In those days of hard hitting with ax and lance, alike in tournament and in battle, the head and the breast generally received the stoutest blows and needed to be the most securely protected. The head-pieces grouped together on page 939 are what a merchant nowadays would call “an assorted lot”; the _casquetel_, or helmet with an iron cape for protecting the back of the neck; the _bascinet_, or helmet with a pointed visor, and another just beneath it that looks like three joints of stove-pipe; the _tilting-helm_, used in the tournament or in the “tilting-field,” looking very much like a “high hat” of to-day, in iron; the German _heaume_, or old Gallic helmet, with the basket-like cage to shield the face; the plumed _burgonet_, or old Burgundian helmet, and the rounded one, sometimes called a _morion_; and the last of the helmets, the helm and _casquetel_ of the harquebusiers—those stout old fighters of the seventeenth century, who gave and took plenty of hard knocks in the Dutch wars, or in the ranks of Cromwell’s Ironsides. [Illustration: FIG. I.—A KNIGHT OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY IN A SUIT OF ENGRAVED ARMOR.] The breastplate, first worn in front only, was gradually added to until it became a _cuirass_, or iron jacket, laced at the sides. Around the neck was worn the metal collar, or _gorget_; the hands were incased in iron gloves, or _gauntlets_, sometimes armed with long, saw-like projections; and spurs of varying size and length were attached to the heels of the curious iron shoes that were known as _sollerets_. [Illustration: FIG. 2.—KNIGHTS OF THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES.] Dagger and poniard, mace and lance, bill and battle-ax were the terrible weapons used by the gentlemen in the iron clothes to cut and carve, to pound and pummel, to hack and pierce one another,—and yet those were called the days of chivalry, of courtesy, and of courage! War is always brutal, always terrible; but there seems something almost cowardly in the custom of those “knights of old” in thus crawling for safety into suits of steel and iron, while the poor people who followed their banners to the wars—vassals and serfs, archers and bill-men—had nothing but leather jerkins and iron head-pieces (often not even these) to protect them from the charge and thrust of the mail-clad knights. And the funny side of it all is that sometimes knights thus covered with plate, like modern ironclads, would fight all day without either being hurt. In one of the Italian battles of the sixteenth century, two armies of knights sheathed in the best Milan armor fought from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon without one valorous warrior being killed or even being wounded. Do you wonder that Cervantes made such sport of those men in kettles and stove-pipe, as he did in his marvelous story of “Don Quixote”? [Illustration]