The Armour Archive

I keep mulling around the idea that "sugarloaf" helmets have varying constructions which can be categorized. I first brought this up on My Armoury on another topic, but feel it might be expanded upon.

http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=29933

Mart Shearer wrote:

Will Phillips wrote:

Mart Shearer wrote:The categorization of "sugarloaf" is broad, covering probably three forms of differing construction of pointed and rounded-top great helms. Visored examples seem more common after 1325 or so.

Again, I appreciate the reply.

Do you count the visored sugarloafs are one of your three forms?

Out of my own ignorance, I have seen two major variations, what I would call the larger, more barrel-like sugarloaf and a more steamlined version. My presumption is the streamlined version with the curvature in the back is a later design, but I could be wrong as the larger version would allow the use of a seperate proto-bascinet under it.

I was concerned I might have written too broadly, and fear I am correct. That said, this isn't a thesis which I have spent a lot of time developing, but one that's been mulling for a while.

I don't really count the visors and barbers as a separate form, but rather a subset, i.e. Type I, Type Ia, Type Ib, etc.. I think the forms are distinguished in the artwork by construction. When modern writers named this style of helm a sugarloaf, they had in mind the ogival form of the cakes or loaves in which sugar used to be commonly sold.

Here we see Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro.


I think the earliest types (shall we designate this Type I?) are distinguished by side seams which run vertically all the way to the apex. The backs are a single plate. The cross reinforce often extends to the top point of the helmet.
http://effigiesandbrasses.com/732/1007/
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/3971/10448/
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4348/13478/


Type II is similar, but the back is clearly made from two plates, upper and lower. It's not quite certain to me if the front is divided in a similar way, as there is usually a cross reinforce which would hide any horizontal join there.
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4054/11488/
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4135/7293/
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4807/11838/
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8454675g/f95.item

Type III has a separate conical or domed top plate. I think this is similar to the kübelhelm (bucket helm), Madeln II. The line between these as sugarloafs and great helms with domed tops like the Pembridge or RA IV.20 is blurry.
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/3943/10847/
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/3971/10510/
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4167/7506/

There may be more categories, but that's a start of how I'm seeing it.

I've since begun to notice a possible Type IV being depicted, where the backs are composed of multiple horizontal plates.

Thoughts?

Agreed. I am sure you have heard this before but I am under the impression from many years of looking at t6his that the 'sugarloaf' is a merger of the great helm and the bascinet/round top helmets we see during the end of the 13th into the mid 14th.

Take a look at the queen mary psalter. Tons of helmets that are right there in the middle between them.

RPM

The argument the other way, against hybridizing between helm and bascinets' skulls, is that you don't see a great deal of following a basc's point's lean-back. This of course may be accounted for in that the more extreme examples of lean-back are later than the heyday of the sugarloaf and in particular of the Type III, which I hope to show below as also susceptible of parting into distinguishable subtypes.

I would look instead to an evolution of the top cap from dished to deeply dished along with somewhat further shrinking of an already reduced cap. It's a bit hard to tell from artwork if the top cap is interior-fit or exterior. Most of it does look like exterior -- then too, when it comes to top caps, the rivets often get omitted. Perhaps the rivets are low-profile or semi-flush.

Type III's particular feature seems to be a construction below the top cap of multiple plates arranged like a 5-plate barrelhelm's, along with a variation or two on that type as with the barrels, using fewer than five plates, but in view of Types I and II, more than two. But a 5-plate-type layout of a top cap plus four, that can be precisely defined without getting too labored. And of course, would this then subsume the Type IV category? Type IV looks like a fine way to piece together a helm out of awkwardly small leftovers or scrap bits.

Another question is if comparative depth of dish to the top cap could be a subtype-distinguishing feature or not quite.

Or assign Type IV designation to sugarloafs beginning to evolve toward frogmouth helms, with the underlipped sights and the plow profile.

This is my first look at sights of this shape: http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4054/11488/. I think the tab on left and right of each sight isn't intended as a visor hinge, but as a reinforce, perhaps of frontal plates that do not overlap but butt upon each other there. We're very free to speculate, with nary a rivet depicted. The fellow bearing sable chevronny or seems to have a one-piece skull to his helm, while all his followers have their skulls in front and back halves without either banding or visible top cap of any kind.

Establishing a typology seems a good idea, speeding understanding as it should.

Kon,

Why assume bascinets have to be back point at all? As far as I can tell first half of the 14th bascinet is the most common term in England for helmets and in art there are a wide number, likely majority, are not back point which are fairly rare earier on. I think the back point idea for bascinets is a modern concept.

I have never bee comfortable with the term used this way or the idea that bascinets and helms had to sit differently as the likely candidates for bascinets early on are little more than conical or round helmets that seem to be worn in similar ways excluding face covering.

I suspect you could look at how the skull was constructed as the main difference. Tricky as some of the later helms then would have very bascinet like profiles and design.

RPM

Certainly the artwork through the 1330s seems to show bascinets with rounded tops. The primary difference seems to be that bascinet skulls are raised from a single piece, where sugarloafs are composed of multiple, likely riveted, plates. Some of the Chalcis helmets and later great bascinets start blurring the line, but before 1350 or so (when sugarloafs are in use) that seems to be a good dividing point between visored sugarloafs and visored bascinets.

Ernst,

Typically I think the skull might be the place to divide the items here but it is trick. Is it just he skull we want to use as the key to the typology. It is tricky. The other is that sugarloaf is a vic term.

RPM

RandallMoffett wrote:Typically I think the skull might be the place to divide the items here but it is trick. Is it just he skull we want to use as the key to the typology. It is tricky. The other is that sugarloaf is a vic term.

RPM

The skull might be -- were the skull indeed a particularly distinguishable part of a barrel or a sugarloaf helm the way it is with a basc or a barbuta. They're really more all of a piece -- one reason I often speak of "top half" or "bottom half" posting about completely developed helms. The sugarloaf in particular can go together with only the most inconsequential difference between upper and lower. The Type I in this proposed typology is better demarcated "front" and "back," really.

Though I do see the point of distinction between the roughly hemispherical top end like in the Luttworth Psalter and the couple-three ways of a bluntly pointier construction -- some pieced, some entirely raised.

It's a Vic term I'm comfortable with -- for the swift, precise communication in the here and now, to answer a need they didn't have then. Spares us a lot of rehashing; suits for summary purposes, concerned as we are for the forms of things, so we're all visualizing the same thing, which is the desired end. And all the more so because the helm type's heyday long preceded any general commercial traffic in sugar -- came in in the latter fifteenth, I believe, when the helm type had long been retired.

Almost all our comparatives are more modern coinings anyway, as well as some of our nouns. "Demigreave" isn't period phraseology, but up at this end of the timeline we find it useful. And so forth.