Item 01 - Leather Shoes

During the renovation of Liddell’s, 19 Dean’s Yard, this pair of shoes was discovered beneath floor boards close to a fireplace on the second floor. They have recently returned from conservation at the Museum of London. The Curator suggests that they are late nineteenth century, fashionable shoes, probably bought in the second hand market and then repaired on the sole, with iron horseshoe heel reinforcements fitted.

Northampton Museum coordinates the survey of ‘concealed shoes’ and their index of finds lists well over a thousand examples. Of course there are a number of shoe superstitions: they are symbols of authority (Old Testament); they are linked with fertility (tied on the back of wedding cars); they are associated with good luck (witness holiday souvenirs in the shape of a shoe). Statistically the finds in buildings are often associated with chimneys or fireplaces. They cannot have been a casual dumping: shoes were an expensive item of clothing. Stories suggest that removal of shoes from a house brings bad luck. There appears to be some association with the devil. Some earlier types of shoes were so narrow and pointed (some were actually called the Devil’s Horns) that it would be easy to believe that the devil was pinching you, a suggestion today’s women may well understand. This may reinforce the idea that the devil can be lured into a boot/shoe. There was a fourteenth century belief that Sir John Schorne, rector of North Marston, Buckinghamshire, conjured the devil into a boot. His shrine was a place of pilgrimage until the Reformation, and several pubs in the area commemorate him. The superstition may well have grown that the evil in a house is collected and contained in the shoe, and if it is removed evil and chaos can roam abroad...