Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 4).djvu/244

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bouilli is a well-fashioned little cabasset formerly in the collection of the late Herr Richard Zschille (Fig. 1294) and now in the National Bavarian Museum of Munich. From the style of its decoration we are inclined to give to it an earlier date than to the morion just described. The surface of the leather is finely embossed and tooled to represent four oblong panels with pendant trophies of arms and musical instruments; the groundwork being worked to a granulated surface. Merely as an illustration of the degradation of the armourer's craft we finally figure a German early XVIIth century helmet—if it can be dignified with the name—made out of thin gilded copper, rather quaint perhaps by reason of the martial subjects embossed upon it, but of the poorest possible form, and fashioned in two halves joined down the centre of the skull-piece (Fig. 1295). It was formerly in the Meyrick Collection and was illustrated and described in Skelton's work on that collection (vol. i, Plate 73), where it is dated as being of the latter part of the XVIth century.

Fig. 1294. Cabasset

Of leather, embossed and tooled. Italian, about 1580 National Bavarian Museum, Munich

We think that we have now sufficiently described the morion and the cabasset; the author has illustrated the choicest examples with which he is acquainted. Except in cases where these helmets are the work of a famous armourer, or of a skilful armourer whose name is unrecorded, they may be generally classed as belonging almost to "regulation" defence. In fact many hundreds of extant morions and cabassets could be placed in no