shoes&pattens2

122

Shoes and Pattens

children wore footed hose or shoes and boots of undressed leather which would rarely survive on archaeological sites (Jan Baart, pers. comm.); that children’s shoes were passed from the elder children to the younger; or simply that the children of the urban poor were less freąuently pro-vided with shoes than their counterparts in the great households, where servants and retainers were regularly issued with shoes and clothing. In London, as in Amsterdam, no children’s boots were recovered, no decorated shoes and hardly any pattens. However, Cunnington and Buck (1965, 28) believe that children did wear pattens, and the single child’s patten in the present collec-tion (see above, p. 105 and Table 20) seems to support this theory, at least in part.

Manuscript illustrations and brasses offer com-paratively little insight on this subject. Manu-scripts overflow with barefooted Christ-childs which are not necessarily representative of the population as a whole, but one of the most lifelike manuscript images of a young boy - in the mid 14th-century Luttrell Psalter (Fig. 163) - clearly shows a front-laced shoe identical to those from ‘Baynards Castle’ (Figs. 53-4). It seems likely that there was a policy of dressing the child as a miniaturę version of his or her parent, and that this did indeed extend as far as the feet. However, the absence of shoes in the smaller sizes with ex-tremely long toes (Table 8) and the absence of illustrations of children wearing ‘poulaines’ seems to indicate that children were exempted from the morę extreme idiosyncracies of adult shoe fashion until the age of ten to twelve (de Neergaard 1985). Presumably, when Monstrelet wrote in 1467 of boys wearing ‘poulaines’ on ell in lengłh (Fairholt 1885, i.181), he was referring to older children or adolescents rather than to infants.

Conclusion

Most of the conclusions about medieval shoe fashions reached over the past hundred years have been based on evidence from manuscripts and sculpture of the relevant period. Thus an opportunity to compare this work with surviving datable archaeological finds must not be over-looked. The evidence of the shoes in the present collection suggests that many of the conclusions about medieval shoes should be modified, or simply abandoned. The most obvious example of this is the occurrence of ‘poulaines’, not as the

standard footwear of the late 14th century but as exceptional. Indeed, drawstring shoes, which do not feature in manuscripts and are therefore largely overlooked by costume historians, occur extensively in London, as elsewhere in the country and on the Continent, and seem to constitute the main style of footwear for over a century. Perhaps Londoners were morę susceptible than others to change in shoe fashion, sińce the drawstring seems to have been abandoned here some years before it was deemed unfashionable elsewhere. The altemative to this suggestion is that the close dating seąuences of the London water-fronts make it possible to datę these changes morę closely than elsewhere, and thus that any discrepancies in dating are purely illusory. The rangę of high boots shown in manuscripts is totally absent from the London materiał, and this must reflect upon the freąuency with which they were worn, and upon those who wore them. The rangę of decoration represented in the collection is morę limited than evidence from manuscripts seems to suggest should be the case, and this again brings back the issue of the status of the wearers and the depositors of the waste along the Thames river-front. The excavation of morę specific sites - cess pits associated with dwellings, monastic sites and so on - might help to answer some of the remaining ąuestions about the footwear of medieval Londoners.

163 Detail from the Luttrell Psalter (mid 14th-century) showing a young boy stealing apples. A pair of front-laced shoes has been discarded at the bottom of the tree. (See also half-title page)