Cokethorpe / Hardwick nr. Ducklington & Witney

The Ecclesiastical and Architectural Topography of England: Oxfordshire (1850) notes: "The font is good N[orman], with intersecting arches." The Antiquary (Saturday, April 6, 1872, p. 83) reports of an excursion of the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society that visited Cokethorpe Chapel: "The principal object of interest here is the font, which is a remarkably handsome one, and which stands in the chancel. Mr. Parker observed that it is not in its right position, and pointed out that one side of it had been cut away, and it must, therefore, have at one time stood against the wall. He drew particular attention to the handsome carved work around its bowl, and observed that they got there something like te origin of the pointed arch. Here were two round arches intersecting each other, which, as regards mere form, produced the pointed arches. With respect to the date there were one or two peculiarities about it. Some of the ormanents on it appeared to be of the 12th century -King Stephen's reign- [i.e., 1135-1154] such as the nail head and the rose ornaments. On the south side of the Iffley church was a rose ornament similar to the one they saw on the font. But they would observe also the kind of tooth ornament, which was characteristic of the 13th century. The font probably gave them the key note to the whole building." Noted in Kelly's Oxford Directory of 1911 as a Norman font. Noted in Sherwood & Pevsner (1974): "Font. Norman, with a blind arcade on intersecting arches of spiral-fluted columns." Described and illustrated in The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland]: late-Romanesque baptismal font "made of Oolitic limestone [...]; notably finer than that in the mother church of Ducklington [...], where extensive use of miniature nailhead in the S arcade suggests a workshop link." The originally cylindrical font was savagely sliced vertically trimming off about two arches of the beautiful arcade of intersecting arches, probably to make it fit against a wall at some time in its past; the flat capitals of the arcade are beaded, as are parts of the band that runs horizontally around the basin side 'behind' the slender colonnettes that are done in various shapes (doubled, braided, torsade, etc.); the bases of the columns are moulded and uniform in shape forming a continuum; some of the spaces between the colonnettes below the band of beaded-tape are decorated with a single motif (several eight-petalled rosettes -one broken-, a four-leaf flower or branch, a scallop-shell); the bottom of the basin is demarkated by a thick roll moulding (missing in the cut area); the base, as pointed out in the CRSBI entry, consists of two cylindrical volumes, "possibly medieval": a narrow lower base on a wider plinth, both made up of a number of separate blocks of stone. Significant damage can be seen on the upper rim, part of it scruffily repaired. The wooden cover is round and flat, plain but for a metal handle, and appears modern. [NB: Cokethorpe church is now [2007] now in the grounds of Cokethorpe School, where it functions as the school chapel].