The trade of the Shoemaker naturally follows that of the tanner, since leather is the material principally employed in making coverings for the feet; the tough hides of animals being used for the same purpose in countries where the art of tanning is either unknown or not practised. Scarcely any handicraft employment engages the attention of so many persons in this country as boot and shoe making. From the fashionable bootmaker to the poor cobbler, who crouches in a stall under a house in some narrow street, is a wide interval, and this interval is filled up by numerous grades. At Northampton boots and shoes are made on a very large scale for the London markets; they include chiefly the cheap varieties, but at some of the recent exhibitions of manufactures the Northampton bootmakers have exhibited specimens of workmanship which are considered to be quite equal to those of London or Paris. At Edenbridge, in Kent, and at other places, the strong coarse “hob-nailed” shoes are made, which are so much worn by waggoners and others.
The London makers import from Paris very large quantities of boot fronts, which, when combined with other parts of English manufacture, constitute many of the “French boots” which now glisten in the windows. Notwithstanding the large number of persons employed in these avocations in England, and the abundant supply of leather, there is still a considerable import of boots and shoes from abroad, chiefly France.
In the old statutes a Shoemaker is called a cordwainer, apparently a corruption of the French cordonnier, which means a worker of Cordova leather. The companies of Shoemakers in our ancient towns were incorporated under this name; and where some of these companies now exist, they are known by the same name. As a legal term, cordwainer is still used.
The trade, as now followed in London and other principal places, is subdivided into about twenty branches. The following may be set down as the chief: the shoeman, or maker of the sole part of the shoe; the bootman, or maker of the sole part of the boot; and the boot closer, or joiner together of the leg, vamp, &c. The labour of these is especially directed to what is called the men’s line; whilst others make the ladies’ shoes or boots. There are many women, too, who get a livelihood by closing the shoe, while others again follow the various sorts of binding.
The mechanical processes, after marking and cutting out the leather, consist chiefly in various kinds of strong needlework, such as the lasting or tacking of the upper leather to the in-sole, the sewing in of the welt, the stitching to this welt of the out or top sole, the building and sewing down of the heel, and the sewing or closing of boot legs. The boot closer is the most skilful of the persons employed, and receives the highest wages.
The materials with which the Shoemaker works are generally called the grindery,—they are so called at least through England and Scotland, though in Dublin it is called finding.
“The cause of this technicality,” says Mr. James Devlin, in his most interesting description of the trade of the Shoemaker in the Industrial Library, “is now, I believe, scarcely known to any one in the trade. The relation to whom I was apprenticed, a man of a very active and inquisitive turn of mind, told me its history, which it may be worth while here to relate.
“Formerly, before hemp, flax, wax, hairs, or any description of tools, were sold, as now, in shops set apart to this particular business, the shoemaker, not using the peculiar sort of stone rubber or the emery composition which he now uses to sharpen his knives upon, was in the habit occasionally of taking his knives to be ground (as the French shoemaker does at the present day) to some of the common knife-grinders of the neighbourhood. The knife-grinder having thus the Shoemaker for a regular customer, began in time to add to his usual business that of selling hemp, &c.; hence his little shop being termed the grindery, every thing he sold became known under this name, and is still continued.”
The tools of the Shoemaker are in their collective form denominated his kit. Anciently, and in the old songs of the trade, they were called “St. Hugh’s bones,” from a now almost forgotten, though somewhat pleasant tradition. In Stow, and in Randle Holme’s “Academie of Armorie,” 1688, we find this term; as, also, in the still older romance of “Crispin and Crispianus;” and in two plays, “The Shoemaker is a Gentleman,” and the “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” of the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The kit of the Shoemaker is, however, no longer now, as formerly, made up of “bones”—saint or infidel, human or brute,—but principally of good and kindly steel; purchased ready-made at the grinder’s, or the grindery establishments before spoken of, and kept afterwards (in this country, at least, and in America) in repair and proper order by the ingenuity and care of the workman himself; though in France, and generally on the continent, much of this is done by another person, to whom such occupation is the sole means of livelihood.