Good shoes start with understanding feet. Each foot contains 26 bones, nearly a quarter of the total in the human body, along with 30 joints, more than 100 muscles and ligaments, and around 200,000 nerve endings. They are complex, finely tuned, and work hard for us every day.
Muscles, tendons, and bones of the foot. Photo credit: Creative Commons - Wellcome Collection - lookandlearn.com
At Crown Northampton, we focus on how shoes are made and how they fit. Precision and comfort are built into every pair. A well-made shoe also depends on a good fit, which is something we work towards with every customer. We have refined our sizing process, and our new guide will help customers choose the size most likely to suit them before we begin making their pair.
Footwear affects far more than appearance. It influences posture, movement, and long-term comfort, which is why getting the fit as close as possible matters. Ready-made shoes are designed around an average foot shape, and while that works for many, every foot is unique.
Our updated sizing guide reflects that individuality. It considers more than length and width, drawing on additional measurements and preferences that help us recommend the size most likely to work for you.
The new guide was developed to make that process clear and considered. Built on decades of experience measuring feet in our Northampton factory, it combines that knowledge with a simple step-by-step approach you can follow at home. Measure in your usual socks, trace both feet on paper, and note the length and width in centimetres. Enter those figures, and the guide will suggest the Crown Northampton size and fitting most likely to suit you.
It is a modern tool shaped by traditional shoemaking know-how, created to help you make a more informed choice before your pair is made.
Of course, this way of thinking set us on a bit of a stroll through the past, wondering how and when shoemakers decided that footwear should adhere to a certain sizing system.
It turns out, to start with, they probably didn’t.
As people began to experiment with ways to protect their feet, thought to be around 50,000 years ago, humans mainly wore primitive types of sandals, meaning a shoe sole of similar size and shape to the wearer’s foot was pretty good going. But examples of closed-toe footwear date back around 10,000 years, and for that kind of piece, you need a bit more attention to size unless you are happy with chronic blisters, crushed toes or a number of other ailments caused by ill-fitting boots.
Wealth has always shaped access to fit, and in earlier centuries it decided it entirely. Obviously, the richer you were, the better the fit you could afford. Rather than browsing the local tradesmen’s market stalls for small, medium, or large, a person of means could have footwear made specifically for their feet.
Around a thousand years ago, shoemakers in Europe began referring to size in relation to how many stitches they used. Different regions had their own standards, so a boot of a certain size in France would not match the same size in Britain or Italy. Many shoes were still made to measure, so as long as a maker could record the correct length and width of a customer’s feet, the number used to describe it mattered far less.
In an effort to bring some clarity, people began looking for ways to standardise measurements. The Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda, written in the tenth century, stated that three barleycorns made an inch. Between 1266 and 1303, an English statute known as The Composition of Yards and Perches confirmed the rule: three grains of barley, dry and round, made one inch, and twelve inches made one foot.
The Barleycorn - a unit of measure used as the basis for shoe sizes, based on the length of a barley grain.
Even established measuring systems still in use today were far less defined hundreds of years ago. In the mid-twelfth century, King David I of Scotland defined an inch as the width of an adult male thumb across the knuckle or just under the nail bed. Handy, in that most people have a thumb or two, but with bodies coming in many different sizes it left plenty of room for variation. A foot in length was literally named after its method of measuring, an adult man’s foot from heel to toe, again allowing scope for a range of results. Such discrepancies meant business disputes were common and not easily resolved.
A kernel of barleycorn was therefore said to represent one third of an inch, and a foot became twelve inches, or thirty-six barleycorns. Nature, however, did not get the invitation to the meeting. Barleycorns are rarely identical, so precision remained elusive and disputes frequent.
In 1324, King Edward II made an official decree confirming the barleycorn approach and warning that regional discrepancies would no longer be tolerated. Despite its potential for error, tradespeople, including shoemakers, adopted the system. Refined over time, it remains the basis of shoe sizing used in Britain today.
The first recorded account of a defined shoe sizing system, beyond vague terms like small or large, appeared in The Academy of Armoury and Blazon in 1688. It declared that size one in children’s shoes measured five inches in length, with each subsequent size increasing by a quarter of an inch up to size thirteen, before returning to size one for adult footwear.
The Academy of Armory and Blazon from 1688 contained one of the first recordings of a defined shoe sizing system. Photo Credit: Forum Auctions.
As the British Empire expanded from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this system travelled with it. The United States initially adopted it but later adjusted the measurements, starting one twelfth of an inch shorter. As a result, a size five in London would measure as a size seven in Louisiana.
Written records about formal shoe sizing systems are rare. The next documented reference appeared in 1856, when Robert Gardiner of London published The Illustrated Handbook of the Foot, noting one third of an inch as the measurement between sizes. A more detailed system followed in 1880, when New York businessman Edwin Simpson introduced a standard that included widths and half sizes. It was quickly approved by the US Retail Boot and Shoe Dealers’ Association, though many manufacturers were slow to adopt it, as it required a much greater number of lasts to be made. Retailers were hesitant too, concerned about the increase in stock they would need to hold.
Customer demand eventually settled the matter. By the turn of the century, many brands were offering half sizes and a small range of widths.
The Ritz Stick - invented by Oliver Cornelis Ritz-Woller - became a gauge for measuring length and width of feet. Photo credit: Made in Chicago Museum.
As awareness of proper footwear fitting grew, Oliver Cornelius Ritz-Woller, founder of Chicago’s American Automatic Devices Company, invented the Ritz Stick in the early twentieth century. Essentially a wooden ruler for gauging the length and width of feet, its introduction in 1916 made an immediate impact.
The following decade, New Yorker Charles Brannock, son of a shoe shop owner, developed a device that also measured the length of the foot’s arch, improving accuracy by nearly 96 per cent. By 1930, the Brannock Device had become an essential tool across the shoe industry, used in Britain, Canada, and beyond. (It took more than sixty years for a version to be introduced for women’s sizing.)
In 1933, a United States Navy captain, concerned about foot problems among his sailors, was so impressed by the Brannock Device that he recommended it as a standard across the military. During the Second World War, Brannock was hired by the US Army to ensure troops were equipped with properly fitted boots, sparking a huge expansion in production.
The Brannock device went one step further, enabling the foot arch to be measured, as well as length and width, improving accuracy.
In 1930, the British Standards Institution redefined the inch as 2.54 centimetres. No mention of barleycorns this time. It was another small attempt to bring order to something that has never been entirely precise.
As shoemaking moved into mass production, the industry gained speed but lost much of its individual fit. Factories focused on quantity and accessibility, producing shoes in standardised sizes that would work for most rather than for each person. Prices fell, but so did the level of personal fitting once taken for granted.
Even today, much of the footwear market still follows that pattern. Nowadays, even expensive high-end shoes are often bought off the shelf and rely on customers’ feet fitting comfortably into ready-made shapes. At Crown Northampton, we work differently. Each pair is made to order, which means we begin production only once a customer has selected their preferred size using our guidance and experience as reference. Some people choose to speak with us directly before ordering, while others use the information we provide to make their own decision. Either way, the process is considered and built around helping every customer make the most informed choice possible before their pair is made.
View the Crown Northampton Sizing Guide
The search for the right fit will always continue, but each step forward brings us closer to shoes that feel as good as they are made.
