John Wycliffe's Font

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Fri, 24/01/2025 - 00:00

Friends and I called at Hipswell in North Yorkshire this month. This is the place where John Wycliffe, ‘the Morning Star of the Reformation’ is said to have been born. The parish church (below) is closed and is relatively modern, while a grand farmhouse to its rear (above) is fifteenth-century and therefore about a hundred years too late to have been known by the great proto-protestant. There was likely a small church here in the 1300s in which Mass was said, but the important rites of passage (such as baptism and burial) were probably performed at the mother church, three miles away at Richmond, where the parson collected the many fees.

Although much of Richmond’s parish church has been 'restored', there is a font there, above, dating to 1399, and very fine it is, too. Yet Wycliffe died in 1384, so this he would not have known. Curiously, and not far from the church’s main entrance, there is a peculiar flower pot made of carved stone which looks remarkably font-like (below). These older fonts are often found within or without ancient churches; having been replaced by ones of a grander style, they become places for flowers to grow. I would suggest that this is the very object from which a young John Wycliffe was duly baptised sometime between 1324 and 1331.

As the medieval priest made the sign of the cross three times, recited appropriate Latin prayers and commanded the Devil to depart from the child (often opening the north door, known as the Devil’s door, to assist his escape), he would then pour holy oil into the water of the font. The child was anointed with the oil and then baptised, naked, with three immersions in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The forehead was then anointed with holy oil and a white chrisom cloth was bound round him as a symbol of the cleansing of his sins. He blew air into the child’s mouth as a symbol of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and placed salt on the tongue with the words "Receive the salt of wisdom". He then dabbed his saliva on little John’s ears and lips and made the sign of the cross on his head, breast and hands. Finally, the little lad was dressed in a white chrisom robe, which, if he had died within a month, would have been used as a shroud. He was given a lighted candle, which was then thought to keep the devil at bay.

Quite a rigmarole, and this is likely the object in and around which it happened. Little wonder that people two to three hundred years hence would describe these as ‘dark and dumb ceremonies’. If only Parson John Sleight knew that the little boy whom he handled around that stone font would challenge the very Bishop of Rome himself, becoming the greatest heretic (i.e. most faithful Christian) of medieval England! Wycliffe would use his Leicestershire pulpit to preach against such superstitions. That salt conferred no wisdom upon him, but the great God of heaven certainly did. Baptism cannot save a person, but Christ most can, and does still. He wrote:

“It is not good for us to trust in our merits, in our virtues or our righteousness; but only in God's free pardon, as given us through faith in Jesus Christ.”