From The Guardian: How medieval feet suffered for their shoes.
Posted on August 13, 2004 09:52 PM. Filed under: history & archaeology.Six centuries of mothers are shaking their heads and crowing "I told you so!"
The ancient warning "if you keep wearing shoes like that you'll ruin your feet" was as true 600 years ago as it is today.
Those feet in ancient times limped painfully across England's green and pleasant land.
The shocking evidence for the mutilation caused by the late medieval fashion for extremely pointy long-toed shoes is lying on an archaeologist's desk in Portsmouth. The distortion of the bones is so extreme that he first thought he was looking at the ravages of disease.
"I first realised what I was dealing with when I looked at my mother's feet," Simon Mays said. His mother had not heeded her mother's warnings.
"She's extremely fit, but she did wear fashionable stiletto-heeled pointy shoes for years - and I suddenly saw that her big toes were exactly like the ones I'd been studying from a medieval cemetery in Ipswich." [continue]