Late 14th Cen­tury Ankle Shoe

I made these shoes in 2004/2005 for my lovely wife, who wanted some­thing appro­pri­ate to wear with a cote­har­die and that would cov­er her ankles. They are based on shoe num­ber 100 from Shoes and Pat­tens, 2nd Ed, page 66. The find these are based on dates from 1375–1400.

This is the next pair I made after the com­pletely worn out shoes men­tioned earli­er. There was a gap of a bit over a year between fin­ish­ing the pre­vi­ous pair and start­ing these and a gap of about a year between fin­ish­ing the first one and the second one, much to my wife’s frus­tra­tion (sorry honey!). The take home les­son here is not to do one shoe com­plete and then the oth­er one, but to do each stage of cut­ting and assembly on each shoe in turn so they get fin­ished at roughly the same time and motiv­a­tion­al issues don’t creep in between the shoes because I feel like I’ve “fin­ished” some­thing and want to take a break when there’s only one of a pair done.

The pat­tern­ing was done by Mas­ter Lly­wel­len ap Daffyd, who got me star­ted in medi­ev­al shoe­mak­ing as a les­son in how he did things. The toe is prob­ably squarer than it should be but the pic­ture in S&P; makes it look like this. What we missed when this was pat­terned was that the shoe in S&P; is miss­ing chunks of toe. This is a good example of why you need to be care­ful with out­lines of recovered frag­ments, they aren’t cut­ting pat­terns, they are the shape of the bits of shoe after it has been worn and soaked in the ground for sev­er­al hun­dred years and may or may not bear any resemb­lance to shape of the parts when they were ori­gin­ally cut out.

These shoes are a single piece wrap around upper with a sep­ar­ate tounge which is attached on to one side of the open­ing with a flesh edge seam. They have lacing rein­force­ments on each side of the vamp open­ing and a welt. The welt wasn’t a fea­ture of the shoe that these were based on fbut did appear on oth­er shoes of the peri­od and I wanted to see how much more dif­fi­cult they made the assembly — not much as long as you tack everything in place before doing the sole seam.

They are made from 2mm veg tanned deer hide, which is won­der­ful stuff to make shoes out of. It is strong but extremely supple and goes amaz­ingly floppy when wet which makes it easy to turn. The leath­er was dyed with an iron-oxide dye (steel wool dis­solved in vin­eg­ar) and heav­ily greased with a com­mer­cial saddle grease both before assembly and after turn­ing. The heel stiffen­er and lacing rein­force­ment are ~2mm veg tanned cow­hide. The soles are ~4mm chrome tanned cow­hide because I didn’t have any thick enough veg tan when I made these, heav­ily waxed with saddle grease.

This was the last pair of shoes I made using pre-waxed poly­es­ter thread, some­thing I will nev­er go back to using but I hadn’t worked out lin­en thread at the time I built them.

[Show slideshow]

Slightly fuzzy shot of the shoe just pri­or to being soaked and turned. I don’t both­er dying the inside of my shoes.

Fin­ished shoe from the lat­er­al side (out­side).

Fin­ished shoe from the medi­al side (inside). You can see how the laces work.

Fin­ished shoe from the top. The white thing inside the shoe you just can see in this pic­ture is a size 13 10mm thick felt insole I found in an army sur­plus shop cut down to fit the shoe. These make the shoes much more com­fort­able on mod­ern feet and make it easi­er to stuff things in for extra arch sup­port if neces­sary. The shoe was pat­terned from the out­set with the thick­ness of the insole taken into account.

Back of the shoe. You can see the out­line of the heel stiffen­er in this shot. This is a res­ult of the heel stiffen­er being made from stiffer leath­er than the upper of the shoe. The heel stiffen­er is slightly squint rel­at­ive to the upper. This is because the first meth­od I tried didn’t work and I’d already made the holes in it so when I turned it around it didn’t quite line up prop­erly.

Flesh side of the but­ted seam that closes the upper. The black marks on this are a com­bin­a­tion of draft­ing errors when I was trans­fer­ring the pat­tern to the leath­er and a stray blob of dye.

Grain side of the but­ted seam clos­ing the upper. Not as neat as I’d have liked but I pulled the stitch­ing a bit tight and the leath­er was very soft.

The attach­ment of the heel stiffen­er to the upper. I should have trimmed this back closer to the last­ing mar­gin before I turned the shoe.

The heel stiffen­er from the inside of the turned shoe. You can see where this is turned along with the upper.

This bulge at the base of the heel is caused by the heel stiffen­er. Where this is turned there are two lay­ers of leath­er being turned over the last­ing seam.

The laces. Shoes and Pat­tens calls these “latchet style” laces since they are cut from a rect­angle of leath­er rather than being a thong passed through the holes like a reg­u­lar shoelace.

Detail of the lacing rein­force­ment on the edge of the vamp open­ing. This is whip stitched on in a sim­il­ar fash­ion to the heel stiffen­er for most of the cir­cum­fer­ence, but is edge-flesh seamed on the edge closest to the tounge. I did this because it was sim­pler to share the holes for the butt-seam hold­ing the tounge on.

The lacing rein­force­ment on the oth­er side of the vamp open­ing. Whip stitched all the way around. I should have skived the edges of the rein­force­ment before I did this.

Flesh side of the but­ted seam hold­ing the tounge on.

Same seam from the grain side.

This is the last­ing seam shown from the sole. These stitches go in the flesh side and out the edge of the sole to hold the upper on.

Fin­ished shoe from the sole. You can see the welt going all the way around the sole and cov­er­ing the upper where it “rolls” out from the last­ing seam.

The welt as it goes around the heel of the turned shoe. Get­ting this to lie flat was a bit of a chal­lenge.

The ends of the welt. These meet just under the arch of the foot where there will be the least wear on the shoe. I prob­ably should have stitched these togeth­er since they don’t meet cleanly.

Toe of the shoe from the top. As noted above this should prob­ably be more pointy. If it were I’d prob­ably have the welt meet here rather than under the arch of the shoe.

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