As we said, if they are important to the story, they are! But how are they uncomfortable? In our age, with smooth synthetic fabric, we might find wool socks scratchy. They might find the warm feet delightful. Cold and wet... that's another thing, and better make a fire and dry them out. A hole where a blister is starting to form, potentially serious.
Yet used soap to wash their hands before meals, and disinfectants on small wounds, took pride in their hair. They were not that tough. Won't argue that they were used to discomfort, but wearing wool clothes is still not fun. Most people seem to have preferred linen even if it was outside of their price range. Poor women wore wool underwear, for example. I assume that's probably literally Hell.
I get the impression you're looking for exact answers... well, you're not. And you never will. Even if you found a source telling you exactly what kind of footwear each member of a village wore, the customs of another village might be different. You need to take educated guesses, and sometimes you might have to take a stab in the dark. If you think that your characters' wool socks are causing him grief, then go ahead and use it in your story. You might be wrong, but unless you build yourself a time machine you'll never know for sure, and, crucially, nor will your readers. If you don't like that then maybe this isn't the genre for you.
yes, and I am fairly sure that if Native Americans such as the Hopi and Zuni wore a type of woven sock and leggings (Hopi cotton) then it would make sense that at least the Saxon women understood how to weave their socks and leggings too.
And I'd like to add: news stories are never accurate, never have been accurate, and likely never will be either.. and history is an accumulation of news stories, history is written commissioned by the winners and they will always paint the losers with a black brush to make themselves look righteous more popular (you can still see this at work today in the media), the guy at the top always gets the credit for great works with no mention of the designers, builders, minions, etc. who did the actual job; for works of great evil though, someone further down the chain of command takes the rap (kind of like the way a film director takes credit for a good film, but the writer gets the blame for a bad one even though everyone screws with the script after the writer hands it in), it's taboo to speak ill of the dead... unless everyone agreed he was a bastard while he was alive, but even then it's still taboo if his good reputation is important to a larger cause (the antipode is also true; in a public forum, it's frowned upon to speak of the good deeds of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein... if there are/were any), and finally, no matter what new evidence comes to light, history will still be taught with errors at grade school level (how many of us were still taught that Columbus discovered America even though the Norse were here before him and even they found people already living here?)
I would approach it this way, if scholars can't agree then that means that no one really knows. So you can choose whatever is most interesting for your story, or the option that you think will be less likely to raise eyebrows in readers. After all, the point of being accurate is that don't break a reader's immersion.
