28559 shoes&pattens
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10

Saxo-Norman period on the one hand (see Pritchard forthcoming) to those of the later 12th and 13th centuries on the other.

One of the shoes from Billingsgate is an instruc-tive example of a shoe wholly in the Saxo-Norman tradition, incorporating many of the characteristic features of London footwear of the llth century (Fig. 4). It was almost certainly an ankle-shoe, originally cut just above the ankle bonę, and the shape of the sole indicates that it was madę to suit a left foot. ¹ It is a turn-shoe (see below, p. 47) and was sewn together - possibly using wool rather than linen thread - with a seam that consists of a normal lasting-margin on the upper and a row of tunnel stitches on the sole, inset slightly from the edge (see also Fig. 82 & p. 51). The sole is straight-sided, as yet without the ‘waist’ that typifies nearly all later medieval and modern shoes, and has a tapering, pointed heel which rises up at the back and was sewn to an inverted ‘V’-shaped cut-out in the ąuarters. The upper is of ‘wrap-around’ construction - or ‘whole-cut’ -with the main seam on the inner side, and directly below the ankle is a group of seven closely bunched slits which examples from earlier deposits suggest would have contained a pair of short interwoven thongs (Pritchard forthcoming). These thongs were presumably ornamental - or at most helped to hołd the upper in shape at the ąuarters - and it is not known how the shoe itself was fastened.

All the other items in the early 12th-century groups differ from this shoe in several important respects. The most obvious is that the soles, although still ąuite straight-sided, are invariably fiat and rounded at the heel. The ąuarters were sometimes strengthened on the inside with a tri-angular or semicircular reinforcement-piece -‘heel-stiffener’ - whose form may in fact have been inspired directly by the earlier ‘V’-shaped sole (F. Pritchard, pers. comm.). At the same time, the basie construction of shoes was transformed by discarding the tunnel-stitched seam on the sole in favour of an edge/flesh seam along the edge itself. Rands - wedge-shaped

Shoes and Patłens

strips of leather inserted between the upper and the sole - also appear to have been introduced now in an attempt to make the seam morę waterproof, but they did not become common until the end of the 12th century. Only three or four scraps of rands were found in the present deposits - nonę of these attached to a shoe - and the fact that the lasting-margins normally have very smali, closely-spaced stitches (see below, p. 48) is a further indication that in most cases the uppers were still sewn directly to the soles.

Early 12th-century shoes seem either to have been worn as ‘slip-ons’ or to have been fastened with a leather thong - ‘drawstring’ - supported in slots cut in the upper and wound once or twice around the ąuarters. Ankle-shoes, varying in height between those cut straight on the linę of the ankle (e.g. Fig. 6) and those rising 1 or 2 inches (25-50 mm) above it (e.g. Figs. 5 & 8), were by far the most popular style. There are only two true shoes (Figs. 7 & 11), and only one boot; this is of a distinctive type to be described in the next section (pp. 14-15 & Figs. 15-16), whereby the drawstring was supported in vertical thongs rather than in cut slots.

1

All the shoes in the present collection, unlike those from 12th-century Middelburg described by Groenman-van Waateringe (1974, 113-4), can be easily identified as either left or right; similarly, a right-foot boot and a left-foot last are reported from Anglo-Scandinavian York (MacGregor 1982, 138 & Fig. 72 No. 627; 144-5 & Fig. 74).