Footwear at the Caroline Court

 

Footwear at the Caroline Court

What the courtiers of Charles I and his queen, Henriette Marie, wore on their feet is a subject about which I had never thought until yesterday. I then came across an interesting  piece by Erin Griffey entitled ‘Shoes, slippers, galoshes and boots: Footwear at the Stuart court’ published on the Early Modern court blog on 13th March, 2019. After some short introductory remarks on the visibility of male courtiers’ footwear and silk stockings, her focus was on the difficulty of detecting what female courtiers were wearing. Very few prints and none of Van Dyck’s portraits offer clues even though some depictions of masques do reveal shoes. To fill this gap, Erin Griffey turned to the accounts of the Queen’s shoemakers, Thomas Gray until mid-1628 and then her regular shoemaker until 1638, John Fossey, who may have been a German judging by the variety of spellings that survive for his name.

In fact, Fossey supplied the Queen with dozens of pairs of ‘plain’ shoes as well as seven pairs of galoshes and three pairs of slippers according to his Michelmas 1628 bill: this was quite apart from the seven pairs of boots supplied to her six pages: her footboy got three pairs of shoes as well. It appears that the queen’s shoes were richly decorated with laces, trimming and satin soles while being made from fabrics like velvet and satin. Her slippers were made of crimson or watchet velvet. Exactly what the soles were made of is less clear. Did the ‘plain’ shoes have wooden soles or did the Queen go outdoors in soft soles ? Male servants certainly were provided with boots, which were ‘waxed’ to make them sturdier. Clearly, Caroline courtiers and their servants were and were expected to be well-shod.

But these items of footwear were for the use of elite men and women. What did people of humbler status wear on their feet? Clogs or leather footwear? Did some people walk about barefoot like the peasants of France? I do not know but I should be intrigued to find out.

                                                                                                                                         5th October, 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finding out about what is going on in early modern history beyond this country

One of the puzzles I face most days concerns what is going on in early modern history in English-speaking countries beyond these shores. I have a reasonable understanding of the seminar papers being offered here and of the conferences being or about to be held. Most of the websites of relevance are known to me and I am, broadly speaking, aware of the names of historians working in the areas I am interested in. Google alerts and social media help to fill in the gaps. Where I am much less well informed arises from the activities of early modern historians in north America, in Australia and New Zealand. Despite having some regular contacts on the other side of the Atlantic, I have to work hard to search the myriad history departments and learned societies of the U.S.A. and Canada. Oddly enough, this does not appear to be so large an issue with countries in Europe where I conduct regular searches for publications and theses, conferences and seminars of potential interest. It would be good ...
Read more

Simon Healy has died

Image
  I am extremely sorry to report that Simon Healy, who worked for the History of Parliament Trust's 1604-1629 section for many years,  has died. I remember him as a very cheerful and engaging conversationalist. My condolences go to his widow and their two children.
Read more

Centre and Locality: review reflections

  Quite by chance, I was browsing on Twitter last Friday (9 th April) when I spotted on Edward Vallance’s site a reference to a video conference organised by William Clayton of the University of East Anglia at the end of last month. Further searches led me to William Clayton’s review of the book edited by Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey, Connecting Centre and Locality: Communication in early modern England, which appeared under the auspices of the Manchester University Press in 2020 and which Clayton had reviewed for The Seventeenth Century in its most recent issue. [1] This is a subject which interests me and I did give some thought to responding to William Clayton’s largely laudatory comments. However, I was also conscious that I had not read this collection of essays and was thus less well equipped than I should be for assessing either the book or William Clayton’s review. There was, however, one historiographical issue upon which I did feel qualified to comment. Right at the st...
Read more