Whats the difference?

[don]

Whats the difference between a barrel helm and a great helm other then about a hundred years?

Don

[Destichado]

The bascinet underneath.

[Konstantin the Red]

Wot Desdichado sed. The great is the lineal descendant of the barrel, literally the next generation in both design and human generations. and it is somewhat larger to put the less extreme sort of bascinets beneath, more or less the rounded-off mid point variety. You could fit a Klappvisier or the bretèche super-nasal in there, but not a hundsgugel visor.

Barrels' heyday was two or three generations in the later thirteenth, and the great had a somewhat longer span in the fourteenth, with long employment as tilting gear throughout the century. Oddly enough, it remained contemporaneous with the great bascinet if you count its further evolution towards the frogmouth form, which took a while, and the great bascinet converged toward frogmouth at the end of its history also.

[Otto von Teich]

You could fit a clap visor under it I guess, but the normal practice was to remove the visor for wearing it with a great helm. So a basinet with a side mounted Houndskull visor could be used with it, the visor would just half to be removed. Just my 2 cents..

[RandallMoffett]

I doubt that definition actually would work as there is plenty of evidence from the 1300s of ‘great helms’ used without a bascinet underneath, usually a type of coif in place. I think the real difference is how modern reenactors use them which are not period terms and is not uniform amongst re-enactment groups. Helm or heaume is what was used fairly often in period and it seems to apply to both in contemporary texts. I am not sure even if barrel helm was ever used at all for this type of helmet in the medieval period.

So the long and short of it is they both likely were called the same exact thing in period as they are just different points of time of the same helmet type.

For further info I'd look into the RA Journal article on Great Helms, which is by far the best info on this helmet.

RPM

[Talbot]

There is no difference in period. Randall has it right.

In my research writing I use great helm for all of them.

In casual conversation I will use the term barrel helm but I most often use it in an SCA context as it is a commonly accepted term that most people understand.

[Konstantin the Red]

SCAjuns have been calling it "barrel" since the first edition of the Known World Handbook -- per Sir Polidore Haraldsson.

And they've been calling it "great" since the first edition of the Fighters' Handbook -- thank His Grace Sir Kevin Perigrynne, I suppose, who edited.

Really narrows it down, hey? Anyway, the latter-day parting of the terms remains convenient for this forum.