shoes&pattens2

Sizes and wear patterns: social inferences

Sizes

Footwear assemblages as large as those from London can provide useful statistical information about the sizes of medieval shoes and pattens. This data, in tum, can make it possible to draw some conclusions about the use of footwear in the City and, to some extent, about the physical char-acteristics of the population. The present study is, regrettably, confined to the conserved registered shoes. The unconserved bulk fragments would have formed a much larger sample - at least of complete soles - but many were found to be too distorted for accurate measurement and the remainder seemed to produce aberrant results, apparently because they had shrunk at different rates.

Table 19, which covers the four largest groups of registered footwear, was prepared by measur-ing the maximum overall length of the shoe soles in each group and then converting the measure-ments to give their size according to the modern English Shoe-Size Scales (Table 18). In the case of shoes with ‘poulaines’, the ‘poulaine’ itself was discounted and the measurement taken to a point on or just beyond the estimated extremity of the big toe (see above, pp. 29-31 and Table 8). Modem shoe sizes represent the inside measurement of the shoe within the upper, rather than the length of the sole; but sińce tum-shoe uppers tended to oversail their soles when in use, especially at the heel, measurement of the sole is likely to produce an under- rather than an over-estimate of the equivalent size.

The purpose of the conversion to modem sizes is partly to make the measurements morę readily intelligible and partly to facilitate compari-son with other statistical data. Medieval shoe-makers presumably madę shoes to measure (bespoke) or, if for generał stock, with just suffi-cient variations in size to enable the average customer to select a suitable pair by trial and error. There is no reason to suppose that they observed specific size standards, and the frag-mentary records of the London Cordwainers’ Company make no mention of such. Nor, to judge from measurements taken across the forepart, waist and heel of shoes from Swan Lane and Trig Lane, does it seem that shoes were madę in a rangę of width fittings: the width of the shoe normally varied in direct proportion to its length, although as observed with the shoes from Kings Lynn (Ciarkę & Carter 1977, 355), it appears that between the 12th and the 15th centuries the waist became progressively narrower.

Simple measurements are unfortunately only a rough approximation to the original size of an excavated shoe. Not only may the leather have been distorted by the long period of burial, but it may also have shrunk sińce recovery, both during and after the processes of conservation. Since little is so far known about the potential changes in medieval leather after laboratory treatment, no adjustment has been madę for this, but shrinkage during treatment has been ąuantified and can, to some extent, be predicted: freeze-dried leather

Table 18. Shoe sizes according to the English and Continental Shoe-Size Scales
Length (mm)	Length (inches)	English sizes	Continental sizes
110	4Vs	child’s 1	1672
119	4%	child’s 2	18
128	5	child ’ s 3	19
136	5Va	child’s 4	20Vz
144	5%	child’s 5	22
153	6	child’s 6	23
161	673	child’s 7	24
170	6%	child ’s 8	26
178	7	child’s 9	27
187	7%	child’s 10	28
195	7%	child’s 11	29
204	8	child’s 12	30V2
212	8V3	child’s 13	3172
221	8%	adult 1	33
229	9	adult 2	34
238	9V3	adult 3	3572
246	9%	adult 4	37
254	10	adult 5	38
263	10V3	adult 6	3972
271	10%	adult 7	41
280	11	adult 8	42

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