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Classics Teaching Resources

Shoemakers

My first Roman shoe, as it were, was in the famous shoe manufacturer Clarks' museum in my home town of Street, Somerset. There the comments are made from a shoemaker's viewpoint, for example:

Leather for both uppers and soles was used double, the two flesh sides being stuck together so that the smooth tough grain side was on the outside.

So we enter the world of the Roman shoemaker. Among the 700 shoes and parts of shoes found in the City of London is one which would fit a medium-sized giant. Now Londinium bobbies may have had extra large feet, but it is much more likely that this was a shop sign. So we imagine the shoe shop in action. Were shoes actually made in Londinium or merely sold there? Evidence in the form of pieces of leather, cut but not fully pierced for sewing or thonging, shows that they were made there.

Evidence for how the shoe shop looked comes from the small shops in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and reliefs from Roman and Gaul showing the craftsmen at work. Perhaps, then, there was a workshop and a small counter, and seats for customers to be measured for sandals. An Athenian vase painting shows a man standing on a counter or table as the shoemaker traces round his foot, and the soles of many Roman sandals are exactly the shape you would get from such a tracing. Today it is only the rich or the disabled who have custom-made shoes, but probably a resident of Roman Londinium would expect to have his or her shoes made to measure. Horace [Epistles 1.10.42] is clear how important the right fit is:

A man's means, when they don't fit him, are rather like shoes - he's tripped by a size too large, pinched by a size too small.
si pede maior erit, subvertet, si minor, uret.

The translation I use talks of shoe sizes, but of course they are a modern invention, not needed in the world of bespoke shoemaking.

These small shoe shops, in Rome at any rate, huddled together in a shoemakers' street. The Roman shoemakers plied their trade in the Sandalarius, a street with its own statue of Apollo donated by Augustus.

We even know the names of some shoemakers. Lucius Aebutius Thales stamped his name on a lady's slipper found in Vindolanda. His father was Titus, and evidence suggests that they lived and worked in Gaul. Did a Roman officer's wife pick up a pair of slippers in Gaul on her way to their posting at the end of the world?. A female shoemaker, Latin sutrix, called Septimia Stratonice had a marble tombstone in Ostia. Other shoemakers were content with a trademark stamped on the product: in London, the marks include a wheel, a rosette and an urn. One maker used to impress a straight line on the insole from toe to heel, and added a number, X on one insloe, XII on another.

One modern researcher has suggested that shoes were produced in large quantities in factories, and that a substantial export trade was involved. I am not entirely convinced. Evidence for the export trade includes the fact that a shoe found in Vindonissa, near Basel in Switzerland, has the same pattern of nails as some found in Londinium. If the pattern match is more than coincidence, then one can easily imagine a soldier or merchant buying a pair of shoes in London for the journey to Switzerland, and throwing them away, well worn, at the end of the trip. As for evidence against an export trade, it is impossible to prove a negative, but I ask you to consider a list of customs dues found at Zarai in the Province of Africa. It was posted in AD 202, and the section on clothing includes such varied items as:

dinner mantle
tunic
blanket
purple cloak
other African clothing, per garment 		1 1/2 denarii
1 1/2 denarii
1/2 denarius
1 denarius
1/2 denarius

There is no mention of complete shoes, but there are taxes to be paid on materials for shoemaking: hides, dressed; hides with hair; supple saddle hides; coarse hides; glue. This surely suggests that even if the materials for his or her craft had to be imported, the shoemaker would be a local craftsman working for local people. As Plato said, every city needs one.

Evidence comes from a variety of places. In considering the claim of one recent writer that "the literary evidence [unspecified] shows that Roman shoemaking and repairing were divided into a number of related specialist crafts, so that ... [different] categories of shoe ... were probably each made (and perhaps repaired) by different groups of craftsmen," I came across an inscription of the 2nd century AD from the copper- and silver-mining district of Vipasca in Portugal. By that time mines were under the direct control of a resident procurator, a small-scale Gaius Salvius Liberalis. He, the managing director of this nationalised industry, subcontracted the service industries to private enterprise, giving annual concessions for administering the baths, barbering, fulling (the ancient laundry or dry-cleaner), and shoemaking. The regulations were strict. Woe betide the man who shaved a beard or cleaned a toga if he was not the concessionaire, and

"Anyone who make any of the shoes or thongs which shoemakers customarily handle, or who drives or sells shoemaker's nails, or who is convicted of selling within the district anything else which shoemakers are entitled to sell, shall have to pay double to the concessionaire, or to his partner or agent. ... No one will be allowed to repair shoes, except to mend or repair his own or his master's. [Even if you went in for D.I.Y. you would have to buy the nails from the official shoemaker. Now, here is the relevant passage:] The concessionaire shall be required to offer all types of shoes for sale; if he does not, everyone shall have a legal right to purchase wherever he wishes."

I would argue that the concessionaire did not just sell shoes; he made them too, else why the nails? So even if he employed specialists for different types of shoe, at least they were all part of the same workshop.

Finally, in our survey of shoemakers, we ask: Where did the leather come from? The answer seems to be that you could get it just about everywhere. At Catterick, for instance, the army had a depot for working hides. The army, of course, did not use leather for shoes only, but for belts, shields and tents. Silchester and Leicester had tanneries. Were tanneries mainly outside towns, because of the smell? We remember how Aristophanes made fun of the tannery smell that clung to Cleon the tanner. And Simon the tanner, with whom St Peter lodged in Joppa - did he live well away from the smell of his tannery? I just don't know.