Culture wars have been waged over very serious issues, but roughly around the year 1000, much fulmination erupted over the fork.

Until then, respectable Western Europeans ate with their hands. They were scandalised when Byzantine princesses who married into the ruling clans of the Holy Roman Empire and the Venetian Republic introduced the use of little golden prongs to pick up food sliced by servants. Monks and prelates condemned the practice as effeminate and damned the women to hell. It would take more than 500 years before the French made forking at the dinner table acceptable practice.