Pakefield / Pagefella

There is drawing (?) of the font at Pakefield church listed in the 1824 auction 'Catalogue of the valuable collection of the late George Nassau, Esq.[...]'; the item is listed on p. 13, set no. 215, as "Pakefield Church Font", together with several other items [copy of the auction catalogue held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford]. Suckling (1846-1848) writes: "In Domesday Book it is written Pagefella, and Gurth held an estate here with a mediety of the church and 16 acres and a half of glebe land, valued at five shillings. [...] There is a fine octangular font of stone, sculptured with the emblems of the four Evangelists, and which, from its position, seems to have served at the sacrament of baptism for both medieties. It was covered, till very lately, by a wooden model of the upper portion of the tower and spire of Norwich Cathedral, which is now removed to the vestry. The model is about seven feet high, and was made by an ingenious inhabitant of the parish about seventy years since" [i.e., ca. 1750-1760, because Suckling took most of his notes for the book in the 1820s and 1830s]. Parker (1855), too, mentions the Evangelists' emblems. Described in Bond (1908) as an octagonal mounted baptismal font of the 15th century, the sides of the basin ornamented with "demi-angels" alternating with lions. The Parish web site [http://pakefieldchurch.com/] [accessed 5 March 2012] suggests the font was probably given to the church by Robert Gaunt, rector, ca. 1392, resposible for the restoration of the church at that time; this same source further notes: " At the corner of the window in the sanctuary there is a carved fragment of what appears to be a lion – possibly one of four which may be supposed to have supported a font which was replaced by the present one put into the church by Robert Graunt nearly 600 years ago. If so, it is perhaps the oldest piece of masonry in the church." ***It is odd that all the sources consulted appear to err in the description of the contents of the panels of this font; there are is no set of the Evangelists' symbols, though there are angels and animals in them; nor are the angels 'demi-figures', but full-length seated angels that alternate around the basin sides with four gardant mammals; the angels hold a number of different objects, at least one of them complemented with a scroll; the seated mammals are not all lions as stated on these sources, either, and at least one of them is clearly a royal stag, as the antler points, the fleur-de-lis crown around its neck with the hanging chain shows. This is a most original font among those belonging to the several variants of the East Anglia type of design.