shoes&pattens4

4

Shoes and Pattens

of these are described. The best surviving examples are illustrated pictorially, as repre-sentatives of their type, and the remainder, which provide much of the evidence for dating and for the relative popularity of each style, are normally summarised in tabular form.

The assessment of what constitutes a ‘style’ or ‘type’ is inevitably to some extent subjective, but for present purposes three main factors have been taken into account:

(1)    the height of the ąuarters - ‘shoes’ being defined as shoes cut below the ankle, ‘ankle-shoes’ as shoes cut on or just above the ankle, and ‘boots’ as anything higher than these.

(2)    the manner of fastening - whether by draw-string, toggle, buckie, latchet or lacing (see Fig. 1).

(3)    the ‘cut’ - the shape of the toe, for instance, or the degree to which the sole is ‘waisted’.

From an analysis such as this, the results of which are summarised in Fig. 1, many groupings are immediately obvious: the dominance of the drawstring fastening until the middle of the 13th century, for example, or the growing importance of the buckie as a means of fastening shoes from the mid 14th century onwards. Some trends, such as the increasing demand for low-cut shoes through the 14th century - in direct contrast to the popularity of ankle-shoes and boots both before and afterwards - must have been almost imperceptible to those who lived at the time, but others were much morę short-lived, showing that fashions could change almost as rapidly as they do today. The latter styles were often the most per-vasive, dominating the shoe assemblages of their time. Typical of these are toggle-fastened shoes, which enjoyed a brief vogue in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, or curving, pointed toes, which were popular at the beginning of the 12th century and again, perhaps for two generations at most, at the end of the 14th. With the exception of the side-laced boot, which should perhaps be regarded as ‘working’ wear, rather than purely ‘fashion’ wear, few styles survived for much longer than a century.

Stylistic changes were often accompanied - and in some cases madę possible - by the technical developments that are discussed in the second chapter, Shoemaking and cobbling (pp. 44-90).

From this it may be seen, for example, that ex-tremely low-cut shoes, such as were common in the late 14th century, would have been almost impossible to manufacture successfully two centuries earlier because the techniąue of sewing a strong reinforcement cord along the inside edge to prevent it from stretching had not yet been devised. For the citizens of medieval London the most important developments were probably those that madę shoes morę waterproof - first, in the middle of the 12th century, the invention of a wedge-shaped strip of leather, the ‘rand’, which could be sewn into the lasting-margin to seal the gap between the sole and the upper and, secondly, in the first half of the 15th century, the addition of a complete outer sole to protect the lasting-margin and upper from direct contact with the ground -but the modern historian may take morę interest in the observation that after a transitional period in the late 13th and early 14th centuries shoes became much morę standardised in construction.

Hardly any early shoes are precisely the same because the difficulty of cutting the upper from a single piece of leather and, very often, imperfec-tions in the leather itself madę it necessary to use a number of irregularly-shaped inserts, but many late 14th- or early 15th-century shoes are identical and the components virtually interchangeable. This was partly because the upper was madę from two or three pieces that were smaller and easier to cut out to a standard pattern and partly, perhaps, because shoemakers now had access to morę regular and reliable supplies of leather. From this, in tum, it is tempting to go one stage further and infer a growing sense of organisation among shoemakers as a profession, with all that this implies about the imposition of standards, training, dissemination of techniąues and division of labour between specialists in, say, tanning, cutting-out or decoration. The Cordwainers’ Company, indeed, had come into being by 1272 if not earlier, but the loss of most of its records in the Great Fire precludes any detailed investiga-tion of its activities at this time.

It was also in the late 14th century that morę sophisticated forms of decoration were intro-duced, whether in openwork or with delicately engraved foliate motifs (see below, pp. 79-86), and, as shown in the following chapter, Pattens (pp. 91-101), that wooden-soled overshoes to protect the feet in mud or snów first became