Warham All Saints No. 1 / Guarham / Quarham / Wareham All Saints

The Domesday survey has seven entries for Warham [variant spellings] [http://domesdaymap.co.uk/place/XX0000/warham-all-saints-and-st-mary/] [accessed 12 December 2013] none of which mentions a church or cleric in it. Blomefield (1805-1810) writes: "Here were 3 churches— All-Saints—St. Mary's— and St. Mary Magdalen. [...] All Saints [...] is a rectory", and names "Richard de Aston" as first recorded rector, in 1312. This date is the earliest reference related to the date of this church in Blomefield (ibid.). On-site notes: a basin from a baptismal font, its well full of old stones, is now among the handful of objects that make up a mini-museum in the north chancel of the church [others are an old plow, etc.]; the basin is now octagonal but shows clearly that it has been re-cut from a square basin. This object is not the baptismal font listed in Cox-Harvey (1907) as a Norman font in this site; they would not have failed to mention the damage to it or the similarity with the font at Burnham Deepdale; the font had probably been already discarded from the church by that time. This must be the font about which Bond (1908) writes: "a sister font [to the one at Burnham Deepdale] has been recently kicked out of the church of Warham All Saints, and is now part of a rockery and filled with ferns." This font is noted in Pevsner & Wilson (1997) [NB: as Knott (2005) points out, there is an error in Pevsner & Wilson; they mention four fonts in this church, but there are only three]. As the images show [cf. Images area] only a portion of the original basin remains now [July 1998]; the four original corners were hacked off to make it octagonal without concern for the destruction of the scenes on the sides; the same was done to the lower part of the basin, obviously too tall for the taste of the vandals. One of the sides has a large drilled hole at the bottom, which probably means that this basin was used as a trough in a farm or garden [NB: Lewis' Directory of 1848 reports: "on the Chalk Farm is the ancient fonts of this [i.e., Warham All Saints'] church, which has remained there for centuries." This must be a reference to the re-cut basin with the drain hole on the side]. There is enough detail left to show that the lions and foliage of the upper basin side of the Burnham Deepdale font can also be discerned on this mutilated basin; that the arcade and figures of the Burnham Deepdale font can be made out on this basin from the partial carving still left on it that shows the lions, the top of the arches and the upper bodies of the figures. It was once a beatiful piece! [NB: are the two Norman fonts at Warham All Saints from the same church? Could one of them have been the original font at Warham St. Mary Magdalene's?]