60058 shoes&pattens5

5

Introduction

at all common. Even so, pattens were still rare in comparison with shoes, and sińce nearly all late 14th-century examples that have survived were decorated with paint, stitching or embossed motifs it seems that as yet they were worn mainly by the well-to-do. But by the early 15th century the introduction of a new form with a composite leather sole - which may have been worn simply over hose, without any shoe at all - had madę this accessory available to everybody.

The history of the patten and of shoemaking techniques thus implies greater sophistication and a morę extensive popular ‘market’ for shoes in late medieval times. A similar conclusion might be drawn from the chapter on Sizes and wear pat-terns: social inferences (pp. 102-111), where it is shown that by the late 14th century children might be provided with shoes as soon as they could walk. In the early 15th century morę children’s shoes seem to have been madę than ever before, and it may be no coincidence that there appeared at this time a form of ankle-shoe, fastened with a buckie or lacing at the front, which would have been morę suitable for children’s feet than the miniaturę versions of contemporary adult styles that had normally been worn in the past. But whereas it is possible to identify children’s shoes and to estimate the relative size of shoes in the collection- relative, that is, to one another in the same archaeological deposit - it is much morę difficult to estimate the ońginal size, because they may have shrunk and become distorted (see Appendix 2, p. 139 & Table 22). Yet when the figures are adjusted in compensation, it seems likely that medieval feet were generally a little smaller than those of today, though as in modern times they may have suffered from bunions and a rangę of complaints that were probably aggravated if not caused by the shoes themselves.

Specific wear patterns on an individual shoe are a reminder that archaeology has a natural bias towards the particular rather than the generał, and so, in the finał chapter, Shoes in art and literaturę (pp. 112-22), an attempt has been madę to assess how representative the present collection is of medieval fashions as a whole. From this it emerges that there are several major omissions from the archaeological record, perhaps the most important of which are high boots and buskins. Contemporary illustrations suggest that after c. 1300 these were worn only by travellers or huntsmen and so might not be expected from urban sites, but that before that datę they were the most common form of footwear; yet nonę of the 12th- or 13th-century London deposits have yielded boots which rise to morę than a third of the height of the knee - and, indeed, these are very rare.

Conversely, there is a strong suspicion that in some cases the illustrations are either ‘con-ventional’ or deliberately anachronistic. The embroidered vamp stripe is one of the most easily-recognised forms of decoration, but whereas eleven of the twelve examples in the collection may be dated securely to the 12th century - the twelfth is possibly of the 13th - it continued to be illustrated long into the 14th century, one of the latest appearances being on a brass datable no earlier than 1397. Furthermore, while the com-parative ubiquity of archaeological finds would suggest that the vamp stripe conferred no particular status on its wearer, entirely the reverse impression is to be gained from many illustrations. These apparent discrepancies are complicated and not easily resolved, but a possible explanation may be that the vamp stripe originated as a ‘luxury’ feature - perhaps picked out in gold thread - on the shoes of the well-to-do, which was subse-quently copied and mass-produced; meanwhile, iconographically it remained associated with per-sons of high status and continued to be shown as a convention, long after the shoes themselves had passed out of fashion.

Differences such as these between the archaeological and the illustrative sources are quite fre-quent, but between the footwear collections from London and elsewhere there is a remarkable similarity. Late 14th-century wooden pattens of precisely the same form and with stamped ornament on the straps were found both at Billingsgate (Fig. 127) and in Coventry (Thomas 1983, Fig. 22); toggle-fastened shoes dominated late 13th-and 14th-century assemblages not only in London but in places as far separated as Kings Lynn (Ciarkę & Carter 1977, Figs. 164.4, 165.29, 168.73-4) and Sweden (Broberg & Hasselmo 1981, 88-112 & Figs. 83-4); and latchet-fastened shoes with slightly pointed toes from Amsterdam (Baart et al. 1977, 74) resemble one of the best-known London styles of the 14th century. That there should be such homogeneity among items so utilitarian as shoes, which presumably were nor-