands and the Netherlands were making their own versions for the new kind of lightly armored cavalry, the harquebusier, who fought mainly with pistols and carbine rather than the lance. The helmet spread widely during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), when armies needed large numbers of cheap, practical helmets for their horse.

Design & Construction

A typical lobster pot had a rounded skull raised from one or two pieces of iron, often with a low comb or a series of ribs to stiffen it. A peak projected over the brow. On the continental and Dutch pattern the face was guarded by a single nasal bar that slid up and down through a bracket on the peak and could be locked with a screw. The English pattern, common from the 1630s, had a pivoting peak fitted with three vertical bars that formed a simple face-guard, which is why it is sometimes called a three-bar pot. Hinged cheek-pieces, often pierced with holes for hearing, hung at the sides. The feature that gave the helmet its English nickname was the neck-guard, made of several overlapping plates riveted to leather straps so that it flexed like the tail of a lobster. Munition-quality helmets were plain, blackened or left from the hammer, and were made in quantity in the Netherlands, the German states and, during the civil wars, by London armorers. Officers' helmets could be finer, with fluted skulls and decoration.

Combat Use

The lobster pot was worn with a buff coat of thick oiled leather, a breastplate and backplate, and sometimes a bridle-gauntlet on the left arm. This was the kit of the harquebusier, and by the 1640s it had largely replaced the heavy three-quarter Cuirassier Armor, which was expensive, hot and exhausting to wear. In the English Civil War both sides equipped most of their regular horse in this way where they could afford it, though many troopers had to make do with a buff coat and hat. At the Battle of Naseby in 1645 the cavalry of the New Model Army under Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, and much of Prince Rupert's Royalist horse, rode in lobster-pot helmets. The helmet protected well against sword cuts to the head and neck, the main danger in a cavalry melee, and the bars of the face-guard could turn a blade. It gave less protection against pistol balls fired at close range. Cavalry of the period usually closed at a trot, fired their pistols, and then fought with the sword.

Legacy

The lobster pot remained in use in England under the Commonwealth and after the Restoration, and some cavalry still wore it in the wars of the 1680s and 1690s. By the early eighteenth century most European horse had given up the helmet for the hat, sometimes with an iron skull-cap, or secret, hidden inside the crown. Large numbers of lobster pots survive because so many were made. The Royal Armouries holds many of them, including armor from the Littlecote House collection, associated with a Parliamentarian cavalry troop raised by the Popham family. The helmet is now one of the most recognisable images of the English Civil War, and reproductions are widely worn by re-enactment societies.