Dry Work In The 1800s

In the nineteenth century, pattens - or overshoes - were worn by women of all classes; outdoors on muddy paths and cobbled roads, as well as in domestic situations, for example, when working in the wash house. A patten consisted of a stout wooden sole on which a round or oval hoop of iron was fitted on its underside, thus raising the sole off the ground. A pair of leather straps with laces attached to the sides of the wooden sole would be tied across a person’s shoe protecting it from wear and damp.

Jane Austin’s Persuasion (1818) describes life in Bath as a ‘ceaseless click of pattens’.

Charles Dickens in David Copperfield (1859) refers to the heavy sound of pattens:
‘It was Covent Garden Theatre that I chose... I saw ‘Julius Caesar’

lt comprised a wooden sole with a closed leather upper and was soled with irons (right) that extended the life of the shoe. This style of shoe provided a cheap and strong form of footwear and was worn over throughout the country at a time of huge industrial advancement. The changing methods of producing clogs and the woods employed reflect the transition from the pre-industrial to industrial age; from hand to machine made. Clogs were produced for different wet or dry work environments: mills, iron and steel and chemical works, workshops and factories, as well as for domestic

Alder, which grows in wet places was easily worked and absorbed moisture when in sole form keeping the foot dry, making it suitable for wear in muddy fields, on wet factory floors and mines. This traditional wood was harvested by itinerant clog sole cutters called cloggers in spring and summer and was a common sight in Britain up to the 1930s. Felled alder trunks no more than 24 inches in diameter were cut into fixed lengths of four sizes (man, woman, middle, child). Each log was hand split with a beetle and wedge into blocks, then cut with a clogger’s knife into rough clog soles, incorporating a deep notch where sole and heel met. These were stacked in the open air for weeks to hasten drying, as the timber was still green, before finally being sent to north country clog factories for final shaping.

Ash was best for dancing shoes as it was light, beech was hard to cut but became more widespread when machine cutting developed, as alder splits when sawn across the grain, making it unsuitable for machine production. Sycamore and willow were also