Chats on Costume

by G. Woolliscroft Rhead

FRENCH. FIFTEENTH CENTURY. FRENCH. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Clogs and pattens were worn from the time of Richard II. onwards as a protection to the soles of the shoes, and were variously shaped. Randal Holme calls pattanes "irons to be tied under the shoes to keep them out of the dirt." In an anonymous work called the "Eulogium," cited by Camden, it states: "Their shoes and pattens are snouted and piked, more than a finger long, crooking upwards, which they call crackowes, resembling devils' claws, and fastened to the knees with chains of gold and silver."

CHILD'S SHOES, FRONT AND SIDE VIEW, GERMAN (SIXTEENTH CENTURY).
MAN'S SHOE, GERMAN (SIXTEENTH CENTURY).

This fashion of appending chains to the peaks of the shoes lasted intermittently for a considerable time. In a work on "Ancient Costume," by Major Hamilton Smith, a portrait of James I. of Scotland is mentioned, in which the peaks of the monarch's shoes are fastened by chains of gold to his girdle.

There is a manuscript in the Royal collection in which the Duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III., is depicted as wearing a clog. This has been adopted by Abbey in his famous picture of "Gloucester and the Lady Anne."

Clogs were of wood, thickened at the heel and ball of the foot for the purpose of raising it from the ground. Afterwards it was further raised by means of two pieces set at right angles to the foot, on precisely the same principle as the Japanese shoes of to-day. An illustration is given from the Cluny Museum ([p. 282]).

Another means of raising the foot was the "chopine," which was a kind of stilt; it was, in fact, the sole, elongated to an extravagant degree. Hamlet thus addresses the lady players: "What! my young lady and mistress! By'r-lady, your ladyship is nearer heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine!"

Towards the close of the fifteenth century it became the fashion to bend the long toe over the shoe backwards. The two examples figured at the head of this chat are from the Cluny Museum, and are characteristic. Both have high heels, and resemble the shoes with which the Chinese ladies until quite recently tortured and mutilated their feet, for the purpose, it is said, of pleasing the distorted fancy of the men and to be qualified for marriage.[30]