Charles Dibdin has a song entitled, The Origin of the Patten. Fair Patty went out in the mud and the mire, and her thin shoes speedily were wet. Then she became hoarse and could not sing, while her lover longed for the sweet sound of her voice.
“My anvil glow’d, my hammer rang,
Till I had form’d from out the fire
To bear her feet above the mire,
A platform for my blue-eyed Patty.
Again was heard each tuneful close,
My fair one in the patten rose,
Which takes its name from blue-eyed Patty.”
This fanciful derivation of the word was not an original thought of Dibdin. Gay wrote in his Trivia, 1715:—
“The patten now supports each frugal dame
That from the blue-eyed Patty takes the name.”
In reality, patten is derived from the French word patin, which has a varied meaning of the sole of a shoe or a skate.
Pattens were noisy, awkward wear. A writer of the day of their universality wrote, “Those ugly, noisy, ferruginous, ancle-twisting, foot-cutting, clinking things called women’s pattens.” Notices were set in church porches enjoining the removal of women’s pattens, which, of course, should never have been worn into church during service-time.
Children’s Clogs. 1730.
It may have disappeared today, but four years ago, on the door of Walpole St. Peters, near Wisbeck, England, hung a board which read, “People who enter this church are requested to take off their pattens.” A friend in Northamptonshire, England, writes me that pattens are still seen on muddy days in remote English villages in that shire.