49524 shoes&pattens5

75

Shoemaking and cobbling

Buckles and strap ends

June Swann (1981) traces the importance of the shoe buckie as a fashion accessory to 1660 and Pepys’s entry in his diary that ‘This day I began to put on buckles to my shoes’ (22nd January, 1660; ed. Latham & Matthews 1970-83, i.26). The buckles of the 17th century far exceeded their medieval counterparts in elaboration, perhaps partly as a reaction to the austerity of the Puritan Commonwealth, but this is not to say that medi-eval shoe buckles were not intended to be decorative, as the buckles in Fig. 110, especially Nos. d to f, will show. Chemical spot-tests (by Helen Ganiaris, Museum of London Conservation Laboratory) indicate that all the late 14th-century buckles are of iron, with 8 of the 19 bearing traces of tinning (Table 14). The remaining 11 may have been tinned originally: the plating may have worn away in use, been destroyed by corrosion or simply not detected by the analytical techniques that were used. Iron buckles with traces of tinning were also found in the 15th-century groups (6 in all). There is also one copper-alloy buckie, but at this period by far the majority seem to have been of lead alloy with iron pins (25 examples). Almost invariably the buckie was slipped through a strap, after which one end of the strap was passed through a slit in itself to create a secure loop (Fig. 109).

There are only two strap ends in the present collection, and both were associated with early/mid 15th-century buckled shoes. They are very similar. The one illustrated in Fig. llOj consists of an undecorated rectangular piece of tinned iron, folded over the still-surviving leather strap and held in place with a single rivet; the other end of the strap will have passed through a slit (cf. Figs. 105-6) and been sewn down on the inside of the shoe.

109 The method used to attach a buckie to its strap.

Decoration

Embroidery (by Frances Pritchard)

The collection contains nearly 30 shoes that were once decorated with embroidery - a high total that is commensurate with the impression gained from historical and pictorial, as well as archaeological, sources of the popularity of embroidered shoes, of various types, throughout early medieval Europę. Many shoes documented as being embellished with embroidery had uppers of samite, a twilled silk cloth. This is substantiated by surviving examples, among which are those of two arch-bishops of Canterbury, Hubert Walter (d. 1205) and Edmund Rich (d. 1241) (Christie 1938, Cat. Nos. 16 and 29). The style of embroidery is that termed opus anglicanum with birds, beasts, flowers, foliage scrolls, stars and moons worked in gold and silk thread. Leather shoes were also lavishly embellished on the Continent but less

Table 14. Metal analysis of all buckles in the collection that are still attached to shoes.
	Iron	Tinned iron	Lead alloy with iron pin	Copper alloy	Total
‘Baynards Castle’ (late 14th c.)	11	8	—	-	19
Swan Lane (early/mid 15th c.)	—	2	6	—	8
Trig Lane (early/mid 15th c.)	—	4	19	1	24
Total	11	14	25	1	51