All this talk about sharpness lately reminded me to post a image from V&A of a set of carving/serving knives.
Interestingly the set includes both a fork *and* a pricker.

In the scabbard of many knives and some swords from the 14th - 16th C you can see a set of by-knife and/or a steel awl, or pricker. Or at least that is how it is often interpreted.

Of course this tool would work well as an awl for various purposes, and possible also double as a fork at the table.
But I have wondered if the pricker/awl primarily is intended as a sharpening steel: something that makes much more sense to have close at hand for touching up an edge whenever it has lost some of its bite.

Seeing the table knives at the V&A was exiting: here we see a dedicated fork as well as a pricker is included in the set. The file can help establish a new raw edge, and the steel needle is used to polish the edge into a fne cutting sharpness.

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The complete set...

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And a close up of the fork and steel.

It's an interesting idea. I recently had a pair of prickers made to match some 15thC knives and had the smith leave them quite hard so I could try using them as steels.

That said, I'm not that convinced the fork is a pricker-substitute. Prickers predate table forks by quite a long time, and the dimensions of that fork, for example, are all wrong for a carving tool. It's a pretty good size for a serving tool though.

Meat in medieval times wasn't sliced the way we do today, it was carved into chunks suitable to be eaten with the fingers, and that fork strikes me as a pretty good tool for transporting bite-size bits of meat from board to bowl.

Thomas a Becket: Tonight you can do me the honor of christening my forks.
King Henry II: Forks?
Thomas a Becket: Yes, from Florence. New little invention. It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves you dirtying your fingers.
King Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.
Thomas a Becket: Yes, but it's washable.
King Henry II: So are your fingers. I don't see the point.



Sorry, I couldn't resist.

I've been wondering the same thing for a while now. Is it possible that the "pricker" was all of these things? Meat skewer, sharpening steel, and awl? The idea of a multipurpose tool can't be THAT modern.

I read somwhere that it's supposed to be a sharpening steel but I can't remember where. Christopher Gravett writes in his book "Knight" that is't called a bodkin (and not the arrowhead here) and was commonly worn with different knives and/or swords. He also mentions that it might have been used to make holes for points, for wich it would be fairly suitable.

I discussed this with an aquaintance of mine and he didn't belive it since they seldom (never before the 1600's as far as I know) have the small ridges as modern sharpening sttels have. However, I made one and left two edges of the square section of the pricker/bodkin quite sharp. The 90 degree angle works very well for removing small nicks and similar on the knife. Further sharpening can easily be achived with a small whetstone but if you need to get rid of slightly larger grades on teh edge this little implement will do the trick. So far I haven't gotten any proff to back me up on this but empirical tests on my own equipment have so far proven useful.

Would like to see more pictures of prickers/bodkins in the future!

/Eric

I've been trying to find out more about the name bodkin for the pricker tool but so far I haven't found any good sources at all. Almost everywhere else in literature a bodkin is an arrowhead. Gravett mentions bodkins on several places in the book and it's only the subject of the text that implies whetter or not it's the arrowhead or the pricker that's discussed.

And offcourse I have misplaced the picture I had of a bodkin/pricker which was partially square... I'll promise to post the picture as soon as I find it again!

Is the one on the bottom some kind of edgeless serving spatula, or a kind of knife? It's hard to see the edges.

M.

It's a serving knife. Indeed, a kind of a blunt spatula, rather like a cake-serving thingy in use. In Medieval courtly sets these were quite common.

Sorry for the threadromancy, but does anyone have any other examples of prickers that included a 'file' section - or any other source documentation to suggest they could have been used as sharpening steels?

When Tod made a stag bauernwehr and by-knives set that I now own, he left the pricker fully hard so that it can be used as a sharpener. It doesn't have a "file-edge" on it, but is more of a four-sided hollow-ground shape that has four "edges" that can be used against a sharp blade's edge. It works well. I've used it to sharpen the by-knives to be very, very sharp. I used it to hone the large piece after I did some cutting of thick-walled cardboard tubes with it (it's a surprisingly good cutter) and it returned the edge to as good as new.

[ Linked Image ]

The main piece is very large! It's really a medium-sized grosse-messer. (Would that be a mittelstand-messer?)

Overall length: 18.375"
Weight: 1.1 pounds
Blade: 13.25" long; 1.25" wide at the base

I will be publishing a collection gallery page with this item soon. It's completed already and just waiting to go live.

Hi Nathan, Thanks for reminding us all of that fantastic set! (Something about that Bauernwehr makes me also think 'Jagdmesser' ...)

Anyway, some searcing on Hermann Historica found two knife sets where what looks like it would have been called a pricker in an earlier timeframe is here referred to as a 'bodkin' or 'sharpening steel' ...

Set 1 (pics below) is here: http://www.hermann-historica.de/auktion/hhm60...at60_m.txt

So: does this support Peter's proposal that prickers could also have been used as sharpening steels? I guess the other interpretations are that a similar form of tool persisted, but with a different construction and use ... or that HH are incorrect ... I'm voting for the pricker also being used a sharpening steel! :)

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Here's example number two from Hermann Historica: http://www.hermann-historica.de/auktion/hhm58...at58_a.txt

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Sure. I dont think it would be a stretch at all to say that it could have been more often used as a sharpening device. All you are trying to do there is remove or straighten out a slight bur and it would work fine. I had heard once that if you look at the spine of most early eating knives that they will almost always have scratches from de-buring another knife on it. They had to do it often. Much more often then modern kitchen knives.

If that's a hunting garniture--and it may well not be--then the fork and the pricker have different uses in the formal breaking up of the deer carcass in formal Par Force Stag/Hind hunting. At the Curee. If you think this is applicable, someone tell me and I'll look up what they're all for... my memory is hazy. I THINK the fork was for displaying the heart, and the pricker if for... displaying something else. Been a while.