Category: Medieval skating

The writers of skating history have awarded Jackson Haines credit for inventing the toe pick in the nineteenth century. They must not have known about the prikschaats (prick-skate). This type of skate features an iron blade with a spike at the toe. It’s not quite like a modern toe pick, being a single spike rather than a set of small teeth, but it’s definitely along those lines.

The prikschaats dates to around 1300–1500. Two have been found so far, one in the Hague and one in Rotterdam. It’s also featured in the manuscript image I described in a previous post, and, if you look carefully, one of Lydwina’s companions might be wearing one in the picture of her accident.

Modern toe picks are for jumping. It’s considered bad form to use them to stop in figure skating (which only works if you’re going backwards anyway), and only beginners use them to push (“toe-pushing” is trained out of beginning skaters early on). I’m not convinced that people were jumping in the Middle Ages. I think it probably represents the shift from pole-pushing to foot-pushing. When they used bone skates, skaters had to push themselves along with a pole. The earliest metal-bladed skates don’t have toe picks, and Niko Mulder has argued that they were propelled with a pole, just like bone skates.

The picture in Douce 5, the manuscript from my earlier post, shows someone skating without a pole, but with prikschaatsen. Maybe early skaters decided to move the point from the pole to the skate so that they could push with their toes. Eventually, they learned that pushing from the side of the blade works even better.

Reference

Niko Mulder. 2008. Ten IJse (2)—Schaatsles voor graaf Floris. Kouwe Drukte 12.34:18–23.

It’s not the famous woodcut of Lydwina’s accident from 1498. Check out this image from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 5. (I can’t post the image here because of copyright restrictions.)

This picture is from a Flemish manuscript that’s around 170 years older than the famous woodcut. It’s a calendar, and the February page shows two kids at the bottom. The one on the left is sliding on a mandibular sled, and the one on the right is ice skating—on metal-bladed skates! You can tell because he or she is not using a pole. Look carefully at the toes of the skates, and you might even see toe picks.

This picture hasn’t made its way into histories of skating yet (except my edition of Fowler, which mentions it in the commentary), but it has been known to archaeologists studying skating for years. It’s included in Randall (1966). MacGregor (1985:146) mentions the sled on the left, but not the skater, perhaps because he was only interested in bones. Küchelmann and Zidarov (2005) bring it into contemporary skating history in their paper on bone skates.

References

G. Herbert Fowler. 1892. On the Outside Edge: Being Diversions in the History of Skating. London: Horace Cox.

Hans Christian Küchelmann and Petar Zidarov. 2005. “Let’s skate together! Skating on bones in the past and today.” In From Hooves to Horns, from Mollusc to Mammoth: Manufacture and Use of Bone Artefacts from Prehistoric Times to the Present, Proceedings of the 4th Meeting of the ICAZ Worked Bone Research Group at Tallinn, 26th–31st of August 2003, ed. H. Luik, A. M. Choyke, C. Batey, and L. Löugas, pp. 425–445. Tallinn: Ajaloo Instituut.

Arthur MacGregor. 1985. Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials Since the Roman Period. London: Croom Helm.

Lillian M. C. Randall. 1966. Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts. Berkeley: University of California Press.