Hardwick nr. Northampton / Hardwicke / Herdewic / Herdewike

While Cox & Harvey (1907) describe the Hardwick(e) font as one of the best instances of the country's 13th-century fonts. Paley (1844) describes it as hexagonal and "a curious and rather rudely-worked example of the Early English period". Mee (1945) writes: "The font is [...] unusual, the bowl set within six plain arches on rounded columns, reaching from the base nearly to the top, each arch with a plain background in which is a recess shaped like a window." Noted in the Victoria County History (Northampton, vol. 4, 1937): "The advowson, which was given to St. Andrew's Priory in Northampton about 1130, [...] and confirmed to that house by Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, [...] was in 1199 conveyed by Walter, Prior of Northampton, to the Master of the Knights Templars. [...] The tower, the nave arcade, and the south side of the chancel date from about 1220 and, though the chancel arch appears to be of rather later in the same century, the church is in plan substantially of one period. [...] The 13th-century font is one of the most interesting in the county. The upper part of the bowl is hexagonal, the angles supported by detached shafts with moulded capitals and bases, carrying plain chamfered arches: the underside of the bowl is rounded and rests on a massive circular stem. Above the shafts the angles are chamfered upwards, the top thus forming a figure of twelve sides [...] At one time the space between the shafts was filled with stucco, hiding the stem and the underside of the bowl: the panels thus formed were ornamented with blind lancets. The font is so figured in Paley's Baptismal Fonts, 1844. A former curate picked out the stucco and released the shafts." The font is made of a hexagonal (?) block of stone and has a blind arcade of pointed arches, an arch to each face; the upper corners have been chamfered, giving thus the upper surface of the basin a dodecagonal shape, while the inner well is round. There is also a Gothic niche incised in each of the six sides of the basin. The web page of The Warwich Society [http://users.quista.net/farnell/info_stnics.htm] notes that there are three fonts in this church: 1) a Victorian font made of Caen stone and supported on five columns in the south aisle, a gift of Mrs Charlotte Cox in 1873 -- 2)a terracotta font now located beneath the pulpit but earlier at the St Nicholas Church Hall, in Bathside [neither of these fnots is listed in this Index on account of the late dates] -- and 3)a Norman font of the 12th or 13th century, now located in the north aisle by the Lady Chapel, "of grey Purbeck marble with simple 'flat-iron' recessed arcading round the octagonal bowl [...]. It was retrieved from the churchyard in 1876 and reinstated in the church." Not mentioned in Pevsner & Cherry (1973).