Hidden shoes

One of the most fascinating discoveries at Ightham Mote was the large number of hidden shoes found in spaces under floorboards, in chimneys and elsewhere. This seems to have been a relatively common folk practice.

The Concealed Shoes Index at Northampton Museum receives an average of one find a month, but curators there believe that hundreds of finds every year are simply thrown out by builders. These finds come from a wide range of dates, with the numbers of shoes from different periods being roughly proportionate to the number of surviving buildings from those periods. The practice continued until the 20th century, when it seems to have gone into serious decline.

For instance, there are around 50 examples in the Concealed Shoes Index from before 1600; around 200 from 1600-1699; approximately 270 from 1700-1799; around 500 from 1800-1899; and 50 or so from after 1900.

These shoes are usually found concealed in chimneys, either on a ledge a little way up the chimney or in purpose-built cavities behind the hearth into which items can be deposited from above. These have been termed 'spiritual middens'.

Other places of concealment are found in walls, under floorboards, in window frames and in staircases. Nearly all of the shoes discovered in this context are well worn. Half of those found belonged to children and only very rarely are pairs found.

Various theories have been put forward to explain why shoes were concealed in this way. One suggestion is that they were a fertility symbol. For example, Roy Palmer in his book The Folklore of Hereford and Worcester mentions a recent case from Broadwas-on-Teme in 1960, when a midwife refused to allow a young woman to remove her shoes until her child was born.

Ralph Merrifield, the author of The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (Batsford, 1988), cites the old rhyme, 'There was an old woman who lived in a shoe/She had so many children she didn't know what to do', as providing evidence of the connection between shoes and fertility. He also mentions a practice from Lancashire, whereby a woman who wanted to conceive would wear the shoes of someone who had just given birth, hoping that her fertility would be passed on through the shoes.

Another explanation is offered by Denise Dixon-Smith, a former assistant keeper of the Boot and Shoe Collection. She says: 'One reason for hiding shoes in chimneys and around doors may have been because they were "openings" where evil spirits could enter the home, and the shoe as a good luck symbol should warn them off.'

Ralph Merrifield suggests that an 'unofficial saint' named John Schorn was partly responsible for the custom. Schorn was reputed to have cast the devil into a boot, which fits in with the idea of shoes acting as a trap for evil spirits. This notion sees hidden shoes as a kind of folk magic to protect houses from unwanted intruders such as witches. The shoes hidden in cavities behind hearths, for example, may have been intended to act as a kind of bait. Witches would be lured into the trap by the smell of the shoe and once there would be unable to escape, since as everyone knows witches are unable to travel backwards.

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