Chapter V

).

In very early times small forks, of which there are some in the Guildhall Museum dating from Roman and Saxon times, were chiefly used for fruit. The use of forks at table, for meat, is attributed to the invention of an Italian, and the custom thus started rapidly spread "in good society" on the Continent of Europe. Thomas Coryate, a noted traveller, is said to have introduced them into Germany, and afterwards into England, where their use was at first much ridiculed as effeminate, the "fork-carving" traveller being spoken of in contempt.

Forks were in regular use in England early in the sixteenth century. Dean Stanley, in his _Memorials of Westminster Abbey_, quotes from the Chapter Book of 1554, in which it is stated by Dean Weston (1553-6) that the College dinners "became somewhat disorderly, _forks_ and knives were tossed freely to and fro." The old table forks were two-pronged, the prongs being long and set near together; the steel forks of the early nineteenth century were three-pronged, and another prong was added later, the latter form being adapted by the makers of silver forks in more recent years.

In Fig. 18 is shown a very handsome knife case and its contents, which are to be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In Fig. 19 another example of a set of knife, fork, and spoon in the same collection is illustrated.

The spoon is, like the knife, of great antiquity. It is said to have been suggested by shells on the shore, and by the hollow of the hand which in the most primitive days was used to drink with. The most beautiful old spoons are those made of silver, a magnificent pair being shown in Fig. 20. Many such spoons are now almost priceless, especially the much-valued Apostle spoons, often given in olden time as christening gifts. Silver spoons more correctly belong to antique silver, which forms another branch of curio-collecting.

Of spoons there are many made of other materials than silver, some being carved in wood (see