We know a lot about shields. We know less, especially in the British isles, about armor. I'm still coming to grips with the archaeological material for continental Europe, so my answer's rather skewed toward British evidence.

Shields

Shields were your most common form of bodily protection. They were always made of wooden boards that were glued together edge-to-edge (modern reconstruction). These boards were, so far as we can tell from the archaological evidence, always covered in leather or rawhide (it's hard to tell the difference between leather and rawhide archaeologically, but rawhide would be harder and more effective at stopping the boards from splintering). The shields had a hole cut in the center of the boards across which a handle was riveted or nailed (like this), and this hole was covered with an iron dome called a shield boss (example, reconstruction).

Shields shown in contemporary art were always round.

In England, the boards were usually referred to in poetry as linden wood, but archaeological evidence shows that the most common choice was usually willow or poplar. The boards were thin, but - in England at least - grew thicker over time, from about 5-6mm in the 5th century to 7-8 in the 7th. Shields also, on average, got wider over this period (in England, at least - I'm not as confident about the continent), moving from small (30cm) bucklers toward the larger (90cm) shields we associate with the Vikings. This change in size suggests a change in fighting style, moving from shields as personal, portable protection toward a shield large enough to form a shieldwall formation, covering your whole upper body and locking up with the shield of the men beside you.

There's little surviving archaeological evidence that these shields were painted (the leather faces of the shields only survive as traces on the rusted ironwork, and any paint is long gone), but illustrations from contemporary art suggest that they usually were.

My personal reproduction weighs about 5lb, and it's a typical 6th English century size (about 60cm wide).

Armor

Armor's a tricky thing from this period. We have references to it in poertry written a few hundred years later (like Beowulf), but not a lot of it shows up in the archaeological evidence. How often was it actually worn, and by whom?

Helmets

The best examples of helmets from this period usually come from graves. In England, we have 5 (or 6) helmets. The most famous is Sutton Hoo, which shows a lot of Swedish influence and was buried in a grave in the early 7th century. It was made from iron, and covered with silver plate into which designs of dancing warrriors and knotwork were hammered. Here's a high quality reproduction (the original was fragmented when the grave it was buried in collapsed). You can see the original and the replica in the British Museum.

We also have a helmet made from an iron frame covered with cow horn, found in a barrow at Benty Grange in the 19th century. It dates to the mid 7th century. Here's a reproduction, and the original.

Then there's the Pioneer Helmet, which was recently discovered during a construction project and probably dates to the 7th century, the Coppergate Helmet, found in a 9th century well but probably made in the 8th, and a recently discovered helmet from the Isle of Wight that looks a lot like examples found on the continent. There were, finally, a bunch of helmet fragments in the Staffordshire Hoard (a recently discovered 7th century stash of battlefield loot), and they appear to be fitting together into our 6th surviving helmet, which is pretty cool.

Go to the continent, and we have some similar fancy, expensive helmets appearing in graves (as at Sutton Hoo in England), especially in Vasgarde and Upsala in Sweden. There's ongoing debate about whether the Sutton Hoo helmet was made in Sweden (it looks a lot like the helmets from Upsala), or made in imitation of their style. But this style definitely seems to be a fashion among really rich people in the late 6th and 7th centuries.

In France, you also see spangenhelms and bandhelms, but I'm still reading up on the archaeology there.

Written texts (again, often written a little after the period) describe the boars you see on top of helmets like Benty Grange and the Pioneer Helmet, and it's generally assumed that these animal figures offered some sort of magical protection.

Other armor

We have a few examples of mail from the period. The Sutton Hoo grave has what appears to be a full shirt of mail (it's very rusted, and difficult to reconstruct). There's mail in a few really rich graves in Scandinavia too.

We also have what appear to be splinted arm and leg armor in one of the Swedish graves, made from parallel strips of iron held together with leather bands. Here's a reconstruction, commissioned by a UK reenactor (along with the helmet and sword from the same grave).

But...

But, the problem with all this armor is, it's incredibly rare. Shields appear very frequently in archaeological digs. It was common for people in this period to be buried with weapons (usually a spear, in England), and something like 1 in 8 male graves have a shield in them. Weapon burials pose a number of interpretive issues (not every weapon being used necessarily makes it into a grave!), but the sheer volume of shields surviving from these burials makes it clear that there were a lot of them.

Armor is a different matter. Sutton Hoo is almost certainly the grave of a king, and the burials with helmets in Upsala and Valsgarde are also pretty clearly royal burials. They're full of treasue and other objects that suggest their occupants weren't ordinary guys. Almost all of our evidence for armor comes from these kinds of high-status burials.

In contrast, ordinary people are often buried with weapons and shields, but basically never with armor.

There are a few ways to interpret this. It could, on the one hand, mean that armor was inherited, not buried with the dead. This is entirely reasonable, but of course means that any such exchanges are archaeologically invisible, so we can't say if the armor that might have existed was common or not. It could also mean that people wore armor made from organic materials like leather or rawhide; we have found rawhide lamellar in a late Roman dig in Syria, so it could have existed elsewhere in the late- and post-Roman world. But again, this is just reasonable speculation, as all traces of this armor - if it existed - have decomposed.

But the safest answer to give is that, for most of the early middle ages, ordinary people didn't have armor. Perhaps because it was expensive (it was - iron takes an enormous amount of charcoal to produce), or because it was reserved for a particular social class. Perhaps warfare was less professional during this period: in England, at least, most warriors appear to have been primarily engaged in farming, and Guy Halsall has argued that serious conflicts only happened about once a generation in Frankia. But whatever the reason, the evidence suggests that during most of the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, armor was somewhat rare in northwest Europe.

Sutton Hoo is arguably the most celebrated early Anglo-Saxon (7th century) archaeological find, and provides some answers. Specifically, the iconic Sutton Hoo Helmet. This is thought to be the helmet of an Anglo-Saxon king, with Rædwald of East Anglia the most popular candidate. Also present are shield fittings which allow us to reconstruct a shield of the period. In the literature of the period, Beowulf is described as wearing "isernbyrne", which is to say "iron shirt" (or rather, taking it off: "ða he him of dyde isernbyrnan"). So we can assume the notion of wearing iron mail was at least familiar to the audience.

But as for the question of what the average member of the fyrd would wear, well, the answer there is "whatever he brought with him". Byrnies and decorative helms seem unlikely, for other than wealthy thegns and kings.

Edit: Just realised I didn't translate "isernbyrne" as originally written, making the implication unclear