Medieval shoes

We take shoes for granted.  Work shoes, dress shoes, shoes for fancy occasions, beach sandals:  off to the store, try on a few pairs, and there we are.  Shoes come in so many shapes and styles that there is even a museum in Toronto (the Bata museum) dedicated to shoes.  The well-to-do are mocked for owning too many pairs of shoes--Imelda Marcos supposedly had hundreds of pairs.  Most shoes today are assembled in third-world countries, and a great many are made of man-made components.

Medieval shoes, as you will doubtless have guessed if you've been reading this blog, were different.  For starters, one did not pop into the shoe store, decide you liked a style, try on both the 9 and the 9 1/2 to see what fit best, and buy a pair.  Shoes were individually made to fit your feet.  Interestingly, however, there wasn't the left shoe and the right shoe.  Instead there were shoes, that might be tweaked until both left and right feet were accommodated.

Shoes were made of leather because there was no plastic and no rubber (at least no rubber in western Europe--rubber comes from southeast Asia).  Light slippers might be fabric with a leather sole, and sandals could be made of fibers (like vines), but leather was the norm.  If someone wanted a new pair of shoes, he or she would go to the shoemaker, who would measure their feet, discuss the style, and decide which shoe last was closest to the buyer's feet.  The shoes would then be made by hand.

Shoes came in several different styles, depending on time, place, and purpose.  The basic shoe was a piece of leather that was cut the right shape to wrap around the foot and was held in place by wide laces going up the leg.  Warmer regions saw a lot of sandals, often made from plant material; some were slip-ons, others had a thong that went between the toes, like a modern flip-flop.  Knights wore riding boots, generally shorter than the modern riding boot.

Not surprisingly, shoes were expensive by our standards.  Peasants needed shoes for the winter, but during the summer they might go permanently barefoot.   (Very conservative Amish communities follow the same pattern today.)  Note the farmer plowing barefoot in the image below.  They would of course have to be very careful not to step on a nail and potentially get tetanus and die.

Even the wealthy had few different pairs of shoes, both because they were expensive and because it took a while to get a new pair.  Because they were made for one's feet, they generally fit just right, so why get more than you needed?

But shoes then, as now, were influenced by fashion.  Periodically a fashion for very long, pointed toes would seize the aristocracy.  In the extreme version, the points were so long that they were drawn up to the knees and tied.  These shoes were hard to walk in, but that wasn't the point.  The long, curling toes still survive in stereotyped images of court jesters.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval clothing and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.