The bassinet, like the rest of the knight's armour, did not necessarily exhibit a surface of plain burnished steel. It was frequently covered with leather, as mentioned in the inventories of Humphrey de Bohun, 1322, and of Dover Castle, 1344; while the King of France at one time wore his bassinet covered with white leather. One of cuir-bouilli, in Simon Burley's inventory, 1388, is coloured white and green. It was also tinned or gilded, and even of pure gold, as prizes for tourneys, or like one set with gems, sent to Edward I. by his father-in-law in 1334. In a bequest of William Langford, 1411, is a headpiece covered with red velvet, and actual specimens so covered are not unknown. The richness of the decorations bestowed on these helmets is shown in the goldsmith's account of one made for the King of France in 1352, and of another made in the same year for the Dauphin with a band of forty large pearls. Effigies and brasses show that coronets and jewelled fillets commonly adorned them, even in the case of simple knights, and that these are not imaginary decorations may be gathered from Froissart, who mentions that the King of Castille actually entered a battle in 1385 with his bassinet enriched with 20,000 francs' worth of gems. Sir Guy of Warwick, in the Romance, is given a helmet adorned with a circle of gold set with most precious stones. Some notable champions, like Sir John Chandos and the Earl of Warwick, prided themselves on a disregard of danger and habitually fought without a visor, yet the tendency to close every crevice with plate defences developed continuously, and the frequent accidents at tourneys, when the lance-point glanced upward and entered the throat under the camail, led to the introduction, about 1330, of a gorget of plate or scales, which with the visor converted the bassinet into a closed helmet. The defence of the breast was always considered next in importance to the head, and fourteenth-century inventories constantly refer to "pairs of plates large," perhaps like those till recently worn in Persia, corsets de fer, cors d'acier, brust plate pour justes, and other defences of plate. Chaucer writes, "Some would be armed in an haubergeon, a bright breastplate and a gypoun." The globose form given to the chests of effigies, such as that of the Black Prince, seems to imply the presence of a rigid defence under the emblazoned surcoat. [Illustration: FIG. 15. 1. Example of a ridged bassinet with banded camail, from the brass of Sir John d'Abernon, died 1327. 2. Combed and jewelled bassinet from the effigy in Ash Church, of about the same date.]