Once viewed with suspicion, forks remained the preserve of royalty until nearly 200 years ago. Matthew Dennison takes a stab at the king of cutlery, which changed the way we eat.
Amid a hoard of silver coins discovered in the Wiltshire village of Sevington was a two-pronged silver fork identified by archaeologists as Saxon, pre-dating the Norman Conquest by at least two centuries. Its burial alongside valuable coins points to its status for its first owner.
In the 9th century, a fork was a rarity in English life, evidence perhaps of…
