Swann notes that the shoe is ‘the only garment we wear which retains the shape, the personality, the essence of the wearer’ (1996: 56) by keeping the foot’s shape – and smell! – the shoe can stand as substitute for the wearer. Or maybe it was the shoe’s close association with its owner. Or maybe it was because of their shape, bowl-like, explaining how John Schorn, a parish priest from Buckinghamshire, was said to have captured a demon within a boot, leading to the shoe being seen as a form of ‘spirit trap’ in popular belief (Merrifield 1987: 135 Hoggard 2004: 179). Maybe they were considered apotropaic because of their material in popular belief, fairies, demons, and spirits didn’t like the smell of leather.
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(Figure 1.) Northampton Museum maintain an Index of Concealed Shoes, begun by June Swann back in the 1960s and currently containing records of close to 2000 shoes – men’s, women’s, and children’s – that have been found in unusual locations within buildings. The shoe is the most commonly concealed object in England. An 18th/19th-century child’s shoe found in the chimneybreast of a house in Ilkley, Yorkshire. It can, however, hope to highlight the most popular and convincing arguments by focusing on some of the more common concealed deposits: shoes, bottles, and animal remains. time capsules) from apotropaic deposition?Ī humble blog post can’t possibly hope to examine the myriad theories behind this custom – an endeavour that has been achieved elsewhere (see Further Reading below). But why? And how can we distinguish accidental, non-ritual, or even sentimental concealments (e.g. They must have invested them with some significance with some power. And yet people went to the trouble of bricking them up in walls, secreting them up chimney breasts, or laying them beneath hearthstones. The question remains though: why would a child’s shoe, a cod-liver oil bottle, and a desiccated cat be considered effective supernatural safeguards? Concealed deposits range from the mundane to the distasteful, but they certainly don’t seem inherently magical. objects used to avert evil forces, and the popular theory is that concealed deposits were one such form of apotropaic device. These safeguards are known as apotropaic devices, i.e. Understandably many families went to some lengths to protect the most vulnerable parts of their homes (roofs, chimneys, doors), employing what Manning (2012) has termed ‘domestic magic’ in the form of supernatural safeguards. Along with fire, illness, and vermin, fear of witches, demons, spirits, and even fairies were abundant across the British Isles, inciting a very real anxiety that these threats may infiltrate the household. The post-medieval world was rife with threats, both natural and supernatural. This hasn’t stopped finders and scholars alike from tossing around theories, the most common of which is that these items were secreted away in the post-medieval home to protect both house and occupants from malevolent forces.
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People usually find them today when they’re undertaking renovations on their homes, and they’re in such odd places that most of them can’t have wound up there accidentally they must have been deliberately secreted away by past occupants many years ago.īut why? Practically nothing was written at the time about this custom, so we have no sources explaining why such objects were concealed and what their concealers were hoping to achieve.
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In fact, a vast variety of objects have been found (from pantaloons to chickens), often dating to the 18 th and 19 th centuries, under floorboards, hearthstones, and thresholds within walls above doors and ceilings up chimney breasts in thatching and buried in the garden.
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What do a child’s shoe, a cod-liver oil bottle, and a desiccated cat have in common? They’re all objects that have been discovered in unusual locations within buildings.