"Ghillies are a whole 'nother beast. They have the advantage that they are easy to make. There are some surviving shoes from the British Isles that vaguely resemble our ghillies, but they date to before AD 900 (Saguto, p.1, and Carlson). According to leading shoe scholars, ghillies as we know them are a modern invention based roughly on some surviving early medieval shoes, apparently a result of a combination of wishful thinking and a desire to come up with something for renaissance fairs, rendezvous, and such that is cheap, easy to make, and does not look obviously modern.
Even home made shoes in the 17th century were shaped to the foot – unlike ghillies, which are essentially a leather bag.
The term ghillie, itself, is a modern construct (Saguto, p.1). In 1894, Mackay listed about sixteen varieties of Celtic footwear from the Middle Ages to the early modern period; nothing resembling ghillies, nor even the term itself, appears (pp.141 ff.).
There is NO documentation for anything resembling ghillies anywhere approaching our period and place. Obviously, ghillies - or anything else that predates our period by seven or more centuries - are not the ideal to which we should aspire."
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