Patten (shoe)

There were three main types of pattens: one with a wooden 'platform' sole raised from the ground by either with wooden wedges or iron stands. The second variant had a flat wooden sole often hinged. The third type had a flat sole made from stacked layers of leather. Some later European varieties of these pattens had a laminated sole: light wooden inner sections with leather above and below. In earlier varieties of pattens, dating from the 12th century on, the stilt or wedge variety were more common. From the late 14th century, the flat variety became increasingly common. Leather pattens became fashionable in the 14th and 15th centuries, and in London appear to have begun to be worn as shoes over hose in the 15th century, spreading to a much wider section of the public.[2] Most London patten soles were constructed of alder, willow or poplar woods.[2]

In 1390, the Diocese of York forbade clergy from wearing pattens and clogs in both church and in processions, considering them to be indecorous: "contra honestatem ecclesiae".[3] Conversely, the famous rabbi Shlomo ibn Aderet (the Rashba, c. 1233–c. 1310) of Aragon was asked if it was permissible to wear patines on Shabbat, to which he replied that it was the custom of "all the wise in the land" to wear them, and certainly permitted.[4]

Since shoes of the period had thin soles, pattens were commonly used mainly because of unpaved roads and also that indoor stone floors were very cold in winter. Furthermore, refuse in cities – animal especially horse feces and human effluent (from chamber pots)– was usually thrown directly into the street (often with minimal advance warning). Making full foot contact with such an unpleasant surface was, understandably, highly undesirable. Thus, pattens tended to only make contact with the ground through two or three strips of wood and raised the wearer up considerably, sometimes by four inches (ten centimetres) or more in contrast to clogs, which usually have a low, flat-bottomed sole integral to the shoe.

Wearing of pattens inside church was discouraged, if not outright forbidden: perhaps because of the noise they made, the oft-commented "clink" being the consensus term for the sound; Jane Austen wrote of the "ceaseless clink of pattens" referring to life in Bath.[6] To talk excessively and too loudly was coined to be as if one: "had your "tongue run (or go) on pattens", used by Shakespeare and others.[7] In houses, pattens were taken off with hats (for men) and overcoats upon entering, not doing so being considered rude and inconsiderate by bringing dirt inside – literally a faux pas or wrong step. The aunt of the Brontë Sisters, Miss Branwell, seems to have been considered notably eccentric for wearing her pattens indoors:

she disliked many of the customs of the place, and particularly dreaded the cold damp arising from the flag floors in the passages and parlours of Haworth Parsonage. The stairs, too, I believe, are made of stone; and no wonder, when stone quarries are near, and trees are far to seek. I have heard that Miss Branwell always went about the house in pattens, clicking up and down the stairs, from her dread of catching cold.[8]

Huge pattens worn by two 18th-century Turkish women, pastel by Jean-Étienne Liotard, who visited Turkey in 1738

Pattens were not always easy to walk in, and despite their practical intention, literary evidence suggests that they could appear, at least to males, as a further aspect of feminine frailty and dependency. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary for 24 January 1660:

Called on my wife and took her to Mrs Pierce's, she in the way being exceedingly troubled with a pair of new pattens, and I vexed to go so slow.

From the Middle Period Poems of John Clare (1820s):

She lost her pattens in the muck

& Roger in his mind

Considered her misfortune luck

To show her he was kind

He over hitops fetched it out

& cleaned it for her foot...

("hitops" are high boots)

From Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders of 1887, though set earlier in the century:

he saw before him the trim figure of a young woman in pattens, journeying with that steadfast concentration which means purpose and not pleasure. He was soon near enough to see that she was Marty South. Click, click, click went the pattens; and she did not turn her head.

She had, however, become aware before this that the driver of the approaching gig was Giles. She had shrunk from being overtaken by him thus; but as it was inevitable, she had braced herself up for his inspection by closing her lips so as to make her mouth quite unemotional, and by throwing an additional firmness into her tread.

"Why do you wear pattens, Marty? The turnpike is clean enough, although the lanes are muddy."

"They save my boots."

"But twelve miles in pattens—'twill twist your feet off. Come, get up and ride with me."

She hesitated, removed her pattens, knocked the gravel out of them against the wheel, and mounted in front of the nodding specimen apple-tree.