Wm Greaves and Sons Table Knife Set Stag Shear Steel Sheffield 1801-1850

1801 tp 1850 early 19th century style stick tang table knife and two tined fork with comed iron buttcaps (quintessential Sheffield style) marked Wm Greaves & Sons in hand cut hot stamp with forged carbon steel blade and fork handled in stag.

Wm Greaves Sheaf Works was one of Sheffields Behemoth cutlery works taking in iron and other raw materials at one end and churning out finished cutlery at the other largely to the United States. Wm Greaves and Sons Sheaf Works was one of the first if not the first to aggressively export to the United States from a large factory. Greaves' gamble paid off and they did very well exporting to the new ex-colony.

While not specified this knife likely uses a shear steel in the blade, the Sheaf Works factory artwork while always exaggerated in scale does show four conical cementation furnaces used to make shear steel. 

Like other Sheffield made table knives of its time it shows a 'puddle weld' near the bolster at the beginning of the blade opposite side as markings, almost looking like a thumbprint, this is where the hard shear steel is forge welded to the mild steel or iron bolster and tang. Forks were forged in a small mold and ground by hand and knife blade forged by hand to shape and then hand ground on a saddle grinder to finish the geometry being finished on smaller buffing wheels. Many of these process were in use for hundreds of years in Sheffield which really held its strength through the massive amount of low priced skilled labor available in Sheffield. 

Shear steel was a 19th and early 20th century steel that was made by case hardening bars of iron in ceramic boxes packed with charcoal, large numbers of these were heated for days on end at high temperatures and the resulting bars were broken up (it would break or shear rather than bend once carbon added hence 'shear' steel) and forged welded into a larger mass. This process was done twice on double shear steel creating a steel with a higher carbon content. 

knife 9.25", fork 6.75" overall