During construction of medieval shoes one needs to use many different types of seams. Since there are a lot of well preserved finds from the medieval period which show exactly how the different parts of turnshoes have been attached, we also know a lot about construction of medieval shoes.

The most known categorization of seams for medieval shoes was published by Olaf Goubitz (Goubitz). It is also the widely used system for distinguishing seams in literature and finding reports. I have summarized the different types of seams in the following table.

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It’s been a long time since I wrote anything new. But at least I was productive when it came to making shoes. Some of them have left my workshop during the last months and I would like to show them here.

Here are some ankle-high shoes with laces. One of the most frequently found types for the 13th century, worn far before and after ¹. In the high versions, the upper extends approximately to the middle of the calf and is closed with a single, two or more circumferential laces. The laces are pulled through pairs of vertical slots in the upper and knotted at the side. The slits are arranged in rows on the left and right sides and occasionally at the front above the tibia. This pair is made of vegetable tanned cowhide.

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On some living-history/reenactement events there is no sleeping area inside a building available. Since I do not want to always ask for a place in someone else tent I wanted to buy my own one. But which type should I buy?

Most of the time I will need this tent when I am alone or on smaller events. Therefore setting it up alone shouldn’t be too hard. Cone tents seem to be perfect for this use case. Therefore I was looking for sources of 13th century cone tents. But there are no remaining cone tents from the 13th century (I did not find any remains of original cone tent). But one can find a lot of pictures in medieval codices. I have collected some of them on my ppinterest page

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Shoemakers today used pitched hemp thread for their sewing work. But what did shoemakers use during the 13th century?

There are only a few finds of remaining sewing threads in all the shoe finds I know of. But this also tells us one thing: The threads must have consisted of a material which needs a different Soil for good preservation. Therefore it annot be something like sinew or gut, cause they have similar preservation conditions as leather.

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Our son is now old enough to join us on the events, therefore he needs his own equipement and clothing. I’ve also been interested in how long it takes to make a pair of childs shoes. So, this was the perfect timing.

I was planning to make a simple par of type “Lübeck” (Volken, Marquita 2014, p. 507), shoes which have been in use between the mid of the 12th century till the 15th century. This type is a simple ankle shoe with lace-fastening like shown in the following picture. It is often found all over Europe. For example in Schleswig (Schnack 1992), Lübeck, Konstanz (Schnack 1994), Svendborg (Groenman 1988), Dordrecht (Goubitz und van Driel-Murray und Groenman-van Waateringe).

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