Sutton Valence / Sudtone / Sutton Hastings / Town Sutton

There is an entry for Sutton [Valence] [alternate spelling] in the Domesday survey [https://opendomesday.org/place/TQ8149/sutton-valence/] [accessed 31 December 2022]; it reports a church in it. The church and its baptismal font are noted and illustrated in Charles Frederick Angell's Some account of the parish church of St. Mary's, at Town Sutton, or Sutton Valence, in the county of Kent (London: J.E. Adlard, 1874). An interior plan of the re-buil church shows the baptismal in the southeast of the nave in 1828, next to Lambes chancel; the same source shows a drawing of the font captioned "As it stood in the Church prior to 1823", i.d. before the demolition of the old church and the installation of the font in the new building. The font is listed in Tyrrell-Green (1928) as the basin of an early baptismal font "with concave sides and octagonal in plan". Noted in Newman (1980): "Font. Perp[endicular]. Octagonal. Four-petalled flowers [cf. ImagesArea]on the sides of the bowl, which [...] are slightly concave." The entry for this church in Historic England [Listing NGR: TQ8096949189] notes: "Parish church. 1823-8 by W. Ashenden, incorporating medieval work [...] C15 octagonal concave-sided font with petalled flowers, on shafted octagonal stem with moulded base." [NB: none of the above sources appears to have bothered to look at the font itself, or at Angell's illustration [cf. supra], which shows two emblems and an eight-petalled -not four-petalled] rosette on one of the visible sides in the source; one of the two emblems is the England coat of arms with the St Geroge cross, while the other is a treflée or fleuronnée and crosslet saltire cross not in a shield] [NB: only three panels are clearly visible in our sources].

]. The pedestal base is also octagonal and adorned with four buttresses.