So, for whatever reason I've become obsessed lately with medieval footwear. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about what our ancestors wore on their feet and a lot of it comes from the modern reproduction medieval footwear that is mass produced, and poorly interpreted.
The biggest myth that gets me is that people think medieval footwear was slippery, and that somehow medieval people just got used to it, or had some technique for not falling everywhere that they walked. This is of course just as silly as it sounds. The culprit is a combination of things. I think the first cause of this misconception is our preconceived and very modern notion that the sole of a shoe should be hard. All modern rubber shoe soles are hard (well, most are, but I'll get in to that in a minute). The modern mind is so convinced that a shoe sole needs to be hard, that the reproduction mass market decided that so too should medieval footwear have a hard sole. This may be a case of the chicken or the egg though...
The end result is reproduction shoes with hardened leather soles. What does hardened leather do when you walk on grass? It turns every natural surface in to a slip-and-slide! So what do we do? Do we question why there's hardened leather on the shoe? No! We just assume medieval people were crazy, and correct their idiocy by adding a modern rubber or lugged sole to a medieval reproduction shoe... then we all have a nice big sigh of relief when we walk across that field and maintain our footing!
Right now a 14th century cordwainer is rolling over in his grave while simultaneously laughing at how we got it so wrong.
Luckily, we have a modern analog to what makes medieval footwear great, and
healthier to wear. Those strange minimalist shoes with the 5 toes on them that look really weird... (I've run and worked out in these for years). They in essence allow you to do everything as if you're barefoot, while offering protection from stuff on the ground like rocks, puddles, dirt etc... They have some amazing benefits though. They get you to use all the muscles in your foot that modern footwear forces you to neglect. Modern shoes teach you to run incorrectly and break our proper biomechanic pattern by allowing us to do what our feet were not designed to do. Those goofy five-finger shoes force you to re-learn how to walk and run like a person was supposed to. You develop the muscles that you haven't used since you spend most of your time barefoot. But what about ankle support? This is of course another crutch that modern shoes have caused us to rely upon because they do so much work for you, your underdeveloped and weak stabilizing muscles in your foot and ankle don't work like they should.
Now enter proper medieval footwear. The sole of every surviving medieval shoe is a nice supple soft piece of leather. This affords all the same benefits as being barefoot while offering you some protection from stuff on the ground like rocks, puddles, dirt etc... sound familiar? It allows you to feel the ground! It doesn't slip because it's not hardened. It keeps your muscles working properly and negates the need for ankle support. It protects you from the ground. If you're going to be walking around on particularly rough surfaces then you of course had the option to wear pattens (wooden overshoes, like sandals that strap to your turnshoe).
Erase those misconceptions from your mind that medieval footwear is slippery and not suited for use in reenactment! Our ancestors were not fools, we are the fools for trying to improve upon what they already had right! We took their shoes out of their medieval context, ruined them, and gave a lot of people a lot of misconceptions about what our medieval counterparts really wore.
