05-07-2007, 12:42 PM
No matter how you do it, you do need some padding. Consider a piece of steel touching your skull, then smacked hard with some solid object...it may not cut you, but your skull will take all the impact. The pad is essential to absorb sweat, and to absorb incoming kinetic energy.
Some people use felt, some layers of wool, some make a leather suspension rig, some use cotton or linen layer (not a bad idea), and there's a long thread on RAT on using natural sponge. AFAIK, there's no totally exclusive way that we believe the Ancients padded theirs, except to say they had to do something.
Imagine one of the Greek helmets, or a Scythian, where there could be three inches or more of space above the top of your head. They didn't (logic would say) haphazardly just stuff that space with rags, or anything else that moved around. They wore helmets to stay alive, not to fiddle with stuffing. Whatever they used was fixed in place, so they could put on their helmet on a moment's notice.
The short answer seems to be that we just don't know what they did. And there's no standard on what we do, either. On some of my helmets, I put a leather hangar, sort of like in a modern construction hat, in others, a layer of thick felt with a cotton liner. Getting things to stay put is the problem, though, nothing much sticks very well to the metal inside the helmet. Nothing I've found yet, that is, that is even remotely available to the Romans. Some ancient helmets have a series of holes, which may have been to sew some lining material in place.
Some people use felt, some layers of wool, some make a leather suspension rig, some use cotton or linen layer (not a bad idea), and there's a long thread on RAT on using natural sponge. AFAIK, there's no totally exclusive way that we believe the Ancients padded theirs, except to say they had to do something.
Imagine one of the Greek helmets, or a Scythian, where there could be three inches or more of space above the top of your head. They didn't (logic would say) haphazardly just stuff that space with rags, or anything else that moved around. They wore helmets to stay alive, not to fiddle with stuffing. Whatever they used was fixed in place, so they could put on their helmet on a moment's notice.
The short answer seems to be that we just don't know what they did. And there's no standard on what we do, either. On some of my helmets, I put a leather hangar, sort of like in a modern construction hat, in others, a layer of thick felt with a cotton liner. Getting things to stay put is the problem, though, nothing much sticks very well to the metal inside the helmet. Nothing I've found yet, that is, that is even remotely available to the Romans. Some ancient helmets have a series of holes, which may have been to sew some lining material in place.
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
