Romanesque Baptismal Fonts in East Yorkshire Parishes 309

Chapter 12 Romanesque Baptismal Fonts in East Yorkshire Parishes: Decoration and Devotion

Carolyn Twomey

The stone baptismal font played a vital and visible role in the religious life of the medieval parish church.1 The waters of the font cleansed the soul of sin and welcomed new Christians into the community of the earthly and heavenly Church through the ritual of baptism. A prominent physical focal point in the nave, the font endured throughout the Middle Ages as an active site of the lit- urgy, devotional reminder of the baptismal moment, and call to penance. The innovation of the stone font in England in the late 11th and early 12th centuries fixed the sacrament of baptism in place for the first time since the age of the late antique baptistery. Before the 11th century, diverse objects and settings – baptismal churches, porticus, river baptisms, western towers, wooden tubs, and portable objects – indicated a long-term flexibility in baptismal practice that only stabilized with the advent of the stone font.2 This lithic change con- stituted a profound shift from a diversity of settings in the earlier Anglo-Saxon period to the establishment of a permanent place of baptism in stone within the built environment of the parish church in the later Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods. This essay grounds this material transition within the context of the Great Rebuilding of parish churches from c. 1050-1150 and explores the ramifica- tions of the widespread transformation of English sacramental practice from wood to stone. Focusing on decorated fonts in the East Riding of Yorkshire,

1 I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sarah Blick, Laura Gelfand, the volume editors, and all participants in the 2014 NEH summer seminar in York for their helpful conversations and comments. 2 Sarah Foot, “‘By Water in the Spirit:’ The Administration of Baptism in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” in Pastoral Care Before the Parish, ed. John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), pp. 171-92; John Blair, “The Prehistory of English Fonts,” in Intersections: The Archaeology and History of Christianity in England, 400-1200: Papers in Honour of Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, ed. Martin Henig and Nigel Ramsay, British Archaeological Reports British Series 505 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 149-77; Paul Barnwell, The Place of Baptism in Anglo-Saxon and Norman Churches, Deerhurst Lecture 2013 (Deerhurst, 2014); Carolyn Twomey, “Living Water, Living Stone: The History and Material Culture of Baptism in Early Medieval England, c. 600- c. 1200” (PhD Diss, Boston College, 2017).

I argue that the stone font represented the profound architectural develop- ments of the late 11th- and 12th-century church building in miniature, and provided a monumental focal point for devotion, one which emphasized the life and death of the Christian at baptism through its iconography and materi- ality. Fonts were both “living stones” (1 Pet. 2:4-7) that constructed the eternal community of the parish faithful and permanent sepulchers to individual sin. Elite and non-elite devotees of the parish encountered their font in various ways; in this essay, I show how medieval devotion was both material and liturgical. The font was a potent site of community ritual and a key place of interaction between clergy, parents, child, and godparents for the forging of new spiritual relationships with Christ and one another. The very fabric of the stone font materialized these ritual actions and social performances of theo- logical truths at baptism. This conspicuous devotional object in the small space of the Romanesque parish nave articulated complex ideas about the Christian community at baptism through not only its decorative motifs, but also the meanings of its stone. Viewing baptismal fonts in the same historical context as contemporary church architecture allows us to see them as active objects, rather than simply passive furniture: things which affected and directed the devotional lives of the medieval men and women who encountered them. Between c. 1050 and 1150, English churches were rapidly rebuilt from wood to stone. From grand cathedrals to small parishes, the churches of the Great Rebuilding transformed the pastoral landscape of England through a concen- trated program of building and rebuilding.3 Though scholars initially saw this movement through the lens of Norman domination,4 historians now iden- tify the phenomenon as a more complex development arising in both major and minor churches from diverse institutional backgrounds in an overlap-

3 Richard Gem, “The English Parish Church in the 11th and Early 12th Centuries: A Great Rebuilding,” in Minsters and Parish Churches: The Local Church in Transition 950-1200, ed. John Blair (Oxford, 1988), pp. 21-30; Richard Morris, Churches in the Landscape (London, 1989), pp. 140-67; John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), pp. 407-22; Richard Morris, “Local Churches in the Anglo-Saxon Countryside,” in The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology, ed. Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton, and Sally Crawford (Oxford, 2011), pp. 172-97, at 191. 4 Eric Fernie, “The Effect of the Conquest on Norman Architectural Patronage,” Anglo-Norman Studies 9 (1987), 71-85; Eric Fernie, “Architecture and the Effects of the Norman Conquest,” in England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. David Bates and Anne Curry (London, 1994), pp. 105-16; For the various historiographical interpretations of the 1066 Norman Conquest, see Marjorie Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest (Manchester, 1999), especially Chapter 8.