Henfield / Hamfelde

In Walker (1908). Harrison (1920) reports the font as 13th-century. Noted in Drummond-Roberts (1935) with date in the 15th century. The Victoria County History (Sussex, vol. 6, pt. 3, 1987) notes: "A church was founded in or before 770 by the thegn Warbald and his wife [...] In or before 1219 the rectory was converted to a prebend in Chichester cathedral [...] The nave and chancel are early 13th-century [...] The present appearance of the building owes much to a restoration of 1870-1. [...] A piscina and the octagonal font which rests on five shafts are 13th-century," Described and illustrated in the CRSBI (2008): "The font has an octagonal bowl of unidentified stone, probably sandstone. Its rim has been replaced (in cement?), imperfectly matching the original. The basin is lead lined. The lower part of the bowl is chamfered and rolled, and a red tinge to the underside suggests that it suffered severe fire damage at some time. The bowl is supported by an octagonal central column and four round angle colonnettes, all of which appear to have been renewed. Three of the two-roll bases may be original; the fourth has certainly been replaced, as has most of the square upper plinth. The shallow lower plinth is modern. [...] The polygonal form of this font is strongly in favour of a date in the early 13thc., but the decoration at the bottom of the bowl is suggestive of hyphenated chevron. It is clearly related, formally, to the Sussex marble fonts, which abounded in late 12thc. Sussex. Drummond-Roberts [cf. supra] nevertheless dated it to the 15thc." [NB: we have no information on the font from the original 8th-century church here].