While the Apocalypse – Blog

We can all remember seeing images of medieval Europeans wearing pointy shoes, but most of us have paid scant attention to the shoes themselves. That may be for the best, since the more we dwell on one fact of life in the Middle Ages or another, the more we imagine how uncomfortable or even painful it must have been by our standards. Dentistry would be the most vivid example, but even that fashionable, vaguely elfin footwear inflicted suffering, especially at the height of its popularity — not least among flashy young men — in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Called poulaines, a name drawn from the French word for Poland in reference to the footwear’s supposedly Polish origin, these pointy shoes appeared around the time of Richard II’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. “Both men and women wore them, although the aristocratic men’s shoes tended to have the longest toes, sometimes as long as five inches,” writes Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouellette. “The toes were typically stuffed with moss, wool, or horsehair to help them hold their shape.” If you’ve ever watched the first Blackadder series, know that the shoes worn by Rowan Atkinson’s hapless plotting prince may be comic, but they’re not an exaggeration.

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