Cardinal Richelieu of France invents the table knife - May 13th, 1637

On this day in 1637, a French clergyman ordered the blades of his dinnerware to be rounded off at the edges, thus creating the first known version of the butter knife.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that delivers a tasty morsel of history every
day of the week. I'm Gay Bluesier, and in this episode,

(00:20):
we're talking about the unusual birth of a now ubiquitous
piece of cutlery, the trusty table knife. The day was
May sixteen thirty seven. A French clergyman ordered the blades
of his dinnerware to be rounded off at the edges,

(00:44):
thus creating the first known version of the butter knife.
Long before utensils came along, Humans primarily ate with their hands,
and many still do, but one of the first tools
we adopted for the task of eating. We're nineis In
medieval Europe, many people carried intricately decorated knives or daggers

(01:06):
on their person at all times. The blades weren't specifically
designed for eating, but many used them at the dinner
table all the same. After all, a hunting knife could
just as easily spear a cooked animal as it could
alive one. To be clear, spoons and forks were both
in use by the seventeenth century, but forks in particular

(01:28):
remained a rarity in the West, even among French nobility.
That meant that if you wanted to stab a piece
of food and bring it to your mouth, a sharp
knife was still the tool of choice for the job.
Cardinal armand Jean Duplicy, the Duke of Richelieu, was a
French clergyman who is best remembered today for helping transform

(01:52):
France into a centralized state, one where the majority of
power rested with the crown, not the nobles. He advanced
this goal on the behalf of King Louis the thirteenth,
whom he served as chief minister. The Cardinal exerted his
influence through harsh methods, including banning political discussions in public

(02:13):
places and using spies to dig up dirt on political
rivals in order to justify their execution. That said, the
Cardinal is believed to have been responsible for hanging quite
a few people, regardless of the strength of the evidence
against them. This alleged cruelty was immortalized by Alexander Dumas

(02:35):
in his classic novel The Three Musketeers, which portrays Cardinal
Richelieu as a brutal, power hungry ruler. His vicious approach
to politics was also reported by French memoirist Francois Bertot
der Motteville, who wrote that the Cardinal was fond of
saying that quote with two lines of a man's handwriting,

(02:59):
an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because
the business can be interpreted in such a way that
one can easily find what one wishes. If all of
that weren't damning enough, the Cardinal was apparently a stickler
for table manners too. He detested watching his dinner guests

(03:19):
stab at their plates with daggers, and it was even
worse after the meal, when they would pick at their
teeth with the points of their knives. Eventually, the delicate
Cardinal decided to discourage the practice by grinding down the
sharp ends of all the knives in his home so
that they were too blunt to be used as toothpicks.

(03:41):
According to legend, the first of these blunt edged table
knives or butter knives, were created on May sixteen, thirty seven.
Of course, the Cardinal couldn't prevent guests from stabbing food
and picking a teeth with their personal daggers, but since
he wielded considerable power and influence, many French households quickly

(04:03):
began dulling their own knives. Gradually, everyone at court started
using blunt knives at the table, and this made the
practice so fashionable that commoners began to do the same.
There were some holdouts, as not everyone was willing to
sacrifice convenience for the sake of appearing well mannered, but

(04:23):
in sixteen sixty nine, nearly thirty years after the cardinal's death,
King Louis finally put an end to sharp knives at
the dinner table. Officially, the king's ban on sharp blades
was meant to curb a recent wave of violence in
city streets and in private homes, but rather than throw

(04:44):
out every knife they owned, most people opted to grind
them down to make table knives, which would at least
still serve some purpose. This made dull knives a common
feature across France and eventually throughout continental Europe. England soon
caught on as well, and from there eventually the American
colonies did too. In the centuries since the table knives introduction,

(05:09):
it's traditional shape has changed a bit. No longer fashioned
from existing thin daggers, the average dinner knife is now
somewhat wider, making it all the more suited for pushing
food onto a fork, and of course we're spreading butter,
jam or whatever else. Of course, sharp and serrated knives
still pop up on the dinner table from time to time,

(05:32):
especially when sliced bread or steak is on the menu.
But luckily for etiquette enforcers like Cardinal Richelieu, picking your
teeth with a steak knife never quite caught on, at
least not for most people. I'm Gabe Luzier and hopefully
you now know a little more about history today than

(05:54):
you did yesterday. If you have a second and you're
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writing to This Day at I heart media dot com.

(06:16):
Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thank
you for listening. I'll see you back here again soon
for another day in History class.