Patten (shoe) dung and human effluent (from chamber pots)– was usually thrown directly into the street (often with minimal advance warning). Making full foot contact with such an unpleasant surface was, understandably, highly undesirable. Thus, pattens tended to only make contact with the ground through two or three strips of wood and raised the wearer up considerably, sometimes by four inches (ten centimetres) or more in contrast to clogs which usually have a low, flat-bottomed sole integral to the shoe. A later pattern of patten which seems to date from the 17th century, and then became the most common, had a flat
Pig in a poke Aphrodite", a story by Rhys Davies, titled "A Pig in a Poke", was published, in which a Welsh collier takes a woman from London for his wife and regrets it. (Boulton 1993: p. 278) The title of Georges Feydeau's 1888 play "Chat en poche" is taken from the French expression. Pig in a poke The idioms pig in a poke and sell a pup (or buy a pup) refer to a confidence trick originating in the Late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce, but cats and dogs were not. The scheme entailed the sale of a suckling pig in a