One of the most extraordinary moral panics - a fear that some evil threatens the wellbeing of society - arose in medieval times.
Fashionable pointy-toed shoes called poulaines were alleged to promote sexual deviancy and, as a resulting sanction from God, were blamed for bringing about the plague. Poulaines, also called cracows - after the Polish city Krakow, where they are thought to have originated - were pointed footwear worn predominantly by wealthy men.
The shoes advertised the wearer's leisure and emphasised their inability to partake in physical labour. According to the London Museum, young men would "stand on street corners wiggling their shoes suggestively" at people walking by. If that shoe-wiggler had bells sewn to the ends of the points, it indicated that the wearer was available for sexual frolics.
Aside from the sinful association of fleshly pleasures, clerics were concerned that the long toe-pieces prevented people from kneeling in the approved obeisant manner. Indeed, the shoe's restriction on the ability to properly pray led to religious leaders calling them "Satan's claws", and in 1215 Pope Innocent III banned priests from wearing them.
The long points were kept erect by being stuffed with moss or straw and could be made out of fancy decorative fabrics or sturdier leather. In a double whammy to the pious, the shoes were seen as both demonic and vain and were eventually banned from London.
In his History of the Church, written in about 1100, a Benedictine monk called Orderic Vitalis railed against the dress of Norman lords, with particular vitriol aimed at long-toed shoes, describing them as an "absurd fashion" that had been "adopted by a great number of the nobility as a proud distinction and sign of merit."
He also directed his righteous ire at glove-wearing, centre partings and long tunics, writing that "They give themselves up to sodomitic filth", with "long luxurious locks like women," and "over-tight shirts and tunics."
In 1348, the Black Death arrived in London, a plague that killed nearly half of the city's population. The church had given the cause of the pestilence to be the "impropriety of the behaviour of men" and poulaines symbolised that behaviour.
In 1362 Pope Urban V tried to ban them completely - and in 1463 the UK Parliament under Edward IV passed a law to stop anyone lower in rank than lord to wear shoes longer than two inches in the points.
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