We don’t often find early utilitarian clothing, simply because it was used until it was used up and thus doesn’t survive. So it’s a treat to be able to share this rare pair of pattens.
While the fashionable clog elevated the feet of wealthier women, the patten was distinctly and necessarily functional, particularly among working-class and rural women. In an age before clean, paved roads, pattens protected the wearer’s shoes and feet from the dirt, mud, and unleveled stones you inevitably encountered during any outdoor excursion. The construction consists of a carved wooden sole attached with large nails to a round, oval, or wavy shoe iron, with leather or cloth latchets or straps. On this pair, the nearly flat sole, slightly rounded toe, and leather latchets lacing at the center over the front of the foot date them to the end of the 18th or early 19th century. Ironically, this cumbersome form and closure probably made walking more difficult. Some surviving examples at least have ankle fasteners.
Unidentified artist, Piety in Pattens or Timbertoe on Tiptoe, published by M. Darly, London, 1773.
A ubiquitous sight and sound in Georgian England, pattens were even described by Jane Austen. During Catherine Morland’s visit to the namesake property in Northanger Abbey (1818), “Wherever they went, some pattened girl stopped to courtesy.” In Persuasion (1818), Lady Russell “made no complaint” when confronted with the chaos of Bath’s streets: “the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men, and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens.”
The noise from patten irons was commonplace into the Victorian era. Residents in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1850) “kept early hours, and clattered home in their pattens, under the guidance of a lantern-bearer, about nine o’clock at night; and the whole town was abed and asleep by half-past ten.” Even in the early 20th century, when pattens were out of use and after the last trained pattenmaker had apparently died, one still found aged signs on churches requesting women remove their pattens before entering, so as to avoid “disturbing the worshippers.”
From Charles Fitch, History of the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers of the City of London (1926), n.p.
Thomas Rowlandson, A Cat in Pattens, London, 1803.
In the eyes of those of higher social status, pattens could also be a signifier of low class, lower means, provinciality, and vice. Prints show housemaids mopping and cleaning and country girls balancing precariously. Caricaturists (notably male) depicted exaggeratedly grotesque, supposedly indecent women attracting attention from men, like Rowlandson’s A Cat in Pattens. A 1783 engraving after a drawing by Henry Bunbury takes a line from John Gay’s 1716 poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London and gives the wearer an eponymous pseudonym: “The patten now supports each frugal dame, which from the blue eyed Patty takes the name.” (Another version contains couplets in Italian and French about Patty patiently waiting for her lover.)
Pair of women’s pattens, late 18th or early 19th century. Available now.
