Forks are an Italian invention; and in England were so perfect a novelty in the days of Queen Bess, that Fynes Moryson, in his curious “Itinerary,” relating a bargain with the patrone of a vessel which was to convey him from Venice to Constantinople, stipulated to be fed at his table, and to have “his glass or cup to drink in peculiar to himself, with his knife, spoon, fork." This thing was so strange that he found it necessary to describe it.[A] It is an instrument “to hold the meat while he cuts it; for they hold it ill-manners that one should touch the meat with his hands."[B] At the close of the sixteenth century were our ancestors eating as the Turkish noblesse at present do, with only the free use of their fingers, steadying their meat and conveying it to their mouths by their mere manual dexterity.  They were, indeed, most indelicate in their habits, scattering on the table-cloth all their bones and parings.  To purify their tables, the servant bore a long wooden “voiding-knife,” by which he scraped the fragments from the table into a basket, called “a voider.”  Beaumont and Fletcher describe the thing,

 They sweep the table with a wooden dagger.

[Footnote A:  Modern research has shown that forks were not so entirely unknown as was imagined when the above was written.  In vol. xxvii. of the “Archaeologia,” published by the Society of Antiquaries, is an engraving of a fork and spoon of the Anglo-Saxon era; they were found with fragments of ornaments in silver and brass, all of which had been deposited in a box, of which there were some decayed remains; together with about seventy pennies of sovereigns from Coenwolf, King of Mercia (A.D. 796), to Ethelstan (A.D. 878, 890).  The inventories of royal and noble persons in the middle ages often name forks.  They were made of precious materials, and sometimes adorned with jewels like those named in the inventory of the Duke of Normandy, in 1363, “une cuiller d’or et une fourchette, et aux deux fonts deux saphirs;” and in the inventory of Charles V. of France, in 1380, “une cuillier et une fourchette d’or, ou il y a ij balays et X perles.”  Their use seems to have been a luxurious appendage to the dessert, to lift fruit, or take sops from wine.  Thus Piers Gaveston, the celebrated favourite of Edward III., is described to have had three silver forks to eat pears with; and the Duchess of Orleans, in 1390, had one fork of gold to take sops from wine (a prendre la soupe ou vin).  They appear to have been entirely restricted to this use, and never adopted as now, to lift meat at ordinary meals.  They were carried about the person in decorated cases, and only used on certain occasions, and then only by the highest classes; hence their comparative rarity.—­Ed.]

[Footnote B:  Moryson’s “Itinerary,” part i, p. 208.]

Fabling Paganism had probably raised into a deity the little man who first taught us, as Ben Jonson describes its excellence—­