This spoon is a typical example of a type popular across Europe in the first decade of the eighteenth century until about 1770. The style emerged in England in around 1710, and has become known as 'Hanoverian' because it was popular during the reigns of the first two Hanoverian monarchs (George I and George II), who ruled between 1714-1760. The ridge or ‘rat-tail’ at the heel of this example (where the stem joins the bowl) is characteristic of spoons made before around 1730. The finial of the spoon has been designed so that the spoon can be placed on the table with its open bowl down (the opposite of how it would be set on the table today) and this is why the initials of the original owners are engraved on what we would now think of as the back of the spoon. This arrangement followed French fashions, which had developed at the end of the seventeenth century. The different sets of initials engraved on the finial of this example suggest it was passed down from generation to generation in the same family.
John Murch, whose mark is punched three times on the stem, had established himself as a goldsmith in Plymouth by 1694, but left the town in 1717 and settled in Tiverton, where he remained until his death in May 1728. Murch did not always submit silver that he had worked to his local Exeter assay office for testing. On this spoon, the two smaller and indistinct punch-marks that supplement his maker's mark are intended to make it appear at first sight that the piece bears formal assay marks as well, when in fact they are worn stamps which repeat his initials 'IM'.