Romans did not split footwear by gender - both wore sandals – but they were differentiated by status. Everyone could tell you what a ‘Roman’ sandal looks like – a hard sole, usually leather-covered wood, secured by thongs and laces up the leg. Mediterranean Antiquity is where we begin to see something more closely resembling medieval shoes. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has a jaw-dropping pair of solid-gold s andals which accompanied Thutmose III, one of Egypt’s greatest Pharaohs, into the afterlife. In warmer climes, shoes were only occasionally worn, though from ancient Egypt we have functional flip-flops woven from papyrus reeds – all the way up to intricately plaited papyrus shoes of great status. They were astonishingly prolific crafters: their surviving rock art and decorative objects show us that even though they had not mastered tanning animal hides into leather, they shaped and sewed skins that would soften into comfortable, warm boots over time.
20,000 BCE), and as anyone who has ever been to Yorkshire knows, chilly feet are no fun. These hunter-gatherer residents of Europe lived during the last Ice Age (c. Perhaps some of the earliest shoes we can point to in the historical record belonged to Early European Modern Humans, better known as the Cro-Magnon people. If you can incorporate those hidden cues into your impression, then you’re on the fast-track to authenticity. They encompass social class, wealth, gender roles and changing identities, as well as shedding light upon the material cultures which produced them. To build a fully-realised re-enactment impression or a fantasy character, we have to do the same! Building an impression from the ground up can often be the way into the medieval psyche: it was as true in the medieval period as it is today that someone’s shoes tell you everything you need to know about them. Then if he’s still your enemy, he’s a mile away and he’s got no shoes on. There’s an old saying: to understand your enemy, you have to walk a mile in his shoes.
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