The Dorestadt Shoes - Assembling the Tools

It's been a long time since I had time to write here, but I've finally been able to squeeze in some time for blogging. I'm going to try and finish up this series on the shoes I made last year (!) so that anyone dropping by the blog will have some idea of how to do the same thing, should they ever want.

Once the initial research for the shoes was done, I waded in to Step 2: furnishing myself with the specialized tools and the materials I needed to make the shoes. Overall, this kind of shoemaking doesn't require that many specialized tools or materials. These are the main ones:

1. A sharp knife
2. An awl
3. Bristles for sewing (or needles)
4. A closing block
5. A stirrup
6. A matched pair of Lasts
7. Linen thread
8. Coad (a sticky wax)
9. Leather (vegetable tanned)

For a sharp knife, I just use a replaceable-bladed utility knife. It's not ideal or historically accurate, but it's inexpensive and easy to control. I have a very nice diamond awl, but for reasons I'll explain later, I got myself another awl with a narrower, rounded blade. I got the awl as sharp as possible on my stones and strop, and later, ground it to a flat, slightly rounded tip and resharpened it.

The bristles I used are wild hog bristles that I got from Francis Classe, the fine authour of the wonderful Raised Heels blog (http://aands.org/raisedheels/index.php). Boar bristles were likely used by leatherworkers of all stripes instead of needles, though it's unclear when they were first used. 

Lystyne Lordys Verament, a late 15^th century shoe-maker's will set to verse, mentions them alongside other shoemaking tools, so we know that by the late medieval period they were being used. It seems likely, given the stitches used on shoes throughout the medieval period (and into the modern period), that some kind of flexible thread guide was used, and boar bristles are ideally suited. If you don't want to spend the money or time trying to get boar bristles, I've been told that 25-30 lb fishing line makes a good replacement.

The awl and a few boar bristles for sewing.

A closing block is a rounded bit of wood that assists in making the closing seam, the seam(s) on the upper part of the shoe. I made mine out of a bit of 2x4 that I rounded off at the edges. I'll get into the exact technique in a later post, but basically the leather is held against the closing block on your thigh by the stirrup while stitching is done with the awl and bristles. The stirrup is just a long leather belt that loops under your foot and around your thigh and secures the leather while you're working. When I made mine, I just used an old belt blank that was too marked up to sell, added a cheap buckle and made a long slit in the middle. The slit is so that the stirrup can be tightened on either side of the area you're working on to give a more secure fit.

Here you can see the awl, the boar bristles, and the stirrup hard at work.

Lasts are hard forms shaped sort of like a human foot - it's most accurate to say they are shaped like the inside of a shoe. Modern lasts are very different from Medieval lasts - in modern shoes, the lasts provide the shape for the shoe, while in the Medieval era the lasts were used mostly for a sewing support while doing the lasting seam. I'll be doing an entire post on lasts after this one, as they are pretty important to how I decided to make these shoes.

For linen thread, I used two different thicknesses - one was 3-cord linen thread for the closing seams and other fine work, and the other was 7 cord linen thread for the lasting seam (the seam that holds the sole to the upper).

I used a kind of coad called 'blond wax' for...pretty much everything I make, actually. It's a mix of roughly two parts pine gum rosin and one part beeswax. There are a million recipes for this kind of wax, many of which use tar, tallow and other substances, but this was the easiest for me to make. Alistair Muckart (AKA William de Wyke) has a wonderful post on his blog for how to make it - he does a better job explaining than I could. Find it here: http://wherearetheelves.net/making-code/

 Finally, the leather. I used 5/6 oz leather for the uppers (2 -2.5 mm thick) and 8/9 oz leather for the sole (about 3-3.5 mm thick). You could probably use 4/5 oz leather for the upper if you wanted, but the fine stitching on the closing seam of the shoes might be weak in that kind of leather (you'll see what I mean when we get to construction.) I used 2/3 oz calfskin leather for the edge binding.

When I make another pair of these, I'll use thicker leather for the sole (more like 10/11 -12/13 oz), both for increased protection when walking and for an easier time of doing the sole seam.

The tools gathered and in use!

Coming up next - making the lasts!

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.