Leonard Stanley St. Swithuns Church Tour

You will notice the font standing beside you. The stone bowl and pedestal date from the early 18th Century. Its cover predates it and is from the late 17th Century. For centuries every child born in the parish, almost without exception, would have been baptised in this font. In the days before the secular registers of births, marriages and deaths were established in 1837, baptism was not only the membership rite of the Church of England, but also the route to establishing citizenship in England.