“Born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth” is a common expression that means your family is rich. The origins of this saying go a long way back, and are connected to a tradition of giving silver spoons to infants getting baptized into the Christian faith. Wiktionary traces the first recorded statement to a 1721 Scottish proverb: “Every Man is no [not] born with a Silver Spoon in his Mouth.”
But the much earlier Shakespeare has a line where King Henry VIII says “come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons.” The context is in a play where the Archbishop Cranmer protests that he shouldn’t be the godfather of the future queen Elizabeth — Henry is saying that the cost of silver spoons is the reason Cranmer doesn’t want to witness the baptism. This source this shows that, among the elite, giving silver spoons as a baptismal gift extended back at least as far as the Tudor period (1485-1603).
The “Apostle spoon” you see here dates to about 1490 — such spoons also reflect a practice in the baptismal ceremony of having a child named after the apostle featured on the spoon.
But giving gifts — sometimes silver — to an infant at the Christening can be traced back to Late Medieval England. One baptismal record, that of a Henry Belmont from 1404, says that he was given “a silver cup” by one godparent and a “little purse of gold” by the other. The costliness of the gift showed off the status of the giver.
Sources: Apostle spoon from the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters, accession number 55.42.8. “The first rite of passage: baptism in Medieval memory,” _Journal of Family History_ 36 (1) 3-14, 2011, William S. Deller. The author of this article looked at over 10,000 of British baptism records from 1246 to 1432, and found that gift giving was not mentioned in any testimonies before 1300 (footnote 39)
