The parish of Wield is located in E Hampshire, W of Alton. The church of St James, in the village of Lower Wield, comprises a chancel with a plain round-headed priest’s doorway on its S side, and a nave with a W bell turret and a W vestry, both weatherboarded. The diminutive vestry occupies the site of a bell tower which was removed in 1810. The E wall of 1884 is of exposed flint rubble while the remainder is rendered. The roofs are covered in red tiles.

The nave is entered through a 12thc. S doorway with carved capitals. Opposite this is a blocked round-headed N doorway (aperture 3.11m by 0.76m) with a chamfered surround and a segmental rere arch. The 12thc. chancel arch survives. The Purbeck font was presented by Winchester Cathedral in 1899.

The Domesday Survey of 1086 recorded that Wield belonged to the Bishop of Winchester and was held by Durand (of Gloucester). No church was mentioned. The earliest documentary evidence for its existence is a document of 1280, regarding the presentation. Much of the fabric, however, clearly dates from the 12thc.

The church appears to have been built around 1150. The bell tower was demolished in 1810 and the bell turret added in 1812. When the church was restored in 1884, the E wall was rebuilt with a new window.

The font was presented to Wield by Winchester Cathedral on 28 December 1899. It appears to have been the damaged Norman font spotted in his garden by Canon Durst when he took up residency in the Close after being installed as a Canon of the Cathedral in 1887. Durst initiated the repair of the font by Cathedral masons and in 1893 it was displayed in the S aisle of the Cathedral. The following account was published in the local newspaper:

'Within the past few days a new object of interest has been placed in the south aisle of the Cathedral, near the old Cloister door, by the orders of the Dean. It consists of a late Norman font in Purbeck marble, which, with its original base and one section of the drain or well, only requires a new section of the well and four new columns at the angles in Purbeck to make it practically perfect, and as when it probably left the church of St. Mary Kalendar some 250 years ago on the desecration of the site. The tradition is that it came from thence. The bowl was cracked in two or three wall holes [sic] which once supported iron supports for flowers and creepers, for to floral purposes it was long devoted in the Close gardens, where Canon Durst on coming into his residence found it, and with good taste had it removed to the north transept awaiting the Dean’s selection of a site for its proper erection, and this has now been accomplished, and the Cathedral masons have made the font as good as it was when ejected from its proper place in the above church’ (Hampshire Chronicle, 5 August 1893, 5).

The church of St Mary Kalendar stood close to the junction of High Street and Parchment Street, very near Winchester Cathedral. It was a ruin by the early 17thc., and the parish was absorbed into that of St Maurice in 1683.

In the 19thc. the main entrance to Wield church was through the W doorway. The priest’s doorway was exposed sometime after 1908. The S doorway was reopened in 1931 by T. D. Atkinson and the plain N doorway was revealed in 1997.

George Zarnecki reportedly dated Wield church, including the S doorway, chancel arch and priest’s doorway, to c.1150 (Bullen et al., 2010, 556). The font, possibly from St Mary Kalendar in Winchester, dates from c.1200.