English Surnames: Their Sources and SignificationsBardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
History
English Surnames: Their Sources and Significations
Bardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
Names, English; Names, Personal -- English
A patten seems in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to have been
very similar to our clog, only that the former was more easily put on
and off. It was of a wooden sole, rimmed with iron. We find in 1464 the
Patynmakers of London presenting a grievance in that the fletchers alone
were allowed to use aspen-wood, whereas it was the ‘lightest tymbre to
make of patyns or clogges.’ (Rot. Parl. iv. 567.) Mr. Way, in his Notes
to the ‘Promptorium Parvulorum,’ says they were worn much by
ecclesiastics to protect the feet from chill when treading the cold bare
pavements of the churches, and he quotes a Harleian MS. dated 1390
regarding an archiepiscopal visitation at York: ‘Item, omnes ministri
ecclesie pro majore parte utuntur in ecclesiâ et in processione _patens_
et _clogges_ contra honestatem ecclesie, et antiquam consuetudenem
capituli.’ The patten-maker was evidently of some importance at this
time.[360]
Perhaps fashion never went to such an absurd extreme as it did in the
fourteenth century with respect to wearing peaked shoes. An old poem
entitled the ‘Complaint of the Ploughman,’ says of the friars, and
alluding to their inconsistencies, that they wear—
Cutted clothes to shewe their hewe,
With long pikes on their shoon:
Our Goddes Gospell is not trewe
Either they serve the devill or none.
Piers Plowman, too, speaks of a knight coming to be dubbed—
To geten him gilte spurs
Or galoches y-couped.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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