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
Patten (shoe) were known in English by the terms: 'patyns', 'clogges', and 'galoches', but the original shades of meaning and distinction between these terms is now unclear. Medieval and Early Modern overshoes are now all usually referred to as 'pattens' for convenience. There were three main types of pattens: one with a wooden 'platform' sole raised from the ground by either with wooden wedges or iron stands. The second variant had a flat wooden sole often hinged. The third type had a flat sole made from stacked layers of leather. Some later European varieties of these pattens had a laminated sole: light