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Introduction

The subject of the second fascicule in the Museum of London’s senes on recent medieval finds from the City is one to which archaeology in Britain has previously madę very little contribution. Medieval shoes, boots and pattens, being madę of leather or wood, are rarely preserved on sites, and their appearance is normally inferred from such sources as manuscript illustrations, monumental effigies and brasses, or contemporary writings. The recovery of well over a thousand examples, many of them complete and in almost perfect condition, is thus an achievement of great significance; both for the information they can provide about details of construction, decoration or fashion and, above all, because they come from a continuous series of deposits datable to within half a century or less, for evidence about the evolution of different styles and their relative popularity.

Leather can survive only in anaerobic conditions and London’s large collection of medieval foot-wear is the product of an unusually high proportion of thick organie deposits which have often been encountered during excavation or rebuilding, especially along the riverfront. By 1970 the shoe collection already totalled about a hundred, split equally between the Guildhall and the London Museums, but sińce it was not published in detail in any of the pre-War catalogues (Guildhall Museum 1903; London Museum 1935; 1940) it remained virtually unknown except to those who had been able to examine it at first hand. The collection is still of value, for it contains some types that have not been found subseąuently (see, for example, below, p. 119), but it has been dwarfed by the discoveries of the past fourteen years, which are the subject of the present volume and have the additional advantage of coming from closely-dated levels.

By good fortunę the 1970s and 1980s, the first period of large-scale rescue archaeology in London, have coincided with the availability through redevelopment of a series of enormous sites on the north bank of the Thames where, eąually by good fortunę, the medieval population of the City continually reclaimed land by building timber revetments ever further into the river and filling the space behind them with common domestic rubbish. The rubbish was evidently collected from streets and households throughout London (see Rhodes, in Milne & Milne 1982, 86-8) and was dumped immediately, so that normally there is a direct link with a particular revetment, itself often dated by dendrochrono-logy, and a much lower chance than usual of a given layer - which in turn may contain datable pottery and coins - being contaminated with residual materiał (for details of dating, see Appendix I, pp. 131-6). The chronological limits of this volume, c. 1100-1450, thus correspond exactly with the main period of reclamation, a process which came to an end with the construction of stone walls along much of the riverfront. Saxo-Norman footwear, both from the clay banks which preceded the timber wharves and from pits in the interior of the City, is to be described in a comprehensive survey of all London finds of this datę (Pritchard fortheoming), while the only substantial 16th-century group will probably be included in a fuli report on the Tudor Baynards Castle with which it was associated.

The task of publishing nearly one thousand five hundred medieval shoes in a form that is both com-prehensive and easy to handle is a formidable one. A catalogue of every example, complete or incom-plete, is clearly ruled out on grounds of length and cost, and, in any case, the morę one examines the collection the morę it becomes elear that amid a profusion of minor variations and details there are relatively few major styles. The establishment of a broad, closely-dated typology, a tool that has not previously been available for the study of medieval shoes in Britain, is thus one of the chief aims of the present volume. The breaking down of this typology into subgroups representing individual workshops or phases must remain the task of futurę generations. In the first chapter, Shoes from London sites, 1100-1450 (pp. 9-43), the whole period has been divided arbitrarily into seven sub-periods, each roughly fifty years - or two generations - long, and the styles current in each

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