Pigache
types of shoe with a long pointed turned up toe, worn during the Romanesque and Byzantine periods
The pigache, also known by other names, was a kind of shoe with a sharp upturned point at the toes that became popular in Western Europe during the Romanesque Period. The same name is also sometimes applied to earlier similar Byzantine footwear.
Names
The English name pigache was borrowed from French, where the name was originally used for a kind of hoe and as a hunting term for a wild boar hoofprint longer on one side than the other. It appeared in Medieval Latin as pigacia and pigatia. The pigache is also known as the pigage, pulley shoe, pulley toe, or pulley-toe shoe. Less often, Orderic Vitalis's terms of opprobrium are reworked into names: scorpion's tail or ram's horn shoe. The name pigache is also sometimes also applied to earlier pointed Byzantine footwear from as early as the 5th century. It is also simply glossed as a pointed-toe shoe and sometimes conflated with the later poulaine.
Design
The pigache had a pointed and curved toe, which Orderic Vitalis compared with the tail of a scorpion (quasi caudas scorpionum). The shoes were sometimes stuffed to make the extension firmer and more erect.
“Pigache” enters the record as types of shoe with a long pointed turned up toe, worn during the Romanesque and Byzantine periods. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pigache, types and shoe can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25043195. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pigache” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.