84793 shoes&pattens3

43

Shoes from London sites, 1100-1450

A further type of buckled footwear, this time a Iow boot, has so far been found only in the adult sizes. Nonę of the surviving examples has a com-plete sole, but the uppers all seem to have been madę from three basie components - a vamp and two ąuarters - joined at the heel and with sym-metrical curving seams on either side (Fig. 67). There was a heel-stiffener and a topband, which evidently continued down each edge of the front opening as far as the instep and thereafter only along the edge on the outer side (cf. Fig. 107); affbced to the inner side, a short distance inside the edge, was a tongue which reached to within c.40 mm of the top of the boot. An unusual feature for a boot of this size is the provision of only one pair of smali round perforations for fastening straps, at the point where the vamp is angled sharply from the horizontal to the vertical planes. On the illustrated example they are empty, but on a second, almost identical fragment they carry a smali buckie and strap which would have had the effect of fastening the boot tightly at the ankle, while leaving it loose at the top.

By far the most common form of footwear in the early 15th century was the side-laced ankle-shoe or boot (Tables 10-11), a style seen regularly on monumental brasses and illustrations of the time (see below, p. 118 & Fig. 159). To judge by the examples in the present collection, they were wom only seldom by very young children but otherwise were produced throughout the whole rangę of older children’s, women’s and men’s sizes (Table 12). The heights vary considerably, from ąuite Iow ankle-shoes (Fig. 69) to boots rising to c.220 mm - mid-calf height; but morę moderate proportions, similar to those of the illustrated boot (Fig. 70), seem to have been the most common. The lace-holes are normally very closely spaced, including morę than 40 pairs on the tallest boots, but sińce nonę of the laces remain in place it is not known exactly how they were fastened.

The smallest ankle-shoes were often madę, as in the early 14th century, by the ‘wrap-around’ method with a single insert at the instep (Fig. 68), but most of the remainder share a mass-produced, tripartite construction. The three parts - vamp, one-piece ąuarters and insert at the front - were almost symmetrical in plan (see Fig. 108) and were joined by symmetrically-placed seams on either side and at the instep. A heel-stiffener was sometimes added, but a topband only rarely (cf. Fig. 68). There was no tongue to cover the side opening, but reinforcement-pieces were invariably sewn on the inside to strengthen the lace-holes. The side opening itself must always have been a point of severe weakness because it reached so far down that the main seam connecting the vamp and ąuarters was never morę than 5 or 6 stitches long. This may account for the fact that hardly any side-laced boots or ankle-shoes have survived complete and may also have contributed to the apparent demise of the type in the later 15th and 16th centuries. These develop-ments, however, which are poorly represented by finds from London, exceed the scope of the present survey.