To understand this page properly - that is, to understand why the fonts at these churches are worthy of attention - you need to read my page about the work of the late Mary Curtis Webb. Of course, there is nothing to stop you visiting these churches for other reasons but it would be a shame to ignore the significance of the iconography of the fonts. All of the fonts are Norman and all of them feature the “circle interlaced with arcs” symbol that proven by Mary Webb to represent Plato’s view of the Macrocosm.
So what the heck is Plato’s Macrocosm? Well first we need to understand that at this point in history the Greek philosophy that the world was composed of four elements - earth, wind, fire and water - was still unchallenged. Plato in his “Timaeus” said “A suitable shape for a living being that was to contain all living beings would be a figure that contains all possible figures within itself. Therefore He (God) turned it into a rounded spherical shape, with extremes equidistant in all directions from the centre. It was designed to supply its own nourishment from its own decay, and to comprise and cause all processes”.
From this and other utterances by Plato a geometric representation of the Cosmos was devised and it is this - the so-called “circle with interlaced arcs” - that we see at this group of Northamptonshire churches. The first known reproduction is in Isidore of Seville’s eighth century “De Natura Rerum” but Mary Webb shows that the design was probably considerably older and, more importantly, that the concepts would have been known to most scholars and theologians in the twelfth century.
I have written extensively about Mary Webb’s work on this site and have traced several examples on sculptural art in the rest of Europe.
The principal focus of Mary Webb was the extraordinary font at Stone in Buckinghamshire that was originally in the nearby church of Hampstead Norreys. She concluded that the carvings there and at some other locations were influenced by the intellectual wellspring that was Reading Abbey. Mary identified all of the Northamptonshire fonts on this web page with their representations of the Macrocosm and also identified St Peter’s Church in Northamptonshire as having a considerable display of Platonic imagery on the west wall of its tower. Mary Webb, perhaps through lack of time, did not write specifically about this cluster of Northamptonshire churches.
St Peter’s also has one of the most complete and spectacular displays of sculpted Norman arcade capitals in England. Interestingly, the Churches Conservation Trust that now cares for St Peter’s proposes that Reading Abbey was responsible for all the sculpture, doubtless drawing upon the similarities between the carved capitals at St Peter’s and those few that survive from the demolished Reading Abbey.
The CCT, however, does not acknowledge or does not understand the significance of the carving on the west wall of their church, as opposed to the capitals. The fonts at the four churches described on this page surely were influenced not by distant Reading Abbey but by Northampton Abbey that was built some decades before Reading and which was, like Reading, a Cluniac house. My own view is that Northampton Abbey was the intellectual wellspring for sculpture not only for St Peter’s Northampton and these four village churches but also at Reading Abbey itself. I believe the CCT has got it the wrong way round! Mary Webb was doubtless right in her surmise that Reading Abbey was responsible for the font carvings at Stone, but I believe it was in turn influenced by Northampton Abbey.
All of this is supposition and speculation. What cannot be gainsaid, however, is that the churches at these tiny, seemingly inconsequential villages, have Norman fonts that together represent a highly significant corpus of sculpture with a place in the history of theological development in this country. There is a similar cluster in North Norfolk (I am not suggesting that Northampton Abbey was responsible for these) and although the high quality of their sculpture and the likelihood of their being carved by a “school” of stonemasons is generally acknowledged, the significance of their iconography is, again, overlooked.
So, this page is about the four representations of the Cosmos on Northamptonshire village church fonts. Manifestly, no two were carved by the same mason. We must see the cluster (as in Norfolk) as emanating from some local intellectual tradition, rather than from an artistic one. Just how many such fonts existed orignially and have since been destrotyed we can never know.
Update June 2023. One of the joys of church crawling is the occasional serendipitous discovery. Over the years I have found a fair few examples of neo-Platonic symbolism that Mary Webb did not know about. I recently visited Carlton Church in Bedfordshire. The Norman font there is fairly well-known. It is dominated by cat mask/green man imagery that makes this font charmingly unique. Nobody, however, mentions the side rammed up close to the south wall. Although a good half of the design has disappeared what is left is enough for us to see it was unmistakably a circle interlaced with arcs! It isn’t in Northamptonshire as all of these other examples are, but it is only thirteen miles from Mears Ashby and so I think we must treat it as part of the same intellectual “school” or tradition as the other four examples. So I am including it here.
Please see also these other pages on this website:
North West Norfolk “School” of Fonts
The Research of Mary Curtis Webb
Mary Curtis Webb’s Research as seen elsewhere in Europe
St Peter’s Church, Northampton
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