PS: There is a growing awareness that the notion of the “cawl”/soup-spoon being ancestral to the Welsh love spoon, is erroneous. First of all, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, material or literal, to suggest that love spoons were carved before the mid-sixteen-hundreds. Secondly, research into the cultural habits of the Middle Ages, produces more and more insight into such customs, if any, as the making and giving of love tokens to women. That began with the troubadours (primarily noblemen), who performed love poems for their adored ones. But this was a very slow process and could only be appreciated by those who had had some education that enabled them to read and write and develop liberal ideals. Women had (to our modern ideas) a most deplorable position in society, well into the Renaissance (the period that followed the Middle Ages), even into the 19th century if one includes the Suffragette movement (e.g. Professor Robert Bartlett’s Inside The Medieval Mind, the UK-Open University). It is much more likely that the so-called love spoon was a product of the Late Renaissance. At that time (one could be tempted to say suddenly and fully developed as far as Wales is concerned), wooden spoons carved with "romantic" emblems emerged all over Europe but in conjunction with other everyday chip carved objects such as knitting-sheaths, stay-busks, butter presses, small boxes, milk stools, walking sticks, etc, not as individual items. Why this does not appear to have been the case in Wales is a mystery, but may have had something to do with the prevailing rules of Puritan society at the time. Often the objects were part of a dowry and were given by the couple to each other as love tokens. Therefore, the source of love spoon carving and giving needs more serious research into the customs and traditions of society of that period, the 16th /17th century, rather than simply assuming that the custom had had an on-going, linear past (August 2010)