posted 09-21-2016 05:10 PM            

A belated thanks to adelapt for correcting the date of the six forks in my previous post. Here are four George II dessert spoons also engraved "Exon." for Exeter College, Oxford, obtained from the same dealer in that city. The maker or sponsor is Elizabeth Oldfield, who according to Grimwade registered this mark in 1750, and one spoon may show part of the P date mark for that year. The other marks are squashed beyond recognition, as is often the case with bottom-marked spoons.

This time I didn't think it necessary to inquire whether they’d been stolen. Oxford and Cambridge Universities’ fifty or more colleges must have thousands of pieces of Georgian and Victorian flatware that were once in daily use. As evidence, Oliver Rackham's catalogue "Treasures of Silver at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge" (like Exeter, a small college) lists 396 spoons and 387 forks, and mentions that “they remained in use by undergraduates until the 1950s” (p. 205). Who uses them now?

Incidentally, Rackham’s is one of the most entertaining of silver books. Here he writes about Apostle spoons: “Ancient spoons very rarely survive as complete sets. Individual spoons get thrown out accidentally with the rubbish. If the owner keeps his own pigs, as St John’s College did from 1939 to 1954, the spoons go out in the swill, are rejected by the pigs, and sink to the bottom of the trough, are recovered by the gardener and returned. If not, they find their way, centuries later, into the collections of metal detectorists.” (p. 85)

Now that neither the undergraduates nor the pigs have access to college silver, it might as well be sold off, so that others can enjoy its historic associations. In the years since I last posted, has anyone had similar finds?