Luxury Cutlery Blog & Dining Guides | Lincoln House Cutlery

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A Practical Guide to Stainless Steel Polish for Cutlery

Learn how to use stainless steel polish to restore your cutlery's shine. Our guide offers practical tips for cleaning, polishing, and protecting your tableware.

A Guide to Antique Silver Candlesticks

Discover the world of antique silver candlesticks. Learn to identify styles from different eras, decode hallmarks, and properly care for your treasured pieces.

Silver Plated vs Sterling Silver: Which Cutlery Wins on Value and Durability

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The Essential Guide to the Silver Hip Flask

Your expert guide to choosing, personalizing, and caring for a silver hip flask. Explore materials, history, and styles to find your perfect timeless accessory.

The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Your Glass Bar Shaker

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A Guide to Cherished Wedding Anniversary Gifts Silver

Discover meaningful wedding anniversary gifts silver to celebrate 25 years. Our UK guide helps you choose, personalize, and care for the perfect silver present.

How Many Pieces Are in a Cutlery Set? A Plain-English Guide

By the team at Lincoln House Cutlery — specialists in fine cutlery since 1967 If you've ever tried to buy a cutlery set online and found yourself puzzled by the...

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One star is more than enough.

£49.95 for this. Seriously?

Two Arthur Price Signature 3-piece sets, delivered three days late, despite the delivery address having been corrected by email and acknowledged by the company.

And this is how £50 worth of cutlery arrived — thrown together in basic plastic wrapping with no individual packaging and no clear identification of the two different sets. Some pieces did not even have visible branding.

I contacted customer service to ask whether this was actually correct.

Their response? Essentially: yes, this is how they package it, the difference between the sets should be “evidently clear”, and I was told that sending several emails within 12 hours was “a bit unnecessary”.

So they get the delivery address wrong, deliver late, send a £50 order looking like this, and then respond to the customer with that attitude.

If this is what you consider acceptable presentation and customer service for a £50 order, you’ve lost a customer.

Never again.

One star is too generous.

Superb quality, speedy delivery. Delighted, thank you.

I bought it for my daughters wedding gift because I had always wanted one and she loved it so I am happy

Disappointingly small. The ‘rattail’ turned out to be an incised pattern not a proper rattail.
My search continues.

Dear Marcus Barbor
Thank you for taking the time to review your cutlery. We are sorry for your disappointment, however, no one makes the raised rattail – or ‘proper rattail’ that you are looking for.
The traditional English “rattail” (or “rat-tail”) fork and spoon pattern is one of the oldest surviving flatware forms in Britain, dating from the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The “tail” itself was originally not decorative at all — it was structural.
For early spoons especially, the bowl and handle were often forged separately and then joined together. The raised rib on the reverse — the rat-tail — reinforced that junction and concealed or strengthened the soldered join.
Forks evolved slightly differently, but the same principle applied in many early examples:
• The tines/head were forged separately from the stem.
• The handle/stem was then fire-welded or brazed onto the fork head.
• The raised “tail” on the reverse strengthened the weak point where the neck met the fork head.
• On hand-forged examples, the rat-tail was often hand-drawn with hammer work after joining.
Early English Hanoverian forks from roughly 1700–1750 commonly show a very pronounced rat-tail because the construction genuinely needed reinforcement.
By the Georgian period, metallurgy and forging improved enough that the structural need largely disappeared. The rat-tail gradually became shallower and then decorative only. Around the later 18th century, many Hanoverian forks lost the rat-tail entirely.
Most modern “rattail” cutlery is made completely differently.
Modern stainless rattail forks are usually:
• stamped from a single blank,
• rolled and pressed in dies,
• with the “tail” formed by coining/pressing rather than forging.
The tail today is usually just a shallow pressed ridge because:
1. there is no structural joint to reinforce,
2. deep forging is expensive,
3. modern stainless alloys are much stronger than early wrought silver or iron.
Traditional hand-forged silver rattail patterns still exist today from specialist makers, but they are niche luxury production rather than mainstream manufacture.
If you are searching for traditional Rattail teaspoons (you bought 6 from us) with the raised ridge-you will need to search in the antique market.
There isn’t a single cut-off date when manufacturing techniques changed over, because methods overlapped for decades and varied by maker. But broadly:
• Fully hand-forged two-piece silver rattail forks remained common through the 18th century.
• High-end Sheffield and London silversmiths still used forged-and-joined construction into the mid-19th century.
• Industrial drop-stamping and die-forging increasingly replaced them from roughly the 1840s–1880s.
• By the early 20th century, almost all commercial EPNS and stainless rattail cutlery was one-piece stamped construction with decorative tails only.
So the “last” true structural rat-tail forks were probably being made by traditional silversmith workshops into the late Victorian or Edwardian era, but mainstream production had effectively moved to one-piece manufacture by about 1900–1920.
One useful clue when examining antique pieces:
• On genuinely old hand-forged forks, the rat-tail is usually asymmetrical, deeply raised, and organically blended into the neck.
• On modern stamped versions, it tends to be perfectly centred, shallow, and mechanically uniform.
The very pronounced rat-tail seen on early English silver is essentially evidence of the transition from forged multi-part flatware to industrial one-piece manufacture.
I hope this helps inform your search for a ‘proper Rattail’.
We do have a 30-day no-questions-asked returns policy. Your order was placed 30th March 2026, so slightly longer than this time period; however, we are happy to take the spoons back if you no longer want them. Please contact us directly to return them and we will issue a refund provided they are unused, in a new condition, and re-packaged accordingly.
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Lincoln House Cutlery.

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