We can all remem­ber see­ing images of medieval Euro­peans wear­ing pointy shoes, but most of us have paid scant atten­tion to the shoes them­selves. That may be for the best, since the more we dwell on one fact of life in the Mid­dle Ages or anoth­er, the more we imag­ine how uncom­fort­able or even painful it must have been by our stan­dards. Den­tistry would be the most vivid exam­ple, but even that fash­ion­able, vague­ly elfin footwear inflict­ed suf­fer­ing, espe­cial­ly at the height of its pop­u­lar­i­ty — not least among flashy young men — in the four­teenth and fif­teenth cen­turies.

Called poulaines, a name drawn from the French word for Poland in ref­er­ence to the footwear’s sup­pos­ed­ly Pol­ish ori­gin, these pointy shoes appeared around the time of Richard II’s mar­riage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. “Both men and women wore them, although the aris­to­crat­ic men’s shoes tend­ed to have the longest toes, some­times as long as five inch­es,” writes Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Jen­nifer Ouel­lette. “The toes were typ­i­cal­ly stuffed with moss, wool, or horse­hair to help them hold their shape.” If you’ve ever watched the first Black­ad­der series, know that the shoes worn by Rowan Atkin­son’s hap­less plot­ting prince may be com­ic, but they’re not an exag­ger­a­tion.

Regard­less, he was a bit behind the times, giv­en that the show was set in 1485, right when poulaines went out of fash­ion. But they’d already done their dam­age, as evi­denced by a 2021 study link­ing their wear­ing to nasty foot dis­or­ders. “Bunions — or hal­lux val­gus — are bulges that appear on the side of the foot as the big toe leans in towards the oth­er toes and the first metatarsal bone points out­wards,” writes the Guardian’s Nico­la Davis. A team of Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge researchers found signs of them being more preva­lent in the remains of indi­vid­u­als buried in the four­teenth and fif­teenth cen­turies than those buried from the eleventh through the thir­teenth cen­turies.

Yet bunions were hard­ly the evil against which the poulaine’s con­tem­po­rary crit­ics inveighed. After the Great Pesti­lence of 1348, says the Lon­don Muse­um, “cler­ics claimed the plague was sent by God to pun­ish Lon­don­ers for their sins, espe­cial­ly sex­u­al sins.” The shoes’ las­civ­i­ous asso­ci­a­tions con­tin­ued to draw ire: “In 1362, Pope Urban V passed an edict ban­ning them, but it did­n’t real­ly stop any­body from wear­ing them.” Then came sump­tu­ary laws, accord­ing to which “com­mon­ers were charged to wear short­er poulaines than barons and knights.” The pow­er of the state may be as noth­ing against that of the fash­ion cycle, but had there been a law against the blunt­ly square-toed shoes in vogue when I was in high school, I can’t say I would’ve object­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ele­gant 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

Exquis­ite 2300-Year-Old Scythi­an Woman’s Boot Pre­served in the Frozen Ground of Siberia

The Ancient Romans First Com­mit­ted the Sar­to­r­i­al Crime of Wear­ing Socks with San­dals, Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Sug­gests

Doc Martens Boots Adorned with Hierony­mus Bosch’s “Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights”

How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Cen­tu­ry Armor: A Reen­act­ment

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Cen­turies: Watch the Very Painstak­ing Process Get Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Recre­at­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

A recre­ation of the mil­i­tary san­dals. (Pho­to: Bavar­i­an State Office for Mon­u­ment Preser­va­tion)

Whether you’re putting togeth­er a stage play, a film, or a tele­vi­sion series, if the sto­ry is set in ancient Rome, you know you’re going to have to get a lot of san­dals on order. This task may sound more straight­for­ward than it is, for sim­ply copy­ing the styles of clas­sic pro­duc­tions that take place in the Roman Empire will put you on the wrong side of the his­tor­i­cal research. We now know, for instance, that some ancient Romans wore their san­dals with socks, a look that, seen in today’s cul­tur­al con­text, may not give quite the desired impres­sion. And thanks to an even more recent dis­cov­ery, it seems we also need to think about what’s on their soles.

Dis­cov­ered near the Bavar­i­an city of Ober­stimm, “an ancient Roman san­dal, large­ly decayed but recon­struct­ed through X‑ray, sug­gests the spread of mil­i­tary fash­ion to local pop­u­la­tions.” So writes Madeleine Muz­dakis at My Mod­ern Met, explain­ing that its type were known as cali­gae, which “had tough soles with hob­nails [that] pro­vid­ed trac­tion for the troops,” who did a fair bit of march­ing.

This par­tic­u­lar cali­ga dates from between 60 and 130, around the time the Roman army switched from san­dals to boots, and it shows that, dur­ing their time in this part of Bavaria, their footwear had an influ­ence on what the civil­ians were wear­ing.

An x‑ray of the ancient san­dals. (Pho­to: Bavar­i­an State Office for Mon­u­ment Preser­va­tion

The idea that stan­dard-issue mil­i­tary gear could influ­ence pop­u­lar fash­ion may sur­prise any­one who’s ever had to wear a pair of “GI glass­es.” But in its hey­day, the Roman army was­n’t just a group of occu­piers installed to project force on the part of a dis­tant metro­pole, but an exten­sion of civ­i­liza­tion itself. If the hob­nails in Roman mil­i­tary san­dals afford­ed extra trac­tion in addi­tion to the sub­tle sug­ges­tion of cul­tur­al sophis­ti­ca­tion, so much the bet­ter. Though the ques­tion of just how far and wide this par­tic­u­lar type of footwear (which appears recon­struct­ed at the top of the post, and in X‑ray just above) spread through the Roman Empire remains a mat­ter for fur­ther research, now would be as good a time as any for cos­tume design­ers to stock up on nails.

via Live Sci­ence/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ele­gant 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

The Ancient Romans First Com­mit­ted the Sar­to­r­i­al Crime of Wear­ing Socks with San­dals, Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Sug­gests

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er a 2,000-Year-Old Roman Glass Bowl in Per­fect Con­di­tion

What the Romans Saw When They Reached New Parts of the World: Hear First-Hand Accounts by Appi­an, Pliny, Tac­i­tus & Oth­er Ancient His­to­ri­ans

Do You Think About Ancient Rome Every Day? Then Browse a Wealth of Videos, Maps & Pho­tos That Explore the Roman Empire

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

We have, above, a pair of socks. You can tell that much by look­ing at them, of course, but what’s less obvi­ous at a glance is their age: this pair dates back to 250–420 AD, and were exca­vat­ed in Egypt at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. That infor­ma­tion comes from the site of the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, where you can learn more about not just these Egypt­ian socks but the dis­tinc­tive, now-van­ished tech­nique used to make socks in Egypt at the time: “nål­bind­ning, some­times called knot­less net­ting or sin­gle nee­dle knit­ting — a tech­nique clos­er to sewing than knit­ting,” which, as we know it, would­n’t emerge until the eleventh cen­tu­ry in Islam­ic Egypt. The tech­nique still remains in use today.

Time con­sum­ing and skill-inten­sive, nålbind­ning pro­duced espe­cial­ly close-fit­ting gar­ments, and “fit is of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance in a cold cli­mate but also for pro­tect­ing feet clothed in san­dals only.” And yes, it seems that socks like these were indeed worn with san­dals, a func­tion indi­cat­ed by their split-toe con­struc­tion.

A few years ago, we fea­tured archae­o­log­i­cal research here on Open Cul­ture point­ing to the ancient Romans as the first sock-and-san­dal wear­ers in human his­to­ry. These par­tic­u­lar socks were also made in the time of the Roman Empire, though they were unearthed at its far reach­es, from “the bur­ial grounds of ancient Oxyrhynchus, a Greek colony on the Nile.”

As Smithsonian.com’s Emi­ly Spi­vack writes, “We don’t know for sure whether these socks were for every­day use, worn with a pair of san­dals to do the ancient Egypt­ian equiv­a­lent of run­ning errands or head­ing to work — or if they were used as cer­e­mo­ni­al offer­ings to the dead (they were found by bur­ial grounds, after all).” But the fact that their appear­ance is so strik­ing to us today, at least six­teen cen­turies lat­er, reminds us that we aren’t as famil­iar as we think with the world that pro­duced them. And if, to our mod­ern eyes, they even look a bit goofy — though less goofy than they would if worn prop­er­ly, along with a pair of san­dals — we should remem­ber the painstak­ing method with which they must have been craft­ed, as well as the way they con­sti­tute a thread, as it were, through the his­to­ry of west­ern civ­i­liza­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ancient Egyp­tians Wore Fash­ion­able Striped Socks, New Pio­neer­ing Imag­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Imag­ing Reveals

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

An Ancient Egypt­ian Home­work Assign­ment from 1800 Years Ago: Some Things Are Tru­ly Time­less

3,200-Year-Old Egypt­ian Tablet Records Excus­es for Why Peo­ple Missed Work: “The Scor­pi­on Bit Him,” “Brew­ing Beer” & More

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

The Ancient Romans First Com­mit­ted the Sar­to­r­i­al Crime of Wear­ing Socks with San­dals, Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Sug­gests

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.