Stirring Up the Past

To be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth, so goes the adage, is to be born assured of wealth. Rarer still are the spoons on which tots teethed in Olde Englande. So rare, in fact, that in 1531, when table manners were simply a toothy process of disconnecting meat from bones, one Humfrey Cooke willed that "every one of my childrene shal have one silver spone callid the Apostles." For when it came to skimming the creme de la creme, nothing could match a set of spoons decorated with figures of the Twelve Apostles.

Today, a set of such spoons is the rarest item in the market for antique silver.

There are only seven complete sets known. Each is made up of 13 spoons, a dozen for the saints of the Last Supper and the last for Christ. Judas Iscariot is replaced by St. Matthias,* for what father would give his child a Judas spoon to slurp up his porridge?

Tools of Martyrdom. Until 1881, only two such sets were known, one ensconced in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the other in London's Goldsmiths Hall. Currently, there are five in U.S.

collections, including a complete set now on view at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. It is the finest item in the nation's best antique-silver collection, located in an off-the-beaten-track museum that nonetheless, eleven years after its opening, is drawing nearly 83,000 a year in attendance--more than 15 times the population of Williamstown.

In their rarity alone, Apostle spoons stir the imagination. The Clark Institute's set cost around $30,000; another, inferior set is expected to fetch $15,000 at New York's Parke-Bernet Galleries later this month. The spoons have sculptured knops at the end of their handles, portraying the saints. Each Apostle bears his symbol, or the tools of his martyrdom: St. John holds a cup symbolic of the poisoned wine he was ordered to drink; St. Bartholomew is shown with a knife to signify his being flayed alive; St. Simon carries the saw that sundered him in Persia.

Forks for Dandies. In 16th and 17th century England, lucky lordlings dined with Apostle spoons given to them as baptismal gifts. Forks were a dandy's innovation from Italy, and young men returning from the Grand Tour in Shakespeare's day with tined implements in their pockets were thought effeminate by their deft-fingered fathers. When spoons did become common tableware, they had elongated bowls, less suitable for chopping food than balancing tiny reservoirs of soup. Still, as talismans of gentle birth, Apostle spoons were an exquisite beginning to a surfeit of flatware, which, by 1911, yielded services of 138 individual pieces per place setting, from pea spoons to asparagus tongs.

* The Apostles usually represented in spoons: Matthew, Peter, John, Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, James, James the Less, Simon the Zealot, Thaddaeus, Matthias.

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