shoes&pattens7

77

Shoemaking and cobbling

emphasis was placed on embroidery alone and in the 12th century it was often combined with applique work using gilded strips of leather. Ponti-fical shoes from tombs in Lausanne and Delemont in Switzerland and Castel St Elia in central Italy illustrate this technique, with chain stitching in silk thread being used to outline the gilded ornament (Schmedding 1978, 100-101; Braun 1899, 293, Abb. 1).

Information concerning embroidered leather shoes wom in England can now be gained from excavated materiał, which thus encompasses footwear from lower down the social scalę. It appears from these that the most common form of embroidered decoration was the vamp stripe extending from the tip of the toe to the throat, which reached the peak of its popularity during the first half of the 12th century. The only other embroidery on a shoe from London is a linę sewn immediately below the heel opening of an ankle-shoe from Swan Lane, which is also exceptional in having a peep-hole cut in the vamp (Fig. 111).

Three methods of making the stripes are apparent from the twenty-eight London examples. The earliest occurs on a round-toed shoe from Swan Lane where the upper was joined to the sole with a strip of leather rather than with animal hair or linen thread, thus suggesting that it dates from the lOth or early llth century (Fig. 112c). The same technique was foliowed on a late llth- or early 12th-century ankle-shoe with a morę pointed toe from Billingsgate (Fig. 112d). An awl with a smali, S-shaped blade was used to incise the grain face of the leather either while the shoe was still in pieces or after it had been tumed. On the Billingsgate ankle-shoe there are two rows of such holes, showing that the decoration was limited to a single stripe, while four rows of inci-sions for two stripes spaced 3 mm apart are present on the shoe from Swan Lane. A decora-tive thread was next sewn from side to side pass-ing through the holes, but regrettably nonę of the thread is preserved to indicate the pattem or type of stitching.

A similar method of decoration is to be seen on two ‘Carolingian’ shoes from the abbey at Middle-burg on the island of Walcheren, with one having diagonal stripes along the wing as well as down the centre of the vamp (Hendriks 1964, 112-115). The supposed 9th-century datę of these shoes, and the presence of footwear with similar vamp stripes at Elisenhof, Hedeby and Lund hints at a possible Continental influence behind this style.

A second method, represented by a frag-mentary ankle-shoe of late llth- or early 12th-century datę from Billingsgate, was morę intricate (Fig. 112a-b). The vamp was slit down the centre below the edge of the throat. Tiny slots were sub-sequently cut, penetrating the flesh as well as the grain of the leather, through which a thread was drawn. The throat end of the seam was strength-ened by sewing both edges together while the shoe was still inside out, grain/flesh stitch holes on one edge matching pairs of tunnel-stitches on the other. The nearest parallels to this vamp seam occur on one-piece shoes from Lembecksburg and Lottorf Mose in north Germany, where the design of the shoe was such that the vamp was left open at each end and had to be seamed down the centre (Hałd 1972, 71-75, Figs. 75, 76, 79 and 80). The vamp stripe can thus be traced to a constructional feature which lingered on as a decorative device, although on the basis of associated red-painted, Pingsdorf pottery the Lembecksburg shoe prob-ably dates to only a few years earlier than the shoe from Billingsgate.

The last method to evolve and the most common among those from London was to sew the thread directly through the grain of the leather without first marking out the position of the stitches, although scorelines do occur on all four of the shoes with single stripes from late 12th-century deposits (Fig. 112e-g). As a conse-quence, the stitching became morę finely spaced, with up to eleven holes per 10 mm compared with three holes per 10 mm for the earliest technique described. Three shoes in this group retain traces of sewing thread along the vamp and on two of them some of the stitches remain intact. These stripes show that single-stranded silk thread was used for the embroidery, which would have slipped smoothly through the leather without causing undue strain and would have glimmered morę lustrously than a twisted or plied thread. The stitch employed, plait-stitch (Fig. 113), was also well suited to embellishing leather sińce most of the thread remains visible on the surface while the reverse consists of hidden rows of horizontal tunnel-stitches. The stripes were embroidered in different coloured silks, the best-preserved example, from Seal House, having three stripes of contrasting red, white and (faded) green (Fig.