The
English name pigache was
borrowed from
French, where the name was originally used for a kind of
hoe and as a
hunting term for a
wild boarhoofprint longer on one side than the other.[2] It appeared in
Medieval Latin as pigacia[3][4] and pigatia.[5] The pigache is also known as the pigage,[6]pulley shoe,[7][8]pulley toe,[1] or pulley-toe shoe.[9] Less often,
Orderic Vitalis's terms of opprobrium are reworked into names: scorpion's tail or ram's horn shoe.[10] The name pigache is also sometimes also applied to earlier pointed
Byzantine footwear from as early as the 5th century.[11] It is also simply glossed as a pointed-toe shoe[12] and sometimes conflated with the later
poulaine.
Design
The pigache had a pointed and curved toe,[6] which
Orderic Vitalis compared with the tail of a
scorpion[4] (quasi caudas scorpionum).[3] The shoes were sometimes stuffed to make the extension firmer and more erect. The end of the toe was sometimes adorned with a small bell.[6] The points of pigaches were, however, more moderate in length than the later
poulaines[4] which spread from
Poland in the 14th century.
The pigache became common in
England under
William Rufus(
r. 1087–1100), whose
courtier Robert the Horny (Robertus Cornardus)[17] used
tow to curl the ends of his shoes into the form of a
ram's
horn[4] (instar cornu arietis).[21] Orderic blamed the spread as caused by and contributing to the
effeminate men (effeminati) and "foul
catamites" (foedi catamitae) involved in the
royal courts of
Europe,[17] while simultaneously describing how most courtiers adopted the fashion to "
seek the favors of women with every kind of lewdness".[22][23]William of Malmesbury similarly condemned the shoes in terms questioning the wearers' masculinity.[1]Guibert of Nogent, while no less dismissive, associated the style more with women and blamed its origin on footwear exported from
IslamicCordoba, whose residents he separately associated with effeminacy and
homosexualrape.[1]
After its initial excesses reaching about 2 inches (5 cm) beyond the foot,[20] the style settled into a more conservative and compact form for a century until the
Black Death and the spread of the still more excessive
poulaine style from
Poland in the mid-14th century.[12]
Alberigo, J.; et al., eds. (1973),
"Concilium Lateranense IV a. 1215"(PDF), Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta (in Latin), pp. 230–271,
archived(PDF) from the original on 12 July 2023, retrieved 12 July 2023.
Dittmar, Jenna M.; et al. (December 2021), "Fancy Shoes and Painful Feet: Hallux Valgus and Fracture Risk in Medieval Cambridge, England", International Journal of Paleopathology, vol. 35, Los Angeles: Paleopathology Association, pp. 90–100,
doi:
10.1016/j.ijpp.2021.04.012,
hdl:2164/17718,
PMC8631459,
PMID34120868.