Doe and Hope

Description

In black leather cowhide over wooden soles, and buckle clasps, the wholes shod with iron, the clogs survive from nineteenth century Lancashire.

The condition of the clogs are thoroughly charming with the leather showing signs of obvious wear commensurate with use and age. They have been re-soled at a later date. We haven’t cleaned or oiled them as they are best preserved and presented as found.

Traditional clogs were often worn in heavy labour, In England for at least the past eight hundred years clogs were known as "Pattens" which were worn over leather or fabric shoes to raise the wearer's foot above the mud of the unmade road. Poorer people who couldn't afford shoes wore wood directly against the skin, and so developed the clog, for several hundred years the words were interchangeable.

The Lancashire clog was an adaptation of the sabot worn by the French and Dutch peasantry and was introduced into Lancashire when the Flemish weavers settled in the Bolton area "wearing wode shoon all of a peece". The Lancashire weavers and country-folk, at this time, either went barefoot or wore shoes of untanned leather, similar to the moccasins worn by Red Indians. The superiority of the footwear of the new comers, which kept their feet dry in rain or snow, was something to be copied. But the rough and stony roads of Lancashire cut into the sabots and irons were nailed on to the soles. Leather 'uppers' replaced the wood shoe but the Lancashire clog kept its wooden sole.

Someone's lost some tactile and wonderfully evocative shoes.