Saturday 9 May 2015

The Dorestadt Shoes - Background and Research

As I've mentioned before, one of my big projects for 2015 was to make my first pair of Medieval turnshoes. Previously at SCA events I've been wearing some iron-age style "ghillie" shoes, and I find myself in need of an upgrade.

However, my wife insisted that I make her a pair of (and I quote) "Viking booties", rather than making my first pair for me. As a good and thoughtful husband, I acquiesced, and began work early on in the year.

The "Viking Booties" that my wife wanted were based on a style of shoe with overlapping flaps attaching to toggles - finds of these types of shoes occur all over Northwest Europe, everywhere the Vikings raided and traded (though perhaps only coincidentally). Specifically, the shoes are modeled off of a find from the 10th century settlement of Dorestadt in the Netherlands (hence the name Dorestadt Shoes).

The Dorestadt Shoes. (From Stepping Through Time,
Goubitz, 2001, p. 147)


Partway through the planning process, I was encouraged by some of my SCA friends to enter something in the Kingdom Arts and Science Faire for Ealdormere. That put a deadline on things, but I thought I'd have enough time to get everything done.

I've decided to approach shoe-making with maximum historical accuracy in mind. I want to do my best to reproduce the techniques, materials, and tools in use at the time. That means a lot of research.

Luckily there are a number of very good websites and blogs chock-full of information. Marc Carlson's website is a phenomenal resource, and you'll see it referenced everywhere anyone talks about Medieval footwear. It has some great, in-depth discussion on tools and techniques, as well as a few tutorials on shoe-making.

My other two web-based sources are blogs. Alistair Muckart's blog, Where are the Elves?, is another great resource. His tutorials on making coad (shoe-maker's wax) and rendering tallow have both been very useful. He's also got photos of shoe cross-sections that offer a lot of insight into how they were made - this is great when you're having trouble visualizing how everything goes together.

Francis Classe's blog, Raised Heels, is more specifically targeted to late period shoes and other footwear incorporating raised heels or platforms of some kind. This is kind of out of my period, as I usually muck about in the early Middle Ages. A lot of the skills and techniques are the same, however, and just as I started this project he was working on a pair of the exact same style of shoes that I was! Fortune was smiling on me there - seeing an accomplished shoemaker at work (and getting some helpful tips!) was very helpful during the whole process. He also provided me with some boar bristles for sewing - more on those later.

There are a number of very good books out there on Medieval shoes, but they approach them from a decidedly archaeological angle. Stepping Through Time by Olaf Goubitz is basically the Medieval shoe bible. Goubitz was an authority on archaeological leather, especially shoes, and made pioneering strides in standardizing the cataloging and description of shoe finds. Despite it's scholarly goals, it's quite the accessible work, and Goubitz's sense of humour shines through on several occasions. Stepping Through Time looks primarily at shoe finds from the Netherlands, but shoe styles were not heavily regional in the Middle Ages so the styles found there wind up being representative of shoes throughout Northwest Europe. This book has recently come back into print - it was apparently getting very hard to find.

The other book I relied heavily on was Archaeological Footwear by Marquita Volken.The focus of this text was to discover and classify the main cutting pattern types of all pre-industrial leather footwear. It's an amazing work, and the categorization of all shoe finds into a small number of basic pattern shapes is not only a great feat of analysis, I also found it very useful when drafting up the pattern for the shoes. Archaeological Footwear is decidedly less accessible than Stepping Through Time, but it's worth the slog. The really big value for this text is the absolutely massive catalog of shoe types in the back - pretty well every shoe type found in Europe is represented. It's basically a gold mine.

I also made some use of Shoes and Pattens and Leather and Leatherworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medieval York. Both of these are good books, but Shoes and Pattens is a little dated (and a little too late period to take in the shoe type I wanted to make). Leather and Leatherworking is a good resource, but a lot of the information overlaps with Stepping Through Time so it didn't see as much use as it should have.

To make a long story short, I did a crapload of reading before I started the actual work. The basic plan was this:

1. Get all my equipment and materials together.
2. Take all the measurements I need from my wife's feet.
3. Make a pair of wooden lasts (sewing supports for making shoes) from the measurements.
4. Create a pattern for the shoes based on the last.
5. Cut the leather using the pattern.
6. Make the shoe.

In the next post I'll discuss the materials and some of the tools I used making the shoes and lasts. After that, I'll get into the last-making, then on to the actual shoe-making! Stay tuned.