Читать книгу The Heritage of Dress - Wilfred Mark Webb - Страница 12

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EARLY FOOT-GEAR—THE ORIGIN OF THE CLOCK—A MODERN IMITATION OF TATTOOING—GAILY COLOURED GARTERS

Many persons still go barefoot, so that ancient as foot-gear may be, the stage preceding its adoption is even now represented. Moreover, sandals, which are very primitive, have been much in use of recent years, and have especially been worn by children.

If we turn to ordinary boots and shoes we shall not find many obvious points about them which lead up to their history. Still we shall see in the case of a large number that in places where one piece of leather laps over another, it is perforated with rows of holes which form a kind of simple ornamentation. (See Figure 64.)

The perforations do not go through the boot or shoe, and in a Roman example in the British Museum, which is much more highly decorated, there are two thicknesses of leather, of which the outer one only is pierced. (See Figure 65.)

In many cases, however, the Roman shoe was truly of open work. It consisted of but one thickness of leather, and from this, large pieces were cut out so as to make a kind of lattice. Several examples of this kind of shoe are exhibited at the British Museum, and we give an illustration of one of these, which is in a very fair state of preservation. (See Figure 66.)

Fig. 64.—A modern boot decorated with perforations made in the leather.

Fig. 65.—An ornamented Roman shoe, of two thicknesses.

Fig. 66.—A Roman shoe of open-work leather.

It seems very probable that the ornamentation on our modern shoes is a survival of the open work which was in favour with the Romans, especially as even then the apertures did not always expose the foot. In pre-Roman times in this country there were perforations in some of the shoes which were useful rather than ornamental, and one type (of which a specimen figured by Fairholt is preserved by the Royal Irish Academy) has survived until recently, if it is not to be found to-day, in Scotland and Ireland. This shoe was made of raw hide (see Figure 67), and the holes, it is said, were intended to allow the water to pass through when the wearer was crossing morasses. An examination of the figure will, however, show that the holes are really slits, and it would appear that however useful they may have proved in the way described, they were originally made for quite a different reason.