Little Thurlow / Thurlow Parva

Parker (1855) notes: "The font is large and square, ornamented with flat foliage, apparently N[orman]." Noted in Mortlock (1938) and Pevsner (1975). Listed in Cautley (1982) as a baptismal font of the 12th century. Described and illustrated in Baxter (2008), in The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland: "The font is by the carvers of the unfinished and mutilated one at Hawkedon [...] The bowl is circular within and lined with lead. Its exterior is painted, but a mortar repair can be seen on the Eern rim. It stands on a pained square shaft with a double-chamfered base, both later." The CRSBI describes the font as Romanesque. Unlike the font at Hawkendon, this one is a finished work and has retained its original shape and ormanetation, although the whole object is covered in hideous whitewash; three of the sides are decorated each with a complex floral and foliage interlace, the fourth [the south side] having a foliated cross inscribed in an octagon; all four sides have an incised rectangular frame around the main motif, and the basin has a colonnette with capital and base carved at each angle. The similarity with the font at Hawkendon is, as pointed out in the CRSBI above, remarkable, and must be from the same master or workshop.