The past at our doors, or, The old in the new around us / by Walter W. Skeat.

  • Skeat, Walter William, 1866-1953.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The past at our doors, or, The old in the new around us / by Walter W. Skeat. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The only kind of wooden “ trencher ” now in fyeneral use is that on which bread is cut, and this is now called a “ platter,” its earlier name of “ trencher ” having died out. Both were long used for fruit served up at the “ banquet,” which latter term in Shakespeare’s time was given, not as now to the feast itself, but to the dessert. At this time, too, Harrison says that old men of his village still spoke of the exchange of treen or wooden platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin.” Gentlemen in those days used to bring their own knives with them to table, and these in Anglo- Saxon times were shaped so like our modern razor that on at least one occasion they were identified as “ Roman razors,” under which strange designation they once came to be labelled in a museum ! The knives then were laid by the spoons, which were of silver, bone, or wood. “ Spoon ” really means, in fact, a wooden chip, as in the common expression spick and span ” or (more fully) “ spick and span new,” where span ” has its original sense of a newly-split “ chip,” a meaning which usefully recalls the most ancient form of spoon. Even then, however, the full force of the expression is hard to see, unless we may perhaps conjecture that “ spick ” in this case has the sense of a wooden “ spike,” such as we know to have been employed from the remotest ages for holding the meat at meals, before