This gorgeous little 'Borrowers' pocket font is a delightful little oddity - shown to me by the verger from Waltham Abbey, after asking where the font was.
We tend to imagine the Middle Ages as cumbersome, static and slow. Yet this fourteenth-century miniature font at Waltham Abbey suggests otherwise. Small enough to accompany a travelling priest, it is faith made portable - a pocket-sized piece of sacred infrastructure ready for life on the road.
Convenience, it seems, did not begin with Amazon Prime. Medieval people also valued objects that could move, work efficiently and meet them where they were. What delights me is the union of solemn purpose and practical ingenuity: all the sacramental gravity of the great church condensed into something you might tuck beneath your arm.
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