In the 17th century it was not yet common for hosts to provide cutlery when entertaining guests to dinner. Most people of rank had their own personal eating implements, usually a knife and spoon, with a fork increasingly included towards the end of the century, which were carried in a fitted case. Filigree, which became highly fashionable in Europe in the second half of the 17th century, was often used to decorate these expensive implements.

This knife and fork are 17th-century in design, but were probably made at the end of the 18th century in Schleswig Holstein in northern Germany, when cutlery of this archaic appearance was popular as a wedding gift. The steel knife blade is stamped 'STETIN', now Szczecin in Poland, and the filigree top is very similar to traditional buttons from the region. Each piece is engraved 'IAB 1723 [or 1793] IGVL' on the strip of plain silver below the top. The two sets of initials often indicate a betrothal or wedding gift.

Cutlers specialised in making blades. They trained as apprentices for up to seven years, working for a freeman cutler who housed and fed them. In England a cutler would have to prove himself as bladesmith and hafter (maker of handles) in order to obtain the freedom of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers, gain his own mark and set up his own business.

Many cutlers acted as middlemen who bought blades from bladesmiths, handles from hafters and sheaths from sheathers. They assembled the cutlery themselves and sold them under their own names.