2. Goffin comments (September 1998). 
3. Cunnington, Seventeenth Century, 
p. 187; square-toed delfitware shoes have 
dates from 1654 to 1707. 
4. Ibid., pp. 54, 56; p. 188, pl. 86a, tor 
lady's square-toed shoe with open sides, 
very high heel, and two ribbon bows. 
5. See c. 1613 portrait of Richard Sackville, 
3rd Earl of Dorset, by(?) William Lakin 
Jackson-Stops, Treasure Houses, pl. 54). 
 
 
                                                                   Actual
size 
 
 
Tlfhree intact single shoes of this early shape are known: the Longridge
shoe 
and one initialed "IHE'E are very similar to one another overall, and
both are 
dated 1654; a differently modeled, undated example has another type of rosette

ornamenting the area above the heel.' Polychrome-painted shoe fragments exca-

vated from Number 1 Poultry site (City of London) are from a low-heeled shoe

of yet another model, but, based on the large, striped bow and (more modest)

dashed rosette above the heel, the piece may date similarly to the 1654 exam-

ples.2 This mid-century date implies that such shoes are likely to have been

made in Southwark at Pickleherring, Montague Close, or Rotherhithe. (Regard-

ing a delftware boot excavated at Rotherhithe, see no. D358.) 
   The importance of the 1654 shoes rests in their documented, mid-century
date 
and the transitional nature of their styling that, Januslike, looks both
backward 
and forward. By about 1635 the square toe was the characteristic shoe shape
for 
men and women, and it would remain so until about 1700.1 The tongue of the

delft shoes is the round-arched Elizabethan type, and the heels' lack of
height, 
acute-angled and low, sloping profile as well as the bulging upper all belong
to the 
early seventeenth century. Also the triangular patches of blue (above the
arches) 
demonstrate that they copy real shoes of that period that had open sides
over 
which the narrow latchets were fastened with strings. (The example shown
here 
probably represents a man's shoe, unlike the other Longridge shoes, which
imi- 
tate women's fashions.) Such shoes, worn by the well-to-do when in full dress,

originally had uppers in silk or satin bound round the top edge with silk
braid that 
matched the multiple bows (common on shoes from the 1640s), tassels, as on
this 
shoe, and, sometimes, a rosette around a central diamond.' The daisylike
rings of 
dots on the delft shoes represent embroidered flower heads, which were some-

times carried out in colored silks or thread wrapped with gold tinsel. 
 
 
The Longridge Collection 399