Kettle Hat

Origin

The origin of the kettle hat lies in 12th-century Europe, and its parent can be sought in the older, simpler hemispherical iron hat. Just where the decisive change of adding a brim took place has not been settled to a single answer in scholarship, but by the late 12th century the chapel-de-fer with a clearly set brim already appears in French and English sources, and the same form took root in Germany and Italy at the same time. By the 13th century it had become the standard helmet of the foot soldier in the Crusades and in the wars of the Italian city-states, and in the 14th-century Hundred Years' War it was worn alike by the English longbowman and the French foot. From the late 15th century it gave way to more refined helmets such as the sallet and the barbute, but it survived among miners, sappers, and the men with the baggage until well into the 16th century.

Features

• Rounded hemispherical skull and a broad horizontal brim
• Form fit for things falling from above, arrows and stones and boiling water and quicklime
• Simple work that any village smith could make
• An open face that kept sight, breath, and hearing alive
• A low price not to be matched by the knight's sallet
• Tens of variants, by the angle and breadth of the brim

Stories

The kettle hat sat on the head of the foot soldier in almost every great war of medieval Europe. The helmet of the foot at Bouvines (1214) and Mansurah (1250) in the great fields of the 13th century, of the English longbowman who stood in the rain at Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415) of the 14th and 15th centuries, was the same chapel-de-fer. In siege work above all, when the foot soldier neared the wall by a ladder or the miner toiled in a tunnel below, the head piece that took the arrows and stones, boiling water and quicklime, on the first row of its brim earned its keep. The foot soldier in a chapel-de-fer had his face open and his sight and breath free, so he was welcomed especially in the place of the longbowman and the crossbowman, where clear sight was needed. And the simple form remained for long the cheapest and most useful piece of protection for the poorly armored citizen militia and peasant foot, covering at least the head.

Weakness

The greatest weakness of the kettle hat was that the face and neck stood almost wholly bare. With no visor and an open side, it gave almost no protection against the point of a sword or a spear coming from the front and the flight of an arrow shot straight, and it was very weak against a blade swung in from the side. Just as the brim turned back the blow falling from above, the same brim cut off the side of sight, making the man late to see an enemy coming in from the slant. So a thick padded coif and a mail hood were often set under it together, and the chapel-de-fer placed on top of them was the rule. From the late 15th century, when the sallet and the barbute, which covered the face as well, began to spread among the foot, the kettle hat, which covered only the top of the head, slowly withdrew from the field and moved to the work of the miner and the sapper.

Cultural Significance

The kettle hat was not merely the helmet of the commoner, but a rare piece of headgear worn alike by almost every rank of the medieval world. The Life of Saint Louis by Joinville records that at the Battle of Mansurah in 1250 King Louis IX of France stood in the camp wearing a chapel-de-fer, and the same hat sat on the head of the English longbowman in the Hundred Years' War. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Wallace Collection in London, and the Musee de Cluny in Paris hold many kettle hats of the 13th to the 15th century, and the German phrase eiserner Hut, meaning iron hat, which once named the chapel-de-fer, lives on today as an idiom for solid, dependable protection. Above all, the form of the kettle hat returned in the Brodie helmet of the British army in the First World War, patented in 1915 by John Leopold Brodie, and so the kettle hat is often called the direct ancestor of the modern steel combat helmet.

In Popular Culture

The kettle hat appears without fail as the headgear of the foot soldier in almost every film, period drama, and game set in the Middle Ages. In the British period drama The Pillars of the Earth, the film Kingdom of Heaven, and Henry V the head of the longbowman and the citizen militia bears the chapel-de-fer almost without exception. The action RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance, set in 15th-century Bohemia, and the strategy games Medieval II: Total War and Crusader Kings III set the kettle hat as the standard helmet of the peasant militia and the miner unit, and even in family works such as Disney's Robin Hood the absurdly broad hat of the Sheriff of Nottingham's men is a parody of the kettle hat. In films of the First World War, too, many a viewer notes the likeness of the Brodie helmet on the British soldier to the medieval kettle hat.

Trivia

• The Life of Saint Louis by Joinville records that at the Battle of Mansurah in 1250 King Louis IX of France stood in the camp wearing a chapel-de-fer, so the kettle hat was by no means the helmet of the commoner alone but a rare piece of headgear worn by men from the foot soldier to the king.
• The Brodie helmet, the Mark I of the British army in the First World War, was patented in 1915 by John Leopold Brodie after the form of the medieval chapel-de-fer, the very thought of letting the brim catch the shrapnel falling from above being the same as the kettle hat's.
• The German phrase eiserner Hut, iron hat, once named the chapel-de-fer, but today lives on as a common idiom for solid, dependable protection.