Templar Footwear: What Knights Wore on Their Feet

The Knights Templar had no special “boots” that set them apart from other fighting men. On their feet they wore what almost everyone in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe wore: soft leather turnshoes and low ankle shoes for daily life in the commandery, with mail leg armour drawn on over padded hose for war. What made a brother’s footwear distinctive was not its shape but its restraint. The Order’s Rule actually legislated what a knight could put on his feet, banning the fashionable pointed shoes of the age as a mark of the vanity a professed brother had sworn to leave behind.

What the evidence actually tells us

Honesty first: no pair of shoes survives with a label reading “Templar,” and the Order left little direct description of what its members wore below the ankle. What we can say is reconstructed from three kinds of evidence, and it pays to keep them separate.

• The Rule and statutes mention footwear only in passing, almost always to forbid something rather than to describe it.
• Manuscript illuminations, seals and tomb effigies show how armoured and unarmoured men of the crusading period were shod.
• Archaeology — especially waterlogged urban digs in London, York and other medieval towns — has preserved many thousands of ordinary leather shoes that reveal exactly how they were cut and stitched.

Put together, these sources point to one grounded conclusion. A Templar’s feet looked much like any contemporary’s, because the Order recruited its men and bought its leather from the same medieval world as everyone else. The difference lay in the vows behind the leather, not in some lost secret design. For the fuller picture of how a brother dressed from the skin outward, our guide to historically accurate attire sets the footwear in its proper context.

The everyday turnshoe

The workhorse of medieval footwear was the turnshoe, and it is almost certainly what the brothers wore around the commandery. The name describes the method. A cobbler stitched the leather upper to the sole inside out, with the flesh side facing outward, then wetted the shoe and turned it right way round so the main seam sat hidden and protected on the inside. The result was a supple, close-fitting shoe with a single thin sole — comfortable and quiet underfoot, but never truly waterproof.

Most examples stood ankle height, fastened with a simple toggle, a small buckle, a drawstring or a side latchet, and were cut from cattle, calf or goat hide left in its natural tan. Better shoes had a rand, a thin strip of leather worked into the seam to help shed water. They wore through quickly on stone and gravel, so resoling and patching were constant facts of life. Taller styles reaching the calf existed, and horsemen sometimes favoured higher leather, but the plain ankle shoe was the default for work, prayer and the road alike.

The Rule against vanity

Here the Templars diverged sharply from fashionable society. Long-toed pointed shoes drifted in and out of favour across the medieval centuries, reaching their notorious extreme in the later poulaines that moralists would condemn as absurd and even sinful. The Templar Rule cut the impulse off at the ankle well before that peak: brothers were forbidden pointed shoes and shoes with laces, and were to keep to plain, practical footwear only.

This fit the Order’s whole approach to dress. Just as the Rule restrained decorated clothing, limited fur to humble lambskin and forbade personal ornament, it stripped the shoe back to its function. A brother’s footwear, like his cloak, was meant to declare poverty and obedience rather than taste. The same instinct that governed the famous white mantle reached all the way down to the soles of his feet.

Hose, points and bare feet

Shoes were only half the story, because a medieval leg was dressed in hose — fitted woollen leg coverings reaching from foot toward the thigh. Early hose were separate legs, tied by laces or points to a belt or to the waistband of the linen braies worn beneath. Some hose were made with integral leather soles, so a man could pad about indoors with no shoe at all — worth remembering when picturing daily life inside a commandery.

There is a further, deliberately austere detail in the record. Penance and humility in the wider Church sometimes meant going barefoot or in plain sandals, and pilgrimages and processions on foot were part of medieval devotion. For an order that framed itself as monks under arms, the plain shoe, the sandal and the occasional bare foot all belonged to the same discipline rather than to fashion.

Feet in armour

In the field, a mounted brother protected his legs with mail chausses — tailored stockings of riveted iron rings worn over padded cloth hose. These could enclose the whole leg and foot or, in simpler and cheaper forms, cover only the front of the shin and lace at the back. Leather shoes were still worn with them. Fully articulated plate sabatons, the armoured “shoes” people usually picture, belong to the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — well after the Order’s suppression in 1312, so no true Templar ever wore them.

At the heel came the spur, and here footwear carried real weight. Early medieval riders used the prick spur, a single fixed goad, before the spiked rowel spur spread more widely from the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Gilded spurs were a badge of knighthood itself: to “win one’s spurs” was to be knighted, and to have them struck off was a public disgrace. Even this small piece of foot equipment sat inside a web of rank and meaning.

Mud, maintenance and the cobbler

Thin-soled turnshoes and wet ground do not mix, so medieval people used pattens — wooden or thick-leather overshoes that lifted the foot clear of the muck of a stable yard or a winter road. A brother crossing a filthy courtyard to Matins before dawn would have been glad of them. Underneath, the woollen or linen hose kept the feet warm and were themselves mended endlessly.

A large commandery was a self-supporting community, and keeping its members shod was steady work. Hides had to be sourced, cut and stitched; worn shoes were resoled rather than thrown away; and the whole economy of leather connected to the same estates that produced the Order’s wool, food and horses. The leathers used for shoes overlapped with those for belts, straps and garments — a subject our guide to cloak and tunic materials explores in depth.

Getting the footwear right today

If you are assembling a historically minded impression, footwear is where many kits quietly fall apart. Modern boots, buckled costume shoes or anything with an obvious rubber sole break the illusion at a glance. Aim instead for hand-stitched leather turnshoes in a plain natural colour; keep the toe rounded rather than pointed, in the spirit of the Rule; and carry pattens if you expect wet ground. Pair them with proper hose rather than modern socks, and match them to the rest of the outfit — as our tabard pattern and fit guide lays out — so the whole silhouette reads as a single, convincing period.

From the sole up

You do not need to reproduce a full kit to carry the Order’s spirit, of course. Our Templar Shield shirt puts the heraldry front and centre for everyday wear, while the authentic footwear stays where it belongs — in the reenactment trunk.

Templar footwear turns out to be a quiet lesson in what the Order valued. Plain shoes, banned vanities and mail drawn over the shins say more about poverty, obedience and readiness than any exotic design ever could. The knights walked, prayed and rode in ordinary leather, and made even that ordinary thing part of their rule of life.