So why did people fear the fork so much? One theory is that, back before they had four prongs, they looked like the devil's pitchfork.
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To be fair, it does look a lot deadlier than that knife.
The proof that forks were evil came early. In the 11th century, a princess came to Italy from the Middle East to marry an important guy. She brought with her a two-pronged golden fork, which she used to eat meat. When she died young of a mysterious disease (like a large number of non-fork users during that time) priests told everyone that it was her punishment from God for being so ridiculously extravagant.
That story was still being told in churches 200 years later. Eating with a fork makes God so sad that he kills you to make you stop.
Eventually, forks were introduced to France. Some upper-class people even started using them. But then King Henry III died and moralists wanted to make sure people stopped eating with these tools of the devil. A French author published a novel about the king's reign called The Island Of Hermaphrodites, and the biggest burn in the whole book was when he said that the king and his totally effeminate courtiers "never touch meat with their hands but with forks."
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It was like the "Yo mama so fat" of the 1600s.