In every English parish church, taking centre-stage in the nave, stands a font. For centuries, every infant in the parish was considered to have been saved from damnation once christened and fonts, as the vessels for this crucial rite of passage, were a pre-eminent tool in the Church's fight against the Devil. Standing within the public space of the church — as with pews, rood screens and chantry chapels — fonts would have been paid for by the parishioners, and so the richness of their decoration was determined by the funds available and the prevailing architectural fashions of the time. Some of the more extravagant have elaborate multi-tiered covers, raised for use via ropes or chains and pulleys. In this introduction to English fonts, Matthew Byrne explores numerous examples in churches all over the country, highlighting the most notable fonts and explaining their changing decoration across the centuries.
