Also Peter Patynmaker.[[359]]
A patten seems in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to have been very similar to our clog, only that the former was more easily put on and off. It was of a wooden sole, rimmed with iron. We find in 1464 the Patynmakers of London presenting a grievance in that the fletchers alone were allowed to use aspen-wood, whereas it was the ‘lightest tymbre to make of patyns or clogges.’ (Rot. Parl. iv. 567.) Mr. Way, in his Notes to the ‘Promptorium Parvulorum,’ says they were worn much by ecclesiastics to protect the feet from chill when treading the cold bare pavements of the churches, and he quotes a Harleian MS. dated 1390 regarding an archiepiscopal visitation at York: ‘Item, omnes ministri ecclesie pro majore parte utuntur in ecclesiâ et in processione patens et clogges contra honestatem ecclesie, et antiquam consuetudenem capituli.’ The patten-maker was evidently of some importance at this time.[[360]]
Perhaps fashion never went to such an absurd extreme as it did in the fourteenth century with respect to wearing peaked shoes. An old poem entitled the ‘Complaint of the Ploughman,’ says of the friars, and alluding to their inconsistencies, that they wear—
Cutted clothes to shewe their hewe,
With long pikes on their shoon:
Our Goddes Gospell is not trewe
Either they serve the devill or none.
Piers Plowman, too, speaks of a knight coming to be dubbed—
To geten him gilte spurs
Or galoches y-couped.