Haaksbergen / Hoksebarge

Information on the composite font here from several sources, forwarded by Pol Herman to BSI (e-mail of 28 November 2021) is noted below. G.J. Leppink's Het Doopvont ca.1258, in Aold Hoksebarge, Orgaan van de Heemkundige Kring Haaksbergen, no. 4 - november 1995, page 1856,: About 1210 the lord no longer felt at home in his court and built his now fortified court in another place, called the Blanckenborgh, just north of the village centre, on the bifurcation of the Blankenburg and the Ds. van Kriekenstraat, still known by the old people as the "Endeke too". This lord of the castle on Blankenborgh probably had a baptismal font hewn from Benthelmer stone, and placed in the church in the middle of the 13th century. In 1963 church warden J.W. Meier accidentally found a lump of Bentheimer stone during excavation work in the garden of the Reformed rectory in Haaksbergen, which on closer examination turned out to be the pedestal of this baptismal font. The Romanesque sculpture is badly damaged and the basin, which must have been violently knocked off, was missing. Of the four supporting figures, one is quite well preserved. It is a seated man, head thrust forward, arms resting straight forward on his thighs. Face and hands are indistinguishable. The damage probably originated during the 80-year war. As a reminder of the earliest times of the Christian community in Haaksbergen, this foot was cleaned in 1979 and set up in the Richtershof. In 1985 the baptismal font was temporarily lent to the Rijksmuseum Twente. It has been back in the Richtershof since September 1989. Hagens H.,"Oude doopvonten in Twente", 't Inschrien 1983, p. 11 and Historie van Haaksbergen. The Protestantse gemeente te Haaksbergen-Buurse [https://www.pkn-haaksbergen.nl/de_kerk_te_haaksbergen/] [accessed 6 December 2021] shows a fragment of a baptismal font in a glass cage and informs that it is the base of a 13th-century baptismal font unearthed during works in 1963; of the four original supports around the base one still shows a human figure with hands resting on the thighs, and to the right of it is the contour of another human figure; the fragment is now used in combination with a late-17th century basin NB: the Richtershof is a multi-purpose meeting room mext to the Reformed Church at Haaksbergen