God bless you and keep you from harm, this day and forever.
The Son of God goes forth to war,
a kingly crown to gain;
his blood-red banner streams afar:
who follows in his train?
Who best can drink his cup of woe,
triumphant over pain,
who patient bears his cross below,
he follows in his train.
2 The martyr first, whose eagle eye
could pierce beyond the grave,
who saw his Master in the sky
and called on him to save:
like him, with pardon on his tongue
in midst of mortal pain,
he prayed for them that did the wrong:
who follows in his train?
3 A glorious band, the chosen few
on whom the Spirit came,
twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew,
and mocked the cross and flame:
they met the tyrant's brandished steel,
the lion's gory mane;
they bowed their necks the death to feel:
who follows in their train?
4 A noble army, men and boys,
the matron and the maid,
around the Savior's throne rejoice,
in robes of light arrayed:
they climbed the steep ascent of heav'n
through peril, toil, and pain:
O God, to us may grace be giv'n
to follow in their train.
Medieval people associated extravagant fashions, and pointed shoes in particular, with alternative or deviant sexualities. In the 12th century, Orderic Vitalis – a Benedictine English monk well regarded by historians – wrote that those who wore pointed shoes “gave themselves up to sodomitic filth”, and that young men who wore them also had “long luxurious locks like women,” and “over-tight shirts and tunics”.
n 1348 the Black Death arrived in London, beginning an outbreak of plague that would kill approximately 40,000 people, somewhere between a third and half of the city's population. Clerics claimed that this was a divine punishment, the plague sent by God to punish Londoners for their sins, especially sexual sins. London's fashion scene became a symbol of that sin.
The long point of the poulaine was regarded as phallic. They were mostly worn by young men, who used to stuff the toes of the shoe with wool or moss to make them harder. They would then stand on street corners and wiggle them suggestively at passerbys. It is said that if somebody wore poulaines with bells sewn to the ends of them, it indicated that the wearer was available for sexual frolics.
Priests called them Satan's Claws.
In 1362, Pope Urban V passed an edict banning them, but it didn't really stop anybody from wearing them. England would proceed to pass sumptuary laws (laws governing dress and behaviour) which set out regulations for how long somebody's poulaines could be based on their station. Commoners were charged to wear shorter poulaines than barons and knights, who were regarded as less susceptible to the kind of “sodomitic filth” that the shoe encouraged.
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/lgbt-london-stories-pointy-shoes-and-sodomy