The font, of which Francis Bond says “among the most magnificent examples which we possess” in his 1908 book FONTS AND FONT COVERS, can be dated between 1461 and 1483, the reign of King Edward IV, since on the east side of the base is carved his rose en soleil badge:  however, it is probable that it was installed in the early part of that period.   It is matched on the west side by the arms of Howard impaling Tendring, as displayed in the south porch and above the west door.   This is a curiosity.   Those arms would correctly have been used only by the Sir John Howard who married Alice de Tendring in 1398, and who died in 1437:  while he may have initiated the “modernisation” of the church into the Perpendicular style of gothic architecture, he was long gone by the time the font was installed.   The next Sir John, later Duke of Norfolk, patron of the rebuilding of the church, would have been well aware of the discrepancy, and so would his stone carvers, so the blazon appears to be a deliberate “mistake”.   Did that Sir John order it as a commemoration of Stoke and the Tendring Hall estate coming under the suzerainty of the Howards, and as a token of affection for his grandfather?   The outstanding quality of both the font and the south doors is witness to John Howard’s wealth.

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The base of the font has two octagonal stages and a top platform in the form of a cross, giving three places for the godparents and one for the priest.   The octagonal basin is mounted on a shaft with eight niches with ogee canopies and a frieze of angels’ heads round the bottom:   it appears that the basin is carved from a single block of stone 80cm across by 58cm thick, an astonishing feat of craftsmanship.   The superb quality of that stone has allowed the sculptor to do his work in crisp detail, and they show, on the cardinal points, the emblems of the evangelists – Matthew’s angel to the west, Mark’s winged lion to the south, Luke’s winged ox to the north, and John’s eagle to the east.   While there is a scroll in every panel which presumably indicates that the person depicted was author of some religious work, the intermediate panels pose a conundrum.  There is a second angel, to the north west:  in the north east there is a robed and seated figure with a baggy hood pointing at a scroll on a lectern mounted on a cranked swivelling arm, which moves in a socket on a lion’s head, and in its top left-hand corner there is a stooping bird, unfortunately headless:  the southeast panel shows a curly-headed man with a sack over his shoulder pointing at a book on a lectern with books on shelves underneath, with his stick leaning against it:  and south west is another seated and robed figure with a baggy hood, and a tree to the right.   It is possible that the two hooded people are women.   It has been suggested that restoration work has been carried out on the panels, but there is no evidence of it, though there are traces of the paint ordered in 1686 in the deep cut parts of the carving.   It may be that people have been misled by the bottom half of the curly-headed man’s face being a gold-coloured and coarser-textured stone entirely different to its surroundings.   However, on close inspection the impression is that it is an inclusion in the stone which was not discovered until the working of the panel (and possibly the whole structure) was well-advanced, and unsurprisingly replacement of the entire bowl must have been dismissed.   Curiously, in daylight the font is grey, but at night in artificial light its colour is almost café au lait, and the inclusion almost disappears.

            The view east from the font shows clearly that the chancel is misaligned with respect to the nave.   There are three explanations for this.   First, that the master mason simply got it wrong:  this can be dismissed at once – the skill to erect a building such as this does not get it wrong.   Second, it is said that to symbolise the hang of Christ’s head on the cross.   Third, in mediaeval times, without such a thing as a mariner’s compass, there was no more than a very general conception of the direction of east and west, and when laying out churches it was common to take east as being the direction of the sun at sunrise on Easter Day, when the foundation stones of chancel and nave were laid.   In the 35 days between the earliest and latest dates of Easter the direction of sunrise moves considerably, and so did the alignments of chancel, founded first, and then nave.