How people in England began to use forks

In 1608 the English traveler Thomas Coryate made a journey to Italy. During the journey he wrote down in his notebooks everything which he found interesting.

He wrote about the wonderful palaces of Venice, and the beautiful ancient buildings of Rome, and about Vesuvius. But there was one thing which astonished him more even than Vesuvius and the palaces of Venice. On one of the pages he wrote the following:

"When Italians eat meat they use little iron or silver pitchforks. They do not eat with the fingers because, they say, people do not always have clean hands."

Before he returned home Coryate ordered some of these "pitchforks" and took them back home. The fork he bought didn't look very much like ours. It looked much more like a tuning fork than a table fork.

When he got home Coryate decided to show the fork to his friends. He gave a dinner party, and when the servants put the meat on the table, he took out the fork and began to eat like the Italians.

All eyes were in him. When he told the guests what it was, they all wanted to take a closer look at the strange thing. The fork passed from hand to hand, and the guests all said that the Italians were very foolish, because the fork was very inconvenient.

But Thomas Coryate didn't agree with them. He said it was not nice to eat meat with fingers, because people didn't always have clean hands.

Everybody was very angry at this. Did Mr. Coryate think that people in England didn't wash their hands before eating? And weren't the ten fingers we had enough for us?

Let him just show how easy it was to use this pitchfork!

Coryate wanted to show them how he used the fork. But the first piece of meat he took with the fork fell to the table. The guests couldn't stop laughing and joking about it. So the poor traveler had to take the fork away.

Fifty years passed before people in England began to use forks.

(From "English through practice" by B.A. Lapidus)