shoes&pattens4

34

Shoes and Pattens

48 Late 14th-century shoes decorated with engraved and scraped motifs. The ‘poulaine’ of one shoe seems to have been cut off deliberately. For linę drawings of the same shoes see Figs. 121a, 50 & 51.

other (Fig. 51) is divided by ‘suede’ bands into a series of dark rectangular panels relieved only by very fine cross-hatching.

Adult shoes were occasionally fastened by lacing at the front, providing a firmer fit over the instep and sides of the foot. This was not done as on a modern shoe but by an extension of the latchet principle, for it is elear that the intention was for the lace to remain fixed on one side of the vamp opening and to be threaded through holes in the other, where it could be tied. In some in-stances a bifurcated latchet-type tag seems to have been provided (cf. below and Fig. 55) but in others - as with the illustrated example (Fig. 52) - the lace was a single narrow strip of leather sąueezed through the holes on one side at exactly its mid point. On the same side as the lace was fixed, a tongue was sewn edge-to-edge along the slit; this then passed below the opposite pair of holes to give protection to the instep as that side was manipulated and the lace tightened during fastening. The sole of the shoe is heavily worn, and a very large repair piece was added, which enveloped the whole of the underside to the extent that it was sewn to the lower parts of the upper. This accounts for the rather unusual appearance of a shoe which in many other respects resembles the standard buckled and latchet types: in its two-part construction, in the absence of a heel-stiffener or topband, and in the shaping of the ąuarters - in this case below both ankles - together with the use of a reinforcement cord.

To judge by the evidence from ‘Baynards Castle’, smali children’s shoes were very similar to those worn by adolescents and adults, although the proportion of ankle-shoes seems to have been slightly higher than average and there are no exaggerated ‘poulaines’ (cf. Table 8b). Of the 19 complete soles where the actual foot length can be estimated at less than 170 mm (notionally equiva-lent to the modern child’s size 9 or smaller), 9 belong to below-the-ankle shoes, 6 to ankle-shoes and 7 to indeterminate types. But as is evident from Table 9, smali children’s shoes of all types differed to the extent that almost invariably they were fastened by lacing at the front. There is a