If you ate breakfast with a spoon this morning, did you think about its shape and what it’s made of? Cutlery is such an everyday object, like the comb also in our exhibition, that we don’t think about how it developed.
This spoon is pewter, a mixture of tin and other metals. At the time it was made, in the 1300 or 1400s, many people would have used wooden, horn or bone. As they became better off, they bought more expensive metal spoons. Knives were also common. Did you know that forks were not widely used in Britain until the 1700s, originally coming to Europe from the Byzantine Empire in what is now Turkey?
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