Unsolved riddles of the very odd fonts of Dorset
One of Osbert Lancaster’s clerical cartoon characters, with their aprons and gaiters and stringed hats, as appropriate, even in the Fifties, was called Fontwater. “Have a care, Fontwater,” a caption might say, “we’re not in White’s now.”
Very droll. I suppose fonts are inherently humorous now because they are clerical enough to seem absurd but not so sacred that laughter sounds blasphemous.
Yet, as Michael Hill points out in his splendid new edition of Pevsner’s architectural guide to Dorset: “In rebuilding Norman churches in later centuries, fonts appear often to have been venerated and retained.”
So at the church of St Mary at Stoke Abbott, a village of 190 people now, the interior gives an impression of the High Middle Ages, with the big window behind the altar dating from the 15th century. At the back of the church, though, is its greatest treasure, a font from the 12th century.
It is shaped like a conventional well-head, a cylinder, of the kind that King Clovis of the Franks is sometimes shown standing in for his baptism on Christmas Day 508. (I hope they warmed the water.)
There’s no room to stand inside the font at Stoke Abbott, with its shallow basin now lined with lead. But the outer surface is covered with carving, “not arbitrary and confused as they often are, but rationally organised,” says the new Pevsner, quoting the 1972 edition.
In place of writhing inexplicable beasts, the surface is divided at the top into eight arches, beneath each of which a head in deep relief looks out. The lower part is decorated with eight large hexagons that enclose leafy patterns.
The impression from a distance is of almost classical regularity. Close up the heads are seen to be strongly stylised, with centrally parted hair and large eyes, some with pupils indicated by holes made by the sculptor’s drill. The head on the west side, visible as you look towards the altar, has a long beard, covering the geometric frieze below.
Whom do the heads represent? Pevsner has no room to speculate. Earlier authors suggested Noah, his wife, their three sons and their wives. That would be possible if four heads are meant to be female. It would be iconographically spot-on too, since a familiar text from the first Epistle of St Peter spoke of Noah’s Ark “in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you.”
A font that Michael Hill, using the words of the old Pevsner, calls “very odd indeed” seems to perpetuate conventions from past centuries. It is at Winterborne Whitechurch, a church built of flints from the belt of chalk on which it stands. The bowl of the font, of a golden stone, has an octagonal stem curving out to support the bowl, richly carved with vines. But pillars of no structural use stand at four corners.
This font is of the 15th century, but the convention of unstructural pillars was strong in the South West. The architectural historian Francis Bond (1852-1918), in his Fonts and Font Covers (1908), with its scores of slightly sooty-looking photographs, shows several Norman examples from Cornwall. He entertains the idea that the corner pillars might be the vestiges of ritual canopies or ciboria, of a kind to be seen at Cividale in Udine, Italy.
Who knows if there is a historical connection, but a canopy indicated reverence for the sacrament of Christian initiation, which also explains the care taken in making and preserving fonts, in Dorset and beyond.