shoes&pattens6

26

Shoes and Pattens

36, 37 Early/mid 14th-century shoes. Scalę 1:3 approx.

between toggle-fastening for shoes and side-lacing for boots is not so precise: from both Custom House and Dowgate, for example, there are fragmentary remains of side-laced shoes as well as boots. But at all three sites, as at ‘Baynards Castle’, the basie forms are similar. Most uppers continued to share the ‘wrap-around’ method of construction, with a main seam on the inner side, and from the soles it is elear that the oval toe shape returned to fashion after the brief vogue of a morę pointed style at the end of the 13th century; some of the toggle-fastened shoes, in particular, have soles with broad, rounded toes but quite pronounced ‘waists’ at the centre.

Table 5 shows that, at ‘Baynards Castle’ at least, nearly all the toggle-fastened shoes are of the type with a single toggle at the instep and a single ‘buttonhole’ on the flap at each side; the morę elaborate version, with additional toggles on one of the flaps, had evidently passed almost completely out of fashion by this datę. The shoes are mostly very similar in construction and appear-ance to those of the late 13th century, but one of the illustrated examples (Fig. 36) is unusual in that the inner side is madę up of two inserts, set one above the other with a seam at the heel. A topband ran along the upper edges and was madę in two parts: the section at the rear, behind the flaps, is of thin leather, folded double to give a smooth edge, whereas the front section is of stout, single-thickness leather which offered a much rougher finish, indistinguishable from the materiał of the upper itself. This shoe was apparently much used by its owner, for a repair piece was stitched to the sole and subseąuently wom through, and three major groups of incisions were madę in the vamp, presumably to make room for toes that had become badly swollen or deformed (see below,

pp. 110-11).

A significant development in the design of toggle-fastened shoes is shown by two examples from Dowgate and two from ‘Baynards Castle’. The most complete of these is illustrated (Fig. 37). Only the inner side is wholly preserved, but the surviving evidence suggests that the arrange-ments on both sides of the shoe were very similar. The inner side itself contains an inserted section madę up of three smali pieces of leather, one of which has a ‘buttonhole’, cut and stitched to-gether in such a way that the largest piece lies partly behind the other two (Fig. 37; cf. Fig. 95). The purpose of this was to provide a watertight seal behind a movable ‘buttonhole’ flap, and it enabled the flap itself to be transferred from the top edge of the shoe to a position lower down the side. This in tum would probably have provided a much tighter and morę comfortable fit, sińce the flaps would have acted as a continuous band, extending from the arch of the foot and right across the instep.

There is only one shoe suitable for a very smali child. It measures just 109 mm at the sole, equiva-lent to the modern child’s size 2 (allowing for shrinkage by 10 per cent), and is a Iow boot that differs in several important respects from the