More than 200 leather shoes from the Middle Ages have been discovered in the Bjørvika neighborhood of Oslo, and those are just the ones they’ve counted so far. Archaeologists estimate there will be more than a thousand in the final tally.
The shoes, between 600 and 700 years old, are hand-stitched from leather. Some of them are low and simple. Others have intricate patterns or elegant decorations. There are also taller boots.
These shoes are clearly well-used. People walked a lot in medieval Oslo. And since shoes were expensive to make, it was important to take care of them.
“We can see that they’ve developed holes, and that these have been repaired in various ways,” says archaeologist Marja-Liisa Petrelius Grue. “We see the entire life cycle of the shoe.”
The wear patterns reveal where the leather bent with the toes and how the soles wore down beneath the heel and ball of the foot.
More than 40 of the 227 shoes counted thus far, more than 40 are children’s shoes. They were custom sown to fit a child’s foot, but other than size, they are the same in design as the adult shoes, and were made using the same techniques and materials.
“They’re very cute. We can see that some of them were used by many. They’ve been repaired many times, adjusted, and redecorated,” [Grue] says.
The Bjørvika neighborhood was open water on an inlet of the Oslofjord northwest of the mouth of the Alna River in the Middle Ages, and Oslo’s first harbor was built there in the 11th century. It was in use until a fire devastated the wooden city in the mid-17th century.
The block currently being excavated in advance of the planned construction of a new school was transformed to dry land by 18th and 19th century reclamation initiatives. Previous archaeological investigations have recovered materials going back to the city’s early history, including a timber from a Viking ship that is the oldest boat part ever found in Oslo, and a 26-foot-long section of a wharf dating to around 1300.
The objects discovered at the site were found in the thick clay of the fjord seabed at least 10 feet below the current surface. The cultural layer dates to the 13th and 14th century, but it was just underneath the layer from the 19th century. Archaeologists believe the medieval layer was carried to the site by flooding from the Alna River. The objects show signs of extensive use, wear and reuse, so they were probably discarded in a rubbish heap that was itself actively used for centuries. Then the spring floods undercut the trash pile, washing out its contents and depositing them at the harbor site well into the 18th century.
That would explain the density of the everyday-use objects found at the site, which is much higher than the team expected. The excavation is all but complete now, and so far the team has catalogued 2,500 objects (not including food waste) with more still to document. The overwhelming majority of them are leather goods. In addition to the shoes, there are at least 15 bags/purses, some of them intact with their fasteners, plus knife and sword scabbards.
In an era when clothes didn’t have pockets, most everyone carried some kind of bag. The predominant bag style of the period was a drawstring pouch that was fastened to the belt with leather strap or tie. They were made of tanned leather that was cut and stitched together. Cords could be threaded through holes at the top to close the bag. Leather bags from this period were sometimes decorated with embossed patterns, embroidery or metal buckles, but of the 15 found so far at the Bjørvika School site, 13 of them are plain and undecorated, with only two showing evidence of a design. One of the bags is tiny, just 5×5 cm (2×2 inches). It may have been used to carry a small amulet or cross, or may have been a mini-purse for a child to carry.
Knives were carried everywhere too. They were worn in a leather sheath tied to the belt. The leather sheaths and scabbards found in the Bjørvika dig are typically made of one or two rectangular pieces of leather stitched together so the seam in the middle back against the body where it wouldn’t be seen. Two fragments have embossed decorations, one a leaf pattern, one a checkered pattern. Some of the longer scabbards had been recycled, their ends cut off and discarded and the remaining section modified. Leather was expensive and would be reconfigured by cobblers and bag makers when possible.
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