Houghton St. Giles / Hacton / Hohtune / Houghton-by-the-hills / Houghton-in-the-Hole

The Domesday survey has one entry for this Houghton [Hohtune, folio 113r] [http://domesdaymap.co.uk/place/TF9235/houghton-st-giles/] [accessed 12 December 2013], but it mentions neither church nor cleric in it. Blomefield (1805-1810) writes: "The Church was dedicated to St. Giles, and was a rectory [...]; on its appropriation to the priory of St. Faith's, in Horsham, a vicarage was settled [...] It was appropriated before the reign of Edward I. [...] It is a single building, and of the same height with the chancel, covered with lead, and has a tower with three bells [...] In 1330, John Freyssel, presented vicar by the prior of St. Faith's." The reign of Edward I [cf. supra] lasted from 1272 throuh 1307, and somewhere between those dates the appropriation to the priory changed the status from a rectory to a vicarage; a vicar is first recorded in 1330 [cf. supra], but there must have been rectors before the date of the appropriation, but we have no other source to establish the original date of the church here. The present font is listed in Tyrrell-Green (1928) as one in a very large group of baptismal fonts that are plain octagonal with straightsided basins. Illustrated in Knott (2007). The font is plain but for a moulding at the upper rim and a thin one where the basin meets the stem; probably 15th- or 16th-century. [NB: we have no information on the font from original church here].