There is a tidy story that knights invented heraldry because the great helm hid their faces — seal a man inside a steel pot and you need another way to tell him apart. It is a good story, and historians don't much believe it. Coats of arms were already spreading across Europe on seals by the 1140s and 1150s, two generations before the fully enclosing great helm this knight wears came into use around 1200. Heraldry grew instead out of seals, feudal identity, inheritance and the pageantry of the tournament. What is true is simpler: a coat of arms was a name you could see — on the shield, the surcoat and the crest — and the Crusades, where lords from every corner of Europe fought side by side, helped the habit spread.

This fighting knight wears both halves of the misunderstanding at once — a fully enclosed great helm painted to match his livery, and a red surcoat and shield strewn with gold cross-crosslets above a chevron, his "name" rendered in paint. He surges forward, sword up, mail glinting beneath the cloth. He is the aggressive counterpart to the Crouching Crusader Knight — the same foot knight in a different mood — and stands comfortably beside the heraldic cavalry of the Red Swabian Knight or the cross-marked Crusader Priest of Jerusalem. In a diorama he is the knight you can pick out from across the table — which was always the whole point of the paint. Sword-first, he anchors the front rank of a Crusader assault.

Model: MK215 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set