shoes&pattens8

28

Shoes and Pattens

41 Late 14th-century ankle-shoe and shoes. The children’s shoes were laced at the front, but the adults’ shoes were fastened with either a latchet or a buckie. For linę drawings of the same shoes see Figs. 56, 49, 42, 54.

three further shoes which differ considerably from any of those discussed so far and which can morę properly be regarded as prototypes of the most important styles of the late 14th century. The soles are ąuite sharply pointed at the toe, and the uppers are of two-part construction. One is laced at the front, the second has a latchet fastening, and the third has a buckie. The front-laced shoe is illustrated and described in detail below (Fig. 52 and p. 34).

The late 14th century (Fig. 41)

It is to this period that the largest and by far the best preserved group of footwear ever to have been recovered from a London site belongs. There are 417 registered shoes of this datę from ‘Baynards Castle’, and it is elear that most were discarded when complete and relatively un-damaged. Such is the quality of the preservation that many details of wear and texture, which are lost on leatherwork from other deposits, can still be seen and evaluated. The only other group of precisely the same period comes from the neigh-bouring site of Trig Lane, but although ąuite large (70 registered shoes), it is so poorly preserved that only the most generał comparisons can be madę with the ‘Baynards Castle’ finds.

As can be seen from Table 6, ‘Baynards Castle’ is uniąue among London assemblages in that below-the-ankle shoes are by far the most common form of footwear, accounting for as much as 81 per cent of the combined shoes, ankle-shoes and boots total; ankle-shoes amount to just 17 per cent, and boots to a mere 2 per cent. The shoes were mostly fastened across the instep, either with a buckie or with a latchet - a bifurcated leather strap passed through a pair of holes -whereas the ankle-shoes and boots were normally laced, either at the front or at the side. The Trig Lane assemblage, on the other hand, contains a much higher proportion of boots and ankle-shoes (Table 7), and even among the fragments too smali for attribution to a particular type of footwear there are no certain examples of buckles or of the side-latchet fastening. Instead, front-laced and side-laced fragments are the main constitu-ents. Some of the former are from children’s shoes (see below and Figs. 53-4) but others are probably from adult ankle-shoes of a type com-