A source of much mirth in Atkinson’s celebrated Black Adder series, pointy shoes were a real thing as attested by this Medieval manuscript detail of a royal Parisian wedding:

Source: Christophel Fine Art/UIG via Getty Images/via Atlas Obscura

Such was the fascination with them that in 1463, English monarchs felt compelled to outlaw them, since the city’s fanciest men had taken to ambling streets shod in long, carrot-shaped shoes that tapered to impish tips, some as long as five inches beyond the toe.

Crakows or Poulains

As a fascinating post by Sabrina Imbler of Atlas Obscura explains, these shoes were called “crakows” or “poulaines” (a term also used to refer to the tips alone), and the court of King Edward IV eventually found them offensive enough to pass a sumptuary law prohibiting shoe tips that extended over two inches beyond the toe.

Perhaps one of the silliest and most fascinating trends in medieval fashion, these shoes probably first emerged around 1340 in Krakow, Poland—both names refer to this origin. Europe had flirted with long-toed footwear since the 1200s, but never to this length, or with this saturation. The lords and, to a lesser extent, ladies of 15th-century Europe wore these shoes almost exclusively for over a century. Every person who could afford shoes wore poulaines, though the longer tips were generally reserved for nobility who could afford to wander around in footwear seemingly designed for pratfalls—or for squashing cockroaches hiding in corners.

A Symbol, Not A Fad

For the glitterati of medieval Europe, poulaines were less a fad than a symbol. Shoes with absurdly long toes were expensive and would clearly impair the wearer from efficiently partaking in any kind of physical labor. So they were also an indicator of leisure and luxury, free of extraneous effort or the tyranny of practicality.

In order to keep the tips erect, medieval shoemakers stuffed them with soft organic material, often moss, hair, or wool. The material also helped prevent the tip of the poulaine from curling when wet.

Poulaines also had a sort of sex appeal, being cut to show off the colored hose around a lord’s ankle—considered quite sexy at the time. It’s a time when tunics are getting shorter and young men would have been showing off their legs. So, low-cut shoes would have accentuated and elongated the leg, all down to that long point.

Most poulaines that survive today were made of leather, but medieval Europeans would have used every possible fabric. The upper echelons of society, for example, used embroidered textiles, velvets, and silks. Such shoes might be hand-painted or etched with intricate patterns, as the examples below show.

Poulaines | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's book

Source: Museum of London via Atlas Obscura

A Generation of Mourning

Poulaines | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's book

Source: Wikimedia/Public Domain via Atlas Obscura

Poulaines stand out even more because medieval fashion was often governed by clean lines and a practical, chaste minimalism. Perhaps the best explanation for this confounding flamboyance is that the shoes emerged soon after the Black Death wiped out half of Europe’s population. It may have been a reaction to a type of austerity. The plague left a landscape with a lot of people who had lost close family members—a generation of mourning. Suddenly there were fewer people who had more money to spend on clothing. So poulaines may have been a kind of retail therapy for coping with the surprise disappearance of 25 million people.

By today’s standards, poulaines were a long-lived fad. But Shawcross says medieval trends often lasted for a century or more, due to the slow, protracted passage of culture across towns and countries, in the absence of any widely distributed media. Until the 18th century, fashions emerged at the top of society and then slowly trickled down, class by class, often taking years to reach rural areas.

The End of the Poulaine

Eventually, the English crown felt the need to intervene, in part because of the lascivious connotations that the increasingly extended toe-tips carried. Parliament equated wearing the shoes to public indecency and stepped forward to put limits on a variety of racy fashions. As the 1463 law reads:

No person under the estate of Lord, including knights, esquires, and gentlemen, to wear any gown, jacket, or coat which does not cover the genitals and buttocks. Also not to wear any shoes or boots with pikes longer than two inches. No tailor to make such a short garment, or stuffed doublet, and no shoemaker to make such pikes.

This followed the example of Paris, which had banned them in 1368, almost a century earlier.

It was a fashion, and fashions come and go. By 1475, the poulaine had vanished. Under the reign of King Henry VIII, European footwear made a hard pivot into the wide, box-toed shoes. In response, England later passed sumptuary laws restricting the width of these blocky shoes. The king even had men who would go around trying to catch people, measuring the width of their toes.

A Surprise Return

Pointy men’s shoes had a surprise reprise in England in the 1950s, with the nattily named winklepicker. Though far less extreme than the most dramatic poulaines, winklepicker wearers also stuffed the toes of their shoes with cotton or tissue paper to keep their tips aloft—like medieval lords.

The style has had several revivals over the ensuing decades, and luckily for the British music scene, parliament has yet to make an official statement on winklepickers…