shoes

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Shoes may be divided into two categories: open shoes, such as the sandal or Japanese geta, and closed shoes, including ankle boots and high shoes. No doubt the first shoes were simple protective wraps. Until the seventeenth century, men and women wore similar styles of shoes.

The thirteenth to fifteenth centuries witnessed the popularity in Europe of the long, pointed poulaine or cracowe, with the point often stiffened and curled up to facilitate walking. Clearly phallic, the poulaine received condemnation in a Papal bull of 1468 (see figure). Another extreme style, the chopine, with a very thick sole of wood or cork, was popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was unsuccessfully outlawed by the Venetian Republic in 1430.

From antiquity, shoes constructed of costly materials, including gems or gold embroidery, revealed wealth and social class. Beginning in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, shoes were worn with pattens — carved wooden supports with pedestals under the heel and ball — to protect the shoes. In the sixteenth century the high heel appeared, worn by both men and women. These, too, were worn inside another shoe, or pantofle, to protect them. Prominent persons sometimes wore shoes to increase their height. Louis XIV, who was only 5 feet 5 inches tall, wore shoes with 5-inch heels covered in red leather, setting off a fashion trend among courtiers.

By the end of the seventeenth century, only women wore the high heel, which accentuates the curvature of the spine, thrusts out the posterior and breasts, and creates a gait in which the hips sway from side to side. Good deportment called for learning how to walk properly in fashionable shoes. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Petrus Camper, a professor of anatomy, wrote a little book detailing the ill effects of high heels on women's health, particularly during pregnancy.

A fifteenth century poulaine. Drawing by Caitlin Marie Zacharias

Tiny feet in women have been admired in different cultures. The practice of foot binding in China produced the lotus-foot, which fitted into a tiny, pointed shoe. In the fairy tale, the glass slipper could fit only the tiny foot of Cinderella, who became the bride of the prince. Historically, some women purposely wore shoes too small to make their feet look smaller.

Shoes are involved in a number of customs. An Anglo-Saxon father gave one of his daughter's shoes to her bridegroom. During the Middle Ages, it was customary to kiss the Pope's shoe. In an old Flemish custom, Christmas gifts were brought in sabots, or wooden shoes.

Shoes, including the lotus-shoe, modern stiletto, and extremely high heels, have been the object of shoe fetishism. The eighteenth-century novelist Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne imagined a story in which the narrator steals some rose-coloured shoes from his employer's wife and kisses one shoe while he ejaculates into the other. The male shoe fetishist is often a masochist who imagines himself being impaled by the high heel. Fetish-style shoes have been brought out into the open by members of heavy metal bands, such as KISS, who wear high-heeled platform shoes during performances.

— Kristen L. Zacharias

shoes

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Home > Library > Literature & Language > English Folklore

The popular custom of tying an old shoe to the back of the car in which a bride and groom are setting off for their honeymoon is a specialized form of what was once a widespread practice, that of throwing an old shoe at or after someone to wish them luck, especially on a journey. It is mentioned in John Heywood's Proverbs (1546).

Another practice, generally interpreted as defensive magic, was more secretive. As Ralph Merrifield writes:

There are few local museums in southern England that do not possess a few shoes, mostly dating from the 17th to the 19th century, that were found hidden in old houses, usually in a wall, roof, or chimney breast, or under a floor … deposited in places that are normally accessible only at the time of building or structural alteration, or by taking considerable trouble at other times, for example by raising a floorboard …. [A] child saw his father and a workman put an old worn-out boot, that significantly did not belong to the family, in the rubble when laying the kitchen floor, at Wareham St Mary, Norfolk, in 1934-5. He could get no reason for this from his father, who seemed slightly ashamed of what he was doing. (Merrifield, 1987: 131-4).

The only first-hand explanation recorded is this comment from Lincolnshire: ‘In the old days, a lot of kids died young, so to keep part of the kid with them, or the spirit of the kid if you like, a shoe was buried in the wall of the house so the kid was still with them’ (Sutton, 1992: 135).

Similar finds were made in England's oldest coal mine, at Lounge, near Leicester, in 1990; medieval leather boots, dating from about 1450, had been laid in certain galleries. This must be a forerunner of a custom reported from abandoned lead mines in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and an old copper mine in Wales, namely placing a single clog at the far end of a passage (i.e. at the last point reached in working it), or in the backfilling of such a passage, or at a spot where a shaft had collapsed.

Explanations as to why shoes should be considered protective can only be conjectural; the two main ones are that they are dirty, especially when old (cf. the saying ‘Where there's muck there's luck’), and that they symbolize the female sexual organ. Small model boots or shoes in various materials were used as mantlepiece ornaments ‘for luck’, or as ‘lucky charms’ in jewellery.

One common love divination in the 19th century was for a girl to set her shoes at right angles on going to bed, saying:
I set my shoes in the form of a T,
Hoping my true-love for to see.

She would then be sure to dream of her destined husband.

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

Radford, Radford, and Hole, 1961: 305-7
Opie and Tatem, 1989: 350-4.
For shoes in buildings, see Merrifield, 1987: 131-6
June Swann, Journal of the Northampton Museums and Art Gallery 6 (1969), 8-21, and Costume 30 (1996), 56-69
for clogs, FLS News 11 (1990), 3-4
12 (1991), 10. An extensive listing of shoes found in buildings throughout Britain is kept at Northampton Central Museum, and now numbers over 1,500