Cordwainers' Hall, a very handsome building of which there are
several collotypes in this volume. The Cordwainers were not only shoemakers, they dealt in all sorts of preparations of leathers, and owed their name to the city of Cordova, a great centre of commerce from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, whence they came over to England, and were settled for some centuries on the verge of the old city of Londinium while the Roman power was predominant. They took up their quarters in the Ward designated by their name in the thirteenth century. The interior of the Hall is full of interesting specimens of their art. In the Upper Hall is a beautiful embossed leathern Portuguese chair;and many kinds of antique Spanish wall-coverings in the same material. Gloves, in shape very like modern gauntlets, occupy a prominent position. Sometimes they were embroidered and ornamented with precious stones and pearls (there is one pair of these which belonged to Mary Queen of Scots), sometimes scented,—the perfume often made a vehicle for poison by Mary's mother-in-law, Catherine de Medicis. We have pictures of leather bags and powder-flasks, and, above all, the "Leathern Bottle" familiar to us now as a public-house sign. Our author quotes the famous song, the refrain of which is,— " I wish in Heaven that soul may dwell Who first devised the Leather bottel."
But boots and shoes occupy the largest and most important por- tion of the book. Shoes alternate between narrow toes and high heels, and when all who were not blessed with a long toe jutting out like a promontory and a fiat instep had sufficiently punished themselves, they took to fiat heels and broad toes, and again, when they had forgotten their sufferings, to high heels and pointed toes once more. In the time of the Guises the tees were so long and sharp that they had to be fastened by chains to the knee. Henry VIII. brought in broad, flat shoes to rest his gouty feet. The frail beauties of Charles II.'s reign wore pointed toes and very high wooden heels, undoubtedly the most becoming form, as it levels distinctions. In the time of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. the same fashion prevailed ; but after the French Revolution the shoes were once more broad and flat, and so they continued in England in the " forties " and "fifties." Now the reign of pointed toes and high heels is undisputed, and will probably remain so, as walking has made way for cycling, and comfort, therefore, for the feet need not be considered. While the representations of shoes are almost all of the feminine per- suasion, the boots are nearly all masculine. There are the boots worn by Henry VI. at Hexham, by Marlborough at Blenheim, by Cromwell's soldiers at Winchester, and many others. Although the ladies did not wear boot k they kept themselves out of the dirt by chopines, very like high saoolroom stocks. Evelyn speaks of them in his diary. They werkworn at Venice higher than anywhere else—some as high as half a yard—and the wearer had to be supported on each side if she tried to walk. There is as allusion to them in Hamlet's address to the players, but they seem only to have been naturalised in England in the form of pattens, derived from the French word patiner, to skate, not as Gay wrote :— " The patten now supports the fracal dame,
Which from the blue-eyed Patty takes its name."
The patron saints of the Cordwainers were St. Crispin and St. Crispinian, executed by the Romans in A.D. 287. But a far more authentic and useful saint was Mr. John Came, a citizen and Cordwainer in London in the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury. His admirable management was only equalled by his munificence. He gave large sums anonymously in well-directed charity under the name of "A Friend to Mankind," and for twenty-three years the real donor was never suspected. The volume contains a very interesting notice of this excellent man, as well as an exhaustive history of the useful and ornamental trade to which we owe so much of our understanding.
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