shoes&pattens9

89

Shoemaking and cobbling

times smali areas of such woodland may have remained quite close to the City wali, but exten-sive areas would probably have been about ten miles distant, say, Enfield Chase to the north or the north Surrey woods to the south. One sample, however, Pleurozium schreberi, belongs in an en-tirely different environment. This is a calcifuge moss characteristic of heathland or acid woodland such as is still found today on Blackheath or Hamp-stead Heath.

The different species of moss do not seem to be associated with particular types or styles of shoe, but it seems significant that a smali group of con-temporary shoes from Gloucester, which was examined at the same time as the present samples, was stuffed with a higher proportion of riverine mosses. This may reinforce the obvious hypothesis that medieval shoes were generally madę in the towns where they were sold and wom, rather than transported over long distances.

Repairs and Reuse

As has already been noted above, a large number of the shoes, especially the soles, have been sub-jected to some degree of repair and/or reuse (Tables 15-16). This is a topie upon which the surviving records of the London Cordwainers’

Company provide a fascinating commentary. The repairing of shoes gave rise to numerous disputes between cordwainers and cobblers, principally over the demarcation of their respective fields of business. It seems that the original trade of the cobbler was not simply that of repairing shoes - a wom shoe would normally be returned to the shoemaker (‘cordwainer’) for repair - but rather that of dealing in second-hand shoes, principally, one assumes, for the benefit of the poor. He would buy up old shoes, recondition them and then resell them. It was the process of reconditioning that caused conflict with the cordwainers - in particular, the extent to which new leather could be used. A ruling of 1409 prohibited cobblers from using new leather for soles or ąuarters, but permitted them to ‘clout old boots and shoes with new leather upon the old soles, before or behind’ (Mander 1931, 56); ‘resoling’ and any other repairs with new leather were to be done by cordwainers.

Resoling - presumably the replacement of a worn sole by an entirely new one - must have been time-consuming, sińce it will have involved the restitching of the entire lasting-margin, and it may be for this reason that many soles were madę in two parts: the heel could be replaced, but not

	Soles			Uppers
total	repairs	%	total	repairs	%

Table 15. Numbers of shoes that have been repaired.

Seal House (early/mid 13th c.)	17	6	35.3	29	1	3.6
Swan Lane (late 13th c.)	15	8	53.3	44	4	9.1
'Baynards Castle’ (mid 14th c.)	33	11	33.3	32	1	3.1
'Baynards Castle’ (late 14th c.)	282	25	8.9	303	13	4.3
Swan Lane (early/mid 15th c.)	67	37	55.2	144	1	0.7
Trig Lane (early/mid 15th c.)	101	28	27.7	342	3	0.9

Table 16. Numbers of shoes that have been cut up for reuse of the leather.
		Soles			Uppers
	total	reused	%	total	reused	%
Seal House (early/mid 13th c.)	17	—	—	29	6	20.7
Swan Lane (late 13th c.)	15	—	—	44	18	40.9
‘Baynards Castle’ (mid 14th c.)	33	4	12.1	32	15	46.9
‘Baynards Castle’ (late 14th c.)	282	21	7.5	303	76	25.1
Swan Lane (early/mid 15th c.)	67	—	—	144	13	9.0
Trig Lane (early/mid 15th c.)	101	3	3.0	342	42	12.3