CULTURE

How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend


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.





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