Winfarthing / Wineferthinc

There are two entries for Winfarthing [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/TM1085/winfarthing/] [accessed 20 October 2015], neither of which mentions cleric or church in it. Blomefield (1805-1810) notes a church here dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin, in which in the year 1326, "John de le Nelde, de Schympling, priest, at the resignation of Thomas, the last vicar" took over the living. Noted in Paley (1844) as a Norman font with "the upper part of the bowl being octagonal, the lower square", and gives Whapdole (Lincs.) as a font of the same design and period. White's Directory of 1883 reports "a fine Norman" font in this church. Described in Pevsner & Wilson (1999): "Norman, round with four short attached columns in the corners. Two of them have heads instead of capitals. One of the columns is spiral-fluted. Barely matching C19 top half curiously like another font placed on top." Described and illustrated in Knott (2006): "huge, tublike font, which sits at the west end. It actually appears to be parts of two separate fonts joined together, and Pevsner thought the octagonal top part was probably a Victorian addition to the Norman stem. Whatever, the most interesting thing about it is the pair of faces on the eastern pillars of the base." Franklin (2008), however, writes: "The font appears to be Romanesque, recut in the 19thc., it presumably originally resembled the font at South Acre"; Franklin (ibid.) argues that the heads on the colonnettes of the base are actually modern carvings, whereas she suggests that the sides of the basin "appear to be the chamfered corners of what was originally a square bowl".