Having covered the history of sandals in the August Periodical, here we examine the more substantial footwear that developed in post-Roman Britain. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, leather shoes with closed-in round or oval toes were usual, 9th-century illustrations confirming the popularity of ankle-high shoes. The first record of a shoemaker (cordwainer) working in Northampton, Britain’s shoemaking capital, dates to 1202 and many medieval shoes have been excavated from European sites. Fashionable shoes were often laced at the sides and toes were long and pointed, the longer the point the higher the wearer’s status. During the late-1400s pointed toes were superseded by blunt toes and for the next century wide footwear was in vogue.

In the 1590s the first shoes with heels appeared, both sexes adopting elegant oval-toed shoes with significant heels. The introduction of heels also prompted the innovation of ‘straights’ – unshaped shoes for either foot. Fashionable Stuart shoes were typically square-toed and by 1660 buckled fastenings were replacing ribbon ties, as recorded in Samuel Pepys’ diary, 22nd January 1660: “This day I began to put on buckles to my shoes.” Luxury shoes were of coloured leather and suede, or silk and velvet for indoors, although wool was a cheaper, hard-wearing material for winter and for shoes of the lower classes. High-fashion female shoes remained colourful in the 1700s, often matching a gown, while men wore boots or plain buckled leather shoes. During the 1790s and early-1800s, heels were abandoned: flat, dainty pumps became fashionable and left- and right-shaped shoes returned.

Low-cut shoes were largely superseded by ankle boots throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but returned during the 1910s as women’s rising hemlines began to reveal the foot. During and after World War One, men also adopted modern, low-cut shoes and, for a time Derby, brogue and Oxford styles appeared almost unisex, until the iconic 1920s bar shoe emerged for women. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s women’s smart-heeled court styles were fashionable, although around the Second World War plainer flat shoes were more practical.

In 1941, when clothes rationing was introduced, wooden-soled clogs were promoted as a substitute for scarce leather, but were unpopular due to their historical connection to poverty. Certain types of clog are still used in some industries and clogging or clog dancing, which reputedly developed in the Lancashire textile mills, is kept alive as a folk tradition in parts of northern England and Wales.