Enjoying the Shepherd’s Calendar again (Spenser really does love archaisms!) and came across this in the February eclogue:

So longe haue I listned to thy speche,
That graffed to the ground is my breache:
My hartblood is welnigh frorne I feele,
And my galage growne fast to my heele

Galage is glossed by E.K. (the commentator on the work, who is probably Spenser himself) as ‘a startuppe or clownish shoe’. Startup is in OED defined as a kind of high shoe or soft boot, often associated with rustics, but of galage I can find no trace. Next stop was a Chaucer glossary (Spenser idolized him and borrowed many terms from him) but no sign there either. In fact the only other instance I can find is later on in the Calendar in September where it’s glossed again as a shoe. I wondered briefly about galligaskins, but of course they’re hose rather than shoes. Any help? I keep thinking I’m missing something obvious, which means I probably am.

Seems similar to galoshes, overshoes.  Hope that helps kick off the invesigation.

My trusty Diccionario de Autoridades, 1734, describes them as wooden shoes common to French towns.

“Diccionario de Autoridades - Tomo IV

GALOCHA. s. f. Especie de calzado de madera, de que se usa para andar por la nieve, el agua y el lodo. Covarr. dice se llamaron Galoch”

Feminine noun, type of wooden footwear, used for walking in snow, water, mud...

The OED gives this etymology for galosh:

< French galoche feminine < (according to Hatzfeld & Darmesteter) popular Latin *galopia < *galopus, < Greek κᾱλόπους (stem -ποδ-) shoemaker’s last (whence diminutive καλοπόδιον), < κᾶλον wood (only plural logs) + πούς foot. In medieval Latin galopedium occurs for ‘wooden shoe’; see also calopedes in Du Cange. The Spanish galocha, Italian galoscia, are probably adopted < French.

And its first definition is:

In early use: A wooden shoe or sandal fastened to the foot with thongs of leather; a rustic patten or clog; a shoe with a wooden sole and an upper of leather or other soft material. The name seems to have been variously applied, and in the earliest quots. may be a general term for a boot or shoe.

And John Bossewell’s Workes of Armorie, published in 1572, describes it as: ‘Shoe called Galloge or Patten which hath nothing on the feete but only Latchettes’.

In other words, the shepherd was wearing something like these over his ordinary shoes, and they were so clogged with mud that foot, shoe and galosh were solidified into one lump.

(It’s line 244 of Spenser’s poem, if anyone is looking it up.)

Yes, the OED also lists galage as a Middle English form of the modern galosh.

The MED has it, a form under the entry for galoche (n.). It defines it as “a kind of footwear, consisting of a wooden sole fastened onto the foot with leather thongs.”

The MED gives this as the earliest citation:

(1363-4) Acc.R.Dur.in Sur.Soc.100 566:  In..1 pari de Galag’ pro priore..In j par. de galog’.

It’s the same source as the OED’s first citation, Extracts from the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham, but a different quotation and different volume, and the MED citation antedates the OED’s by about ten years, c. 1364.

Of course, galosh! I knew I’d kick myself for missing something obvious. Thanks. guys.