The Shoes Hidden in the Walls

If somebody renovating an old house finds one battered shoe underneath the floorboards, my first thought would probably be that a previous owner dropped it, lost it or had considerably lower standards of housekeeping than I do.

That explanation becomes harder to maintain when the shoe has been bricked into a wall.

For centuries, people deliberately concealed shoes inside buildings. They put them in chimneys, behind fireplaces, under floors, above ceilings, around doorways and inside roof spaces. Northampton Museum and Art Gallery still maintain an international Concealed Shoe Index because enough of them have been discovered for accidental loss to become an increasingly ridiculous explanation. The museum describes concealed shoes specifically as footwear deliberately hidden within the fabric of buildings, and researchers have found the practice particularly strongly represented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

The shoes are usually old. Many are badly damaged, heavily repaired or worn completely out, and single shoes are far more common than pairs. Children’s shoes also appear frequently in museum collections.

What nobody left us was an explanation.

There is no known early household manual instructing people to take Grandad’s boot, put it above the fireplace and brick it in before anybody asks questions.

They simply did it.

WE KNOW THEY WERE PUT THERE DELIBERATELY

The distinction between a lost shoe and a concealed one matters.

Nobody is particularly interested in the boot somebody left in an attic cupboard. Concealed shoes are found in places where footwear does not end up through normal household life. They have been incorporated into walls, built into chimneys, pushed beneath fixed floors or sealed into roof spaces during construction and alteration work. Historic England lists chimneys, floors, ceilings and openings in buildings among the recurring locations.

One of the earliest recorded English finds was a pair discovered behind the choir stalls at Winchester Cathedral, whose stalls were installed in 1308. That does not prove the shoes themselves were hidden in 1308, but it gives some idea of how far back these strange discoveries can reach. The practice becomes much easier to trace from the post-medieval period onwards and appears to have been especially popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

If your shoe slips behind a chest of drawers, you have had an accident. If somebody has to dismantle part of the chimney two hundred years later before they can retrieve it, you made a decision.

The problem is that we do not know what decision.

THE SHOES THEMSELVES MAY BE THE CLUE

The fact that so many concealed shoes are worn is one reason researchers think the identity of the wearer mattered.

A used shoe becomes a remarkably personal object. Leather moulds around the foot, the sole wears unevenly and repairs record the way somebody walked and worked. National Museums Scotland notes that many concealed shoes in its collection show repeated hand repairs, particularly among footwear associated with working people for whom shoes represented a significant expense.

That physical relationship between shoe and body has led to the suggestion that old footwear could represent the person who wore it. Ceri Houlbrook, whose research has examined concealed shoes in detail, describes the idea that the shoe’s close connection with its owner may have made it useful as an apotropaic, or evil-averting, object. The vast majority being old, worn or damaged fits that interpretation better than if people had been concealing brand-new shoes.

It is a persuasive theory, but it is still a theory. That distinction is going to follow us through almost the entire article because the people who hid the shoes have been extraordinarily unhelpful.

THE LOCATIONS LOOK IMPORTANT

Chimneys are one of the most common hiding places.

Shoes also appear around doors and windows, under floors and inside roofs, which has encouraged the idea that they were placed at vulnerable points in a building. If harmful spirits, witches or other unwanted influences were believed capable of entering the home, then openings such as doors and chimneys were obvious places to defend. Historic England includes concealed footwear within the broader evidence for ritual protection found in old buildings, alongside concealed garments, markings and other objects.

Some museum interpretations go further and suggest that the shoe acted almost as a decoy, attracting or trapping whatever harmful influence was trying to enter the house because the worn object retained something of its owner.

Unfortunately, we do not have a seventeenth-century householder explaining this to us, so I am not going to pretend we know that this was what everyone believed. The location supports a protective interpretation, but Houlbrook is very clear that beyond the facts of concealment, age and condition, much of the motivation remains speculative.

That makes these very different from the witch bottles we have just looked at. With those, surviving texts eventually gave us recipes and explanations. With the shoes, the people who used them kept their mouths shut.

SCOTLAND HAS PLENTY OF THEM TOO

National Museums Scotland holds several examples, which pleased me because we were not letting England have all the strange building rituals.

A child’s dark brown leather shoe dating from around 1810 was discovered during conversion work in the roof of buildings at Bristo Place in Edinburgh. Other Scottish examples include a shoe found at Cupar in Fife, boots found beneath the floor of an Edinburgh tenement and footwear recovered from Culzean Castle. One Culzean example still shows a carefully repaired toe, which is exactly the sort of tiny domestic detail that makes these objects feel personal rather than abstract.

The museums also preserve the correspondence generated when curators began asking the public about these finds in the 1980s. People wrote in with shoes discovered during renovations, while researchers compared locations and tried to work out whether the scattered examples formed one tradition or several overlapping ones.

One exchange between curators Naomi Tarrant and June Swann rather perfectly sums up the whole subject. Swann floated a theory connecting shoe concealment with older foundation sacrifices and then admitted that she could not see how it could ever be proved.

That may be the most useful sentence anyone has written about concealed shoes.

We have theories. Proving them is another matter.

WHY IS THERE USUALLY ONLY ONE?

The missing shoe is one of the strangest parts of the custom.

Ceri Houlbrook examined a sample of one hundred deposits specifically because so many concealed shoes appear without their counterpart. Rather than assuming the second shoe simply vanished through ordinary wear or disposal, she asked whether separating a pair might itself have been meaningful. Her point is not that we know why the shoes were divided, but that the absence of the other one should not automatically be treated as irrelevant.

That question becomes more interesting when you remember that shoes were valuable. Working footwear could be patched and repaired repeatedly before it finally became unusable. A surviving shoe might have been stripped for leather, handed down or worn until it disintegrated completely.

Perhaps one shoe was enough for whatever ritual was being performed. Perhaps separating the pair mattered. Perhaps the other one was still on somebody’s foot.

Nobody knows.

There is every possibility that someone in 1780 did something which was perfectly obvious to the entire household and would find it enormously entertaining that two centuries later academics are writing papers called The Other Shoe trying to work it out.

SOMETIMES THERE WERE FAR MORE THAN TWO

Not every concealment involves one lonely boot.

Caches containing several shoes have been discovered, sometimes belonging to adults and children and sometimes deposited alongside other objects. A group found inside the chimney wall of a seventeenth-century cottage at Avebury contained three shoes dating from roughly 1640–70: a man’s shoe, a woman’s shoe and a smaller work boot which may have belonged to a woman or adolescent.

That has encouraged the suggestion that some caches could represent households or families, although once again we do not have written evidence confirming it.

There are much larger deposits as well. In 2010, work at Gelli Iago, a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Snowdonia, revealed fifty-eight shoes and 189 shoe fragments beneath the fireplace. The footwear included men’s, women’s and children’s shoes and mostly dated from the late nineteenth century.

At that point accidental loss has left the building entirely. Nobody mislaid the footwear of an extended family beneath one fireplace. Whatever was happening, people meant to do it.

GOOD LUCK MAY BE PART OF THE ANSWER

Protection from evil is not the only explanation.

Shoes had strong associations with luck in British custom. Old shoes were thrown after people setting out on journeys and after newly married couples, and the wedding tradition survived well into the nineteenth century. National Museums Scotland found a wonderful example in The Scotsman from 1861, describing old satin shoes being thrown after the carriage of Lord John Russell’s daughter as an omen of good luck.

English Heritage therefore suggests that some concealed shoes may have been lucky objects intended to bring good fortune to the household rather than weapons against a specific supernatural threat.

That explanation also allows for traditions to change.

A family does not need to preserve a detailed supernatural theory for a custom to survive. People still touch wood, avoid certain actions or repeat small rituals because they have been told that is what you do. The explanation can disappear while the behaviour remains.

Perhaps somebody hid a shoe because their parents had done it and their parents may have been copying their own parents. By the time anyone asked why, the answer may simply have been that you were supposed to.

CHILDREN’S SHOES MAKE IT MORE COMPLICATED

Children’s footwear appears frequently among concealed finds, particularly in Scottish museum collections.

That has produced several interpretations. Some writers have linked them with fertility or household prosperity, while others have wondered whether particular shoes could have been memorial objects connected with a child who died. National Museums Scotland is careful about this, noting that high child mortality makes the idea possible but that there is no way to know whether a particular concealed shoe related to a specific death.

I think that caution matters. A small worn shoe immediately makes us want to build a story around it because it feels intimate. Somebody’s foot was inside it. Somebody outgrew it. Somebody repaired it.

That does not mean we get to invent what happened next. Sometimes the most respectful thing history can say is that we do not know.

EVEN THE PEOPLE WHO FIND THEM ARE RELUCTANT TO MOVE THEM

There is a lovely afterlife to this tradition.

Northampton Museums has noted that some people who discover concealed shoes choose to put them back where they were found “just in case”. Researchers studying modern discoveries have encountered the same hesitation, with property owners and custodians sometimes uncomfortable removing an object that may have been placed to protect the building generations earlier.

I understand this completely. I can spend the entire article telling you that we do not know whether the shoe was magical, lucky, protective, commemorative or simply part of a custom whose meaning disappeared centuries ago. I am still not volunteering to be the person who takes it out of the wall and throws it in the bin.

Some things can remain somebody else’s experiment.

THE SILENCE IS THE INTERESTING PART

This is what separates concealed shoes from many of the other rituals on this shelf.

We have the objects in huge numbers. We know the shoes were generally old and worn, often single, and deliberately placed where they would not normally be stored. We know the custom crossed social classes and survived for centuries. We know shoes have been found in chimneys, walls, roofs, doorways, ceilings and floors, and we have modern records detailed enough to compare individual discoveries.

What we do not have is somebody from the eighteenth century saying why they put one there.

That absence leaves us doing archaeology backwards. We look at where the shoe was hidden, how worn it was, whose foot might have fitted it, whether it was found alone and what else was concealed nearby. Then we compare those details with wider beliefs about luck, protection, bodies and domestic boundaries.

Some interpretations fit better than others, but the shoe itself refuses to tell us. Perhaps that is why I like these more than I expected to.

There is no dramatic trial, no famous ghost and no learned man writing down the instructions. There is just an ordinary person with an old shoe, standing somewhere inside a house while building work is being done, deciding that the shoe should not be thrown away.

Instead, they put it into the building. They may have been protecting the family, bringing luck, continuing an old custom or doing something we have completely failed to understand.

Then the wall was closed. The floor went back down. The chimney was finished.

Two hundred years later somebody opens it again and finds a shoe waiting inside. We know somebody wanted it there.

For once, history has left us almost everything except the reason.