The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30847, 4 September 1965, Page 5

The People's Songbag

The fork, for example, although one of the oldest tools known to man. was not introduced to England as a table utensil until the late 13th century and was not generally accepted until the 18th. The ancient Egyptians had big wooden forks for agricultural purposes, and the early inhabitants of England had forks for spearing fish, but the idea of using forks to eat with does not seem to have occurred to anyone until about the eleventh century, when a young woman from Constantinople : ntroduced to the court of her husband, the Doge of Venice, a twopronged fork for eating meat.

The first recorded table fork in English history belonged to Edward I, wf-s made of crystal and was considered to be a treasure. The Duke of Brittany owned a silver fork in 1306, and Henry VIII had several glass-handled forks- which his daughter Elizabeth used for picking up the sticky Indian preserves called ginger. But until the seventeenth century the fork was considered a woman’s weapon, and the man who used one was a sissy.

In Italy, the custom of eating meat with a fork was accepted by the fifteenth century. The English explanation for this odd behaviour wa- that “all Italian's fingers were not alike clean.” and the stately tables of England had many a giggle over traveller’s tales of the measures taken by Italians to avoid getting their fingers greasy. Even as late as 1652 the use of forks was frowned on in England, and a writer in that year mentioned “the use of silver forks which by some over-spruce gallants is taken up of late.” ' But by the middle of the seevnteenth century every genteel youngster was trained to handle a fork, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the practice was almost universal. There are, incidentally, a few items of fork-lore worth remembering: putting a fork in the milk makes the cow go dry, dropping a fork means a man is coming to dinner, and putting two forks at one place on the table means the occupier will marry twice.