Shoe repair for pleasure and prophet

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A friend dropped in a pair of shoes for repair last weekend. They’d been lent to an unnamed person, who warmed his feet by/in the fire while wearing them. The left shoe was fine, the right sole had shrunk in the heat, cracked and then charred. I could see the innersole had also been damaged through the crack in the sole.

Most re-enactment shoes are simple turn shoes, the process of replacing a sole is exactly the same as making the shoe in the first place. Early modern shoes are different, with multiple structural layers that need to be addressed separately. In many cases, machine sewn repros have so many compromises that it’s often quicker and cheaper to just replace them. This pair were different, they were hand sewn, properly constructed using correct early modern techniques and materials. I’ve listed the steps I followed to repair the damage in case you want to fix a pair too.

Close-up of a damaged shoe sole showing significant burning, cracking, and a split on the left shoe, while the shoe on the right appears intact.
The damage, hereinafter referred to as “Troyed”.

Remove the sole

Carefully cut the stitches holding the sole to the welt. I start in the instep, just because. I’m replacing both soles as I can’t match the existing sole leather; nothing available in my area is the right thickness. After cutting the threads, I worked the small pieces of thread from the holes in the welt using a large, coarse needle.

Hopefully, the innersole isn’t too badly damaged and can just be repaired. If you need to replace the innersole, you’ll need a matching last or make a stitching stand. This may be the point where you have to decide replacing them instead of repairing is a better investment.

Repair damage

Fortunately, I was able to smooth out most of the ridges by soaking with water and then hammering from the centre outwards on a metal last.

A close-up view of hand-sewn shoe on an iron last, showing the damage having been worked out. The other shoe in the background is having the sole moulded to shape.
Burn damage mostly stretched out with water and hammering. In the background, the outer sole is being moulded to shape.

I then glued a parchment piece to cover the splits, hopefully preventing them from opening up while the wearer walks. Normally this would be done with a wheat paste but the soles on this pair were attached with a modern adhesive and the wheat paste just sat on the surface. I ended up using modern contact adhesive instead. The parchment is a piece of kangaroo rawhide I stretched and scraped earlier. The edges of the patch were sanded to feather them out to the sole so there are no ridges inside or outside the shoe.

Close-up of the bottom of a shoe showing a parchment patch glued to the damaged sole.
Parchment patch glued in place. I flooded the cracks with glue to help hold everything together.

Make the new soles

I cut the new soles from crusted sole leather with a coping saw. Knives, bandsaws or industrial lasers are other acceptable methods. I tend to cut a few millimetres ( to ⅛”) larger so I have some latitude when gluing the sole on. The payback is that I then have to trim it to fit. Modern sole leather is produced from veg tanned butts using water, heat and rollers, back to around the 15th century it was made using water, heat and hammering. The end product is much the same.

Once cut, soak them in water for a short while and then bend them to match the shape of the shoe. I find the best result then is to let them dry in place on the shoe, held down with weights. Let them dry, then glue them in place. The glue doesn’t have to be particularly strong, it’s just to stop the layers moving against each other when the shoe is finished. Shear strength is the main requirement. Again, I used contact cement this time. Carefully trim the edges to match the welt if you went oversized. Sharpen and hone your knife first.

Sew

I plied up a couple of 25/3 threads to match the thickness of the original thread and attached boar bristles to either end. The thread thickness is important to make sure that the existing awl holes in the welt are completely filled. I’m sure I did a post about making coad some time ago but I can’t find it, so maybe it was Staple.

Close-up of a a plied piece of black thread with attached boar bristles, resting on a wooden box with initials 'MR' carved on its surface.
Plied thread with boar bristles attached.

Dampen the leather and cut a slit in the sole leather for the thread to lie in. The slit needs to be about 6mm / ¼” from the edge. It helps if you lean the knife over a little towards the middle of the sole as you make the cut so that it aligns with the awl path. The distance from the edge doesn’t matter so much, as long as you are consistent. Try working the awl through the sole from the welt and see how far in the point comes out as a guide. Set a pair of dividers to that width and mark a line on the sole for your knife to follow.

Close-up of a hand-sewn leather shoe sole showing stitching and a metal awl poking through the sole.
Stabby, stabby. I had some problems at the bottom right of the above picture because I hadn’t cut deeply enough. I backed out, recut and redid those stitches.

Sew the sole to the welt. Aim the awl at the bottom of the slit you cut. You’ll get better at it with more experience. Pushing an awl through sole leather takes some effort. Keeping the slit and edge of the sole wet helps. Be careful not to bend your awl, and keep your other hand and body away from where a broken awl would go.

Close-up of a newly cut and stitched shoe sole, featuring a smooth surface and visible stitching around the edge.
Attached sole in all its ugliness.

Once the sole is sewn, put the shoe on a metal last, wet the leather around the edge and hammer the slit and awl holes closed. A cobbler’s hammer is best but any round-faced hammer will do.

Close-up of the closed sole slit, protecting the seam from wear.
Slit closed over stitching.

Set that aside to dry. Once it’s dry, you can pare the edge of the sole to match the welt. Then wet the edge and burnish with a piece of bone. I use a bone folder, but any bit of bone will do, I used to use a bone from a lamb roast.

Close-up of the burnished sole edge.
Pared and burnished sole edge.

Finish by stuffing1 the leather with dressing. As usual, I used Baker’s fine concoction.

A pair of hand-sewn early modern shoes with cuts and openings in the leather upper, resting on a concrete floor.
  1. In the sense of working as much dressing into the leather as it will take, not the Australian vernacular version. Unnamed Troy already did that at the start. ↩︎

Addendum

I finally found the post I was looking for, but it was about pitch rather than coad. The link is here if you are interested.

Company of the Staple did a blog post on their experiences as well as the video, it’s on their website.

Scott Perkins also has a recent post on his experience making coad. Scott works in US customary units, Staple and I work in an inconsistent mix of metric and Imperial units so there may be some differences in our raw amounts. Work in your units of comfort and concentrate on the ratios of ingredients rather than raw numbers.

Making Barker’s Leather Dressing

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Well over a decade ago, I posted a recipe for making a waterproof dressing from BARKER’S DELIGHT: OR, THE ART OF ANGLING. Wherein are discovered many rare Secrets very necessary to be known by all that delight in that Recreation, both for catching the Fish, and dressing thereof by Thomas Barker, second edition 1659. Here’s the quote agin, for those who haven’t committed it to memory.

I have a willing mind with Gods help to preserve all those that love this recreation, to goe dry in their boots and shooes, to preserve their healths, which one receit is worth much more than this book will cost.1

First, they must take a pint of Linseed oyle, with half a pound of mutton suet, six or eight ounces of bees wax, and half a pinniworth2 of rosin, boyle all this in a pipkin together, so let it coole untill it be milk warm, then take a little hair brush and lay it on your new boots; but its best that this stuff be laid on before the boot-maker makes the boots, then brush them once over after they come from him; as for old boots you must lay it on when your boots be dry.

I need a good dressing for a 1970s scabbard, so I thought I’d go as crash test dummy on this one.

First step was to normalise the units and then convert them into something I could measure, as my pinniworth scales are out for repair. Next, I scaled the quantities to something that would work with the amounts of each ingredient I had in the cupboard.

I’m asserting a pint of raw linseed oil is 600ml. I’m aware this is about 15ml too high, but I’ll round down when I do the scaling. It’ll be fine. Half a pound of mutton suet (I’m using rendered beef tallow instead) is 227g, 6-8oz of bees wax is 170-225g (again rounding generously). Half a pennyweight is 12 grains, or roughly 0.8g of rosin.

I scaled down the recipe to a metric cup of oil, which gives me a ratio of 250ml/600ml, or 0.42 if I round down to compensate for the optimistic metrification in the paragraph above. As weight is easier to measure than volume1, I used the density of raw linseed oil at 0.93g/ml to calculate the weight of 232.5g. For more depth on scaling historical recipes, see my Brewing – scaling historical recipes on my other blog.

This gave me:

232.5g raw linseed oil
95g tallow
80-85g bees wax
0.336g rosin

Actual figures were slightly out due to limitations of the scale and slightly ham-fisted spooning of the tallow. I ended up with 234g of oil, 84g of wax and 97g of tallow. To measure 0.336g of rosin, I weighed 1g of rosin and then eyeballed 1/3 of that. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

The oil was a hardware store brand, the beeswax from a local apiarist and the tallow was grass fed from the local butcher. You can render your own tallow if you like but store-bought is fine.

Melt the higher melting point components first, then add the tallow and oil. The recipe says boil, I didn’t want to get anything to its autoignition point, so I took it to a gentle boil in case of some need in the chemistry, then shut off the heat. I’ve been wrong about assuming steps in historic recipes were ritual or superstition before. Linseed oil has a boiling point and autoignition temperature of 343°C, so don’t let it get too hot for too long and have a dry powder extinguisher or fire blanket nearby.

Once it’s had time to cool (milk heat is 35-40°C), apply with a soft brush. I used an old shoe polishing brush. The dressing soaks into the leather surface easily, and evens out nicely with a bit of friction from the brush.

  1. It’s not actually more difficult, it just saves me from having to wash up a measuring cup. ↩︎

Hedeby Quiver – Mark 2

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If you go back to my earlier posts on making a Hedeby quiver, I commented that I had been able to match all the stitch holes and thread imprints on all parts other than the carrying tabs.

Hedeby quiver carrying whassits
Hedeby quiver carrying tabs, redux

I’m now working on a group of new ones and this is the solution I’ve come up with. I’m using some of the narrow strips to wrap the edges of the tabs. This results in the outcome that I was chasing – stitch holes but no thread marks on the main parts of the tabs.

Interestingly, this is the same edge treatment as on the 6th-10th century flacket from Cloonclose, Co. Leitrim. The link is to a photo album on Facebook by Matt Bunker and is used with his kind permission.

The shoehorn that never was – Jane Ayres, 1595

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It all began with a letter to the society… then an email from a PhD candidate and ended with the 1595 shoe horn evaporating in a cloud of logic.

Let’s go back to where the confusion began, in early 1921.

An Elizabethan Shoe Horn: Jane Ayres
—This shoeing horn is inscribed as follows: —

“This is Jane Ayres shoeine Horne made by the hands of Robert Mindum 1595”
Can any reader by any chance give me any information regarding Jane Ayres?

Percival D Griffiths, FSA.
Sandbridgebury, St Albans

Notes & Queries Series 12, VIII (26 February 1921), p168

A deal of Mindum folklore hangs on this letter. Several authors, myself included, entertained romantic notions around two shoe horns for the same person in such a short period of time. We felt we were on a real winner when the “JANE HIS WIFE…1613” shoe horn appeared in the first decade of this century.

Griffiths amassed a large collection of English oak and walnut furniture and seventeenth-century needlework and is known to have owned two Mindum shoe horns. One was loaned to the Exhibition of late Elizabethan Art in conjunction with the tercentenary of Francis Bacon at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in June 1926. That turned out to be the 1597 shoe horn with the obliterated name, originally from the Drane collection, and sold in 1916 as part of Drane’s estate.  

He loaned the other shoehorn on two occasions, in 1931 and 1933, with the inscription published in full in the first catalogue, and a brief summary in the later one.

In the section on the objects on loan from Percival D Griffiths, FSA in 1931, we have:

No. 766, p. 97: An Elizabethan Shoehorn engraved with a conventional design and a lady who represents ‘Justice,’ inscribed ‘This is Jane Ayers Shoeing (horn made by the hands) of Robert Mindum 1593.’

A loan exhibition of works of art being held in aid of the East London hospital for children at Dorchester Hotel in London organised by the V&A Museum from May 28 to June 18, 1931, ex cat. (London, 1931)

The other has a similar section for Griffiths’ objects.

450a Shoe-horn, inscribed and dated 1593.

A Loan Exhibition Depicting the Reign of Queen Elizabeth at Grosvenor Place in January-March 1933, ex. cat. (London: Battley Brothers, 1933), p63

This makes it fairly clear that Griffiths’ other shoe horn was the 1593 Jane Ayres one, now in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum collection.

What went wrong?

There’s a couple of transcription errors obvious in the quoted Notes and Queries letter: the use of the letter J rather than I in the name “Jane”; the word “shoeine” used in place of “shoeing”; “Horne made by the hands” is an interpolation of text missing from the shoe horn, but matches the text on the other shoe horn in his collection, and; the incorrect year. I’m unable to tell whether the error was Griffiths’ or made by the publication. He may just have had illegible handwriting.

After the 1933 exhibition, we lose track of the shoe horns. They don’t appear in any of the articles or books on Griffiths’s collection, in his auctions through the major houses in the 1920s or the  posthumous 1939 sales, nor in they do appear in the 1931 scrapbook recording a portion of his needlework and snuffbox collection, now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art library. He did frequently sell items privately to other collectors and had a period of financial hardship in 1931/32 when he liquidated a portion of his collection.

The Salisbury object record notes the donation of the 1593 Ayres shoe horn by Lieut. Col. Frederick George Glyn Bailey (d. 1951) of Lake House, Salisbury in 1947. (Personal correspondence with Salisbury Museum’s Museum Assistant Valerie Goodrich, 18-25 September 2017).  We have no information about how Bailey acquired the shoe horn, he maintained a residence at 4 Audley Square, London W1 in addition to Lake House and is likely to have encountered it while in London.

I’ve passed this information on to the Salisbury Museum, they’ve added it to the object record. There’s still a few holes in the provenance but we have pushed it back from 1947 to at least 1926. 

A much more modern bucket

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We went on the Japanese mini submarine tour around Sydney Harbour last week, run by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. The tour included a visit to Fort Denison, in the Fort museum was this bucket.

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Bucket, leather, c1858
Made by the Royal Gun Factory, Woolwich, England

The Fort Denison collection has three surviving leather buckets, which arrives in the Martello Tower at the same time as the leather canisters. The buckets played an important role in the firing of the guns, as they held the water needed by the spongeman.

To reload the gun after a round had been fired the spongeman took his long spongestaff, wetted the sponge which was on the end of it with water from the bucket, and thrust it down the bore of the gun. This was done to quence any smouldering fragments of power which might have remained in the bore.

Acc Number 2008.54

Firmly dated to the middle of the 19th century, it is almost indistinguishable from the 18th century riveted buckets in Cawdor Castle, Cotehele House and HMS Victory The sewn buckets seem to have stopped in the middle of the 18th century, for example the bucket from the wreck of HMS Invincible (1801) dated 1758.

The main innovation seems to be the use of buckles on the handle to provide some additional flexibility. Here’s some other angles, click on them to embiggen.

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