Shoes By The Yard

Northern Advocate, 26 January 1939, Page 9

Shoes By The Yard

Boots and shoes nowadays are generally plain affairs, for we rarely break out into pretty buckles and ornaments except for parties. It .must have been exciting, if not comfortable, to live in the Middle Ages, and wear shoes with toes so long that they had to he turned up and fastened to the knees. This was a verypopular fashioh, and was carried to such lengths that law had to be passed forbidding long toes. After shoes began, to spread themselves in other directions, and by Henry Vll.’s time broad shoes became the vogue. For Court wear they were often as much as nine inches wide, and were made of soft, brightly-col-oured leather, slashed to show little puffs of silk lining of a different colour. 1 The next great change was when boots grew higher in the leg. At the first the tops were turned down, and later, in the times of Charles 11., they spread into large loose cuffs, which stood away from the leg and were sometimes lined with , coloured silk. Heels were unknown until, in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, they were attached to riding boots to keep the foot from slipping from the stirrup._ They proved comfortable for walking, too, and were soon adopted for ordinary shoes.

Pompons and rosettes were favourite shoe ornaments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were very like the ones we use today on indoor and bedroom slippers, but much larger. The stout, buckled shoes worn by the schoolboys of 330 years ago are still worn by Bluecoat boys. When the Stone Age man first felt the need of some protection against sharp stones and snake bites, he wrapped rough skin gaiters round his legs and made a kind of moccasin for his feet; these he tied on with thongs of leather—the very first bootlaces.