34400 shoes&pattens5

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Shoes in art and literaturę

decorated shoes in the collection, except those with embroidered vamp stripes, are dated to late iathk cenJairY ⁽see ahove, ęę. 80-7). The effigy of Edward III in Westminster Abbey wears shoes that are decorated - probably in imitation of embroidery - with panels of leaves separated by the arms of a stylized cross (Fig. 155). At the lower end of the social scalę, Chaucer describes the parish-clerk Absolon in The Miller’s Tale as having Powieś window (viz. a window in St. Paul’s Cathedral) corven on his shoos (ed. Skeat 1912, 3318). Indeed, drawings by Smirke of a wali painting once in St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster show one figurę wearing shoes decorated with just such an architectural design -one reminiscent of the rosę window of a Gothic cathedral (see Fig. 118; cf. Fig. 116c in the present collection and Baart et al. 1977, 75, No. 2). It is not elear, however, whether the artist has intended to show embroidery or, as on the other shoes in the same scene, openwork decoration.

156 Weeper from the tomb of John of Eltham (d. 1337) in Westminster Abbey. The figurę is probably wearing footed hose.

Hose fitted with soles seem to have been worn from the middle of the 12th century, if not earlier. Fig,. 156, taken from the south side of the monument to John of Eltham, second son of Edward II (d. 1337), shows one of the weepers with what seem to be footed hose, shaped to the foot with only a slight point to the toe. Manuscripts show the majority of wearers of short tunics in long footed hose of stout woollen materiał or leather -King John had a pair of cow hide (Cunnington & Cunnington 1973, 31) - not joined at the top but held up by strings attached to the belt. The soles often had thin inner soles of leather or felted wool (Herald 1981, 212) Sometimes shoes were worn over the hose; sometimes short hose or buskins. One writer believes that the late 14th-century fashion for parti-coloured hose, coupled with the extreme toe lengths and the popularity of pattens, meant that shoes were seldom worn during the second half of the century (Yarwood 1979, 76). It is difficult to comment on this subject, sińce Yarwood’s information comes from illustrative sources which mostly depict the fashionable upper and upper middle classes. The sources of the waterfront dumping in the City of London are most likely to be middle or lower class house-holds, and probably for this reason tend to be at yariance with the conventional, pictorial evidence. The late 14th-century deposits at ‘Baynards Castle’ produced the largest assemblage of shoes excavated in the City (possibly partly because of the excellent preservation on the site). And the ‘Baynards Castle’ and Billingsgate groups from this period yielded both shoes with extreme points and modestly-pointed shoes shaped to the foot (see above, pp. 29-31 and Table 8).

The adoption of sumptuous clothes and ostenta-tiously fashionable shoes served to reflect the growing prosperity of the middle classes. It is interesting to notę that France, which shared England’s prosperity during this period, also adopted ‘poulaines’, whilst in Amsterdam, which did not start to flourish commercially until the late 15th century, few ‘poulaines’ have so far been found on archaeological sites until that datę Gan Baart, pers. comm.). Excavated Swedish shoes, although displaying some similarity in fastening types to the London materiał, feature only modest toe shapes. Indeed, if they are dated correctly and are not residual, some of the 14th-century shoes from Lund seem still to have been fastened with