I learned this today. Shoe sizes in America and the UK are measured in barleycorns.
Nobody knows when people first started wearing shoes, but experts think it might have been about 40,000 years ago. The little toe bones of skeletons found after 40,000 years ago are thinner than the bones found before. They deduce that wearing shoes resulted in less bone growth.
The earliest shoe found dates from 8000 BC. It is just a piece, and it was found in a cave in Oregon. It was made from sagebrush bark. Early shoes were made from bark, twine, and other things found in nature, so they aren’t very often found by archaeologists as they biodegrade. Those early shoes wouldn’t have needed a measuring system because people would have made their own shoes.
Leather shoes dating from 3500 BC were also found in a cave in Armenia. Ancient Egyptians used leather sandals, but a lot of people went barefoot. It was the Romans that tried to make everyone wear shoes. They also came up with the idea of having different shaped shoes for the left and right feet.
The next development in shoes was in the Middle Ages. Turnshoes were invented. Turnshoes are shoes made out of leather. They are sewn with the soft side out and then turned inside out to have the tough side out, hence the name “turnshoe”.
People with money would have shoes made to fit their feet and people without money would probably choose from small, medium, or large. There was still no need for shoe sizes.
During the Middle Ages, the population started to grow, and the merchant class began to develop. From this point, there was a much larger choice of shoes, and it became necessary to standardize their sizes.
There were a lot of measurements at use in England at the time. Many of them came from the Roman Empire and were still in use, while some of them had been created in England. Often, these measurements contradicted each other and it sometimes took an act of Parliament to set them straight. That is why the mile is 5,280 feet and not 5,000 feet as it originally was.
At the end of the 1200s, Edward I of England was persuaded to standardize measurements by tradesmen who were getting annoyed at the huge discrepancy in the same measurement method. The “composition of yards and perches” stated that 12 inches make a foot, and 3 feet make a yard. However, it also said that 3 barleycorns make an inch.
Barleycorns had been used as a system of measurement for a long time. A barleycorn is a kernel of barley taken from the middle of the ear. Obviously, different barleycorns are different sizes, but it was a good general measurement if you wanted to measure something smaller than an inch.
Edward I set the size of the barleycorn by saying that there should be three barleycorns in an inch.
At about this time, shoe merchants were trying to find a way to measure shoes. You couldn’t measure them in inches because the different feet size in two people is often less than an inch. They decided to use barleycorns as the measurement system.
The system started at 0 with children’s sizes, but you obviously can’t have a shoe that is 0 long because you would have no shoe. 0 was a shoe of 5 inches. So, a size 0 shoe is five inches long. The sizes then progressed from there in barleycorns. So, a size 1 would be 5 1/3 inches long. A size 2 would be 5 2/3 inches long and so on, up to a size 13, which is 9 1/3 inches. Then it goes back to 1 and adult sizes start. So, an adult size 1 would have been 9 2/3 inches.
The industrial revolution and then the invention of the sewing machine changed the way shoes were made. They could be mass produced in far more styles. The English sizing system spread across the English-speaking world and lasted like this for a long time.
In 1880, in New York, Edwin Simpson decided to make a standard set of lasts. Lasts are the wooden mold that the shoes are built around. The lasts are the size that the final shoe will be. He measured his lasts in barleycorns, the same way that they had been for hundreds of years.
Today, there is a formula to work out the size of your foot. In America, your shoe size is the length of your foot in barleycorns minus 22 for men or 21 for women. So, for example, my foot is 11 1/3 inches long, which is 34 barleycorns. 34-22=12. My shoe size is 12 in America. In the UK, it is the same but minus 23. So, 34-23=11. My shoe size is 11 in the UK. There are other different systems used in other countries, but that is enough for today.
So, it became necessary to measure the length of shoes in the 13th century and people used barleycorns as a measurement. 1 inch was equal to 3 barleycorns. The formula is a little different these days, but this is what I learned today.
Photo by Anthony Shkraba from Pexels
Sources
https://www.hitachi-hightech.com/global/channel/units/04_09.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barleycorn_(unit)
https://www.satra.com/bulletin/article.php?id=1679
https://invention.si.edu/charles-f-brannock
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/03/pedestrian-origins-modern-shoe-sizes/
http://www.agleathers.com/shoe-guide/shoe-sizes/