The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

with a total amount of £9,073 value of clothes, out of which £2,500 were spent
on shoes (28 per cent) and £681 for spare soles and heels (9 per cent). 43 The
Dragoons were provided with two pairs of shoes (14s), 3 shoe-brushes (is 9d)
and another 19s were spent every year for mending (probably several times) the
two pairs of shoes provided. £1 14s 13d out of a total of £10 i4s 6 (16.5 per
cent) was spent on shoes. Military commissions are important not only for
defining prices and quantities, but also for their influence on methods of
production. Surely they represented a fundamental element in the creation of a
ready-to-wear market. Large quantities of shoes had to be produced in short
times and in standardised ways. 45 The use of shoe sizes is for the first time
testified in military orders of the first half of the seventeenth century. Four
London shoemakers were commissioned in 1646 to produce 3,000 pairs of shoes
in 28 days "at the sizes 10, 11, 12 & 13"."
The American war of Independence and the later French and Napoleonic
Wars provided orders on a much larger scale than the in the first half of the
eighteenth century. In London an entire part of the trade was employed to satisfy
military supplies and a productive "battalion of half farmer and half
shoemakers" found work in this market. Shoemakers were employed for army
commissions also in Ireland, in Staffordshire and in Northamptonshire. Large
contractors organised the overall system. In London, Joseph Hall, a wholesale
shoe manufacturer, reported to a Parliamentary commission that he produced
several thousands pairs of shoes a week for the Army as well as for the Blue
Collars Boys and for Christ's Hospital and was also a contractor for the Navy.47
always do them, and that with seasoned leather, which might not be the case, was he to take the
immediate change of the country for it."
PRO, PRO 30/55, vol. 6, f. 670 (16th September 1766).
B. Cuthbertson, A System for the compleat interior management, cit., appendix.
In 1659 William Saul, a London shoemaker, produced 4,600 pairs of shoes for the Army in
just one week, probably employing more than 250 workmen. PRO, SP 251!, 115, if. 4-5. Orders
had to be executed in a short time. The four London shoemakers who were appointed in 1646 to
produce 3,000 pairs of shoes were able to produce them in 28 days. This means that each of them
employed at least 150 workmen. A few weeks later another two shoemakers were appointed to
produce 4,000 pairs of shoes in two weeks. I. Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland
and Scotland, 1645-1653 (Oxford, 1992), p. 42 and I. Mungeam, 'Contracts for the supply of
equipment to the 'New Model' army in 1645', Journal of the Arms and Armour Society, VI - 3
(1968), pp. 75-6, 115
PRO, SP 28/37, if. 355-7. The first complete examination of shoe sizes is present in book HI
of Randle Holme's The Academy of Armory (Chester, 1688), p. 99.
British Parliamentary Papers, 18 12-13, vol. IV, pp. 642-43 (micro. 14.23).
104