Do you love historical shoes?  I LOVE historical shoes.  After all, they combine two of my favourite things: shoes and historical fashions. For this week’s terminology post, let’s look at a a historical shoe term: the Cromwell buckle & shoe and its stylistic relatives. Basically, a Cromwell buckle is an ornamental buckle of metal (often cut steel, and sometimes nickel  or pewter) on the front of a shoe.  In addition to the sparkly cut steel the buckle might be ornamented with paste jewels.  A Cromwell shoe is obviously the shoe worn with the decorative buckle.  Cromwell shoes are generally somewhat 18th century inspired, and usually have medium to high heels. A variant of the Cromwell shoe is the Moliere shoe, which sported a slightly lower heel, and a slightly turned-up toe (though it seems likely that which you chose to call your shoe depended more on the date and your location than the actual style).  Notoriously, Moliere shoes were worn by the first known victim of Joshep Vacher: the French Jack the Ripper. Another variant …