What size shoe do you wear, sir?

I found this curious bit about my possible multi-great grandfather William Newman in the history of Stamford, Conn., I've referred to in the last couple of posts:

"In 1659, complaints having been made to the court in New Haven respecting the 'sizes of shoes,' the court hearing that William Newman had an instrument which he had brought from England which 'was thought to be right to determine this question, did that the said instrument should be procured and sent to New Haven, to be made a 'Standard' which shall be the rule between buyer and sell, to which it required that all sizes be conformed."

We've all been there at some point. We needed shoes but our feet had grown and we needed to know what size to get. If you're old enough, you may remember a device that looked like a ruler that had a fixed block at one end where you put your heel. The other end had a block that slid down to your big toe. Then you'd take your foot out and read the size. That device was called a Ritz Stick and was invented in about 1913 by a fella named Oliver Ritz-Woller. It may have been the first nationally recognized measuring device in the U.S.

Sometime along about 1925, the Ritz Stick was upstaged by a device invented by Charles Brannock. Most people know this as the standard device for measuring shoe size. It has heel stops at both ends, a sliding piece that measures the width of your foot, and another piece that you slide to place alongside the ball of  your foot. You use a chart to determine your shoe size. That measurement from heel to the ball of the foot? It helps determine if you need a half size. And good luck finding half sizes in shoes nowadays.

Once you've figured that out, you know your shoe size right? Well, despite efforts to standardize sizes, you are well aware that a 10 in one shoe brand may well be a 9 1/2 in another brand or an 11 in still another brand. Sizes tend to be more sorta guidelines

At one point in the past sizes used to be the equivalent of "small," "a little bigger than small," or "quite large. Prior to the late 13th century in England, measurements were based on body parts. An inch was the width of the big thumb joint. A foot was, well, the length of an adult male's foot. A yard was the length between the arm from shoulder to the end of the fingers. But whose parts were you supposed to use? Things could get messy, kind of like that fiasco NASA had when one of their orbiters was built using English and metric measurements.

In the early 14th century, the English decided to standardize their measurement units, basing the system on the barleycorn, the seed of the barley plant. Three dry barleycorns laid end to end constituted an inch, 12 inches a foot, and three feet a yard. Other measurements were based on these standards. 

Of course you probably see the problem here. Seeds aren't always the same size. But somehow an agreement was reached on what size barleycorn constituted a third of an inch, and they went forward from there, though each tradesman was free to use whatever size barleycorn he desired. 

In 1324, King Edward II of England noticed that different countries within the realm still managed to use different units -- the Welsh, for instance, defined a foot as 27 barleycorns. So he issued a decree making the units in the previous paragraph the standard everywhere he ruled. 

The first description we have of a shoe sizing system based on those units comes in The Academy of Armoury and Blazon, published by Randle Holme:

"The size of a shooe [sic] is the measure of its length which is in Children divided into 13 parts; and in Men and Women into 15 parts; the first of these being five inches long before it be taken for a size; what the shooe exceeds that length, every fourth part of an inch is taken for a size 1,2,3 and so forwards to 12 which is called the Boys or Girls thirteens, or the short thirteens, and contains in length 8 inches and a quarter, from which measure of 8 inches and a quarter the Size of Men and Women, called the long size or Man’s size begins at 1,2,3 etc. to the number 15, each size being the fourth part of an inch as aforesaid, so that a Shooe of the long fifteens is in length 12 inches just."

Other systems developed -- of course -- and the next well documented system pops up in the mid 1800s. It set the difference between sizes at a third of an inch. The U.S. shoe industry adopted its first standard in the late 1800s, based on a system developed in 1880 by a New York businessman.

Now you know more than you ever wanted to about shoe sizing, but the question is, what was the device that Newman brought with him from England that was supposed to be the standard in the New Haven connection of settlements? No idea. I searched and searched and couldn't find a thing.

Should you have more questions about things like why children's sizes start at zero, but adult sizes start at 1, or why the fuss about half sizes, or who came up with widths, visit Satra Technology They're a UK research and testing firm that says it's a leading technical authority for footwear. The information for this post was taken from their page about shoes, though I looked at several sites that contained the same information.

Image: A European 17th century shoe. From metmuseum.org, public domain.