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MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES
Crafts and Guilds on Stamps
SHOE MAKER
The well-dressed lady on the right is holding up a last, or model for a foot over which leather has been fitted.Apparently she is describing her preferred style to the shoemaker sitting at her feet. The shoemaker's apprentices look on from the rear of the shop.
Medieval style dictated pointed shoes and these "crakows" (after the city in Poland) often sported "spikes": or "points" as long as eighteen inches. In England, the fashion got so out of hand that Parliament issued an edict in 1463 prohibiting points longer than two inches. The penalties for breaking the statute, we are told, were severe.
Shoe sizes date from about 1305 when Richard I of England decreed an inch to be the length of three dried barley corns. For those of you wearing a size ten shoe, that's thirty barley corns lined up end to end, if you please.
