Eamon Duffy:
One of the most remarkable manifestations of the impact of the Church's catechetical concerns on the laity is the collection of forty or so octagonal baptismal fonts, the majority of them in Norfolk and Suffolk, which portray the Seven Sacraments around the bowl. These fonts date from the three generations before the Reformation. One of the earliest is at East Dereham, acquired in 1468, and the last, at Walsoken, was made ten years after the break with Rome, in 1544. Many, perhaps most, of these fonts are the result of lay benefactions to the parish church...[The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy. Yale University Press, 1992]
The fonts are common in areas where Lollardy had been particularly strong in the generation prior to their appearance, as at Martham in Norfolk, the home of the redoubtable Margery Baxter, and it has been suggested by Professor Ann Nichols, the leading authority on the subject, that they represent a considered response to the Lollard attack on the sacramental teaching of the Church, and mark the understanding and acceptance of that teaching by the most influential laity of East Anglia. Certainly the iconography of the sacraments on the fonts is extraordinarily precise and "correct". In many continental and some English representations of the sacraments in other media they are represented by some peripheral part of the ritual... On these fonts, by contrast, the scene depicted is almost always that of the action held by the theologians to be constitutive of the sacrament... The carvings therefore represent an extremely precise and full form of catechetical teaching, perhaps designed to counteract heresy. At any rate the very large number commissioned in the later fifteenth century bear witness to lay interest in and enthusiasm for the teachings they enshrine. After the Reformation, Protestant activists recognized in the iconography of these fonts a rallying point for Catholic belief and a means of propagating it, and attacked them accordingly.
More information and pictures at Norfolk Churches.
