East Meon is a village in the South Downs National Park, in the district of East Hampshire. The nearest town of any size is Petersfield, just over 4 miles to the E. The village is in the valley of the River Meon , a chalk stream that rises in the village and flows into the Solent near Stubbington. All Saints' church stands on rising ground on the N side of the village and has a cruciform 12thc. plan to which a S aisle was added in the 13thc., continuous with a S chancel chapel. The S porch belongs to this campaign too. The crossing tower is 12thc and has a broach spire. The E end was rebuilt c.1500, and the church was restored by Ewan Christian in 1870 and again by Sir Ninian Comper in 1906-22. Construction is of flint with ashlar dressings, and the tower is ashlar faced.

The glory of the church is its Tournai marble font, and there is a second 12thc font bowl here too, brought from Westbury Chapel nearby and now ruinous. Other Romanesque features recorded here are the S and W doorways, the crossing arches, the crossing tower windows and stringcourses on the tower.

In early documents East and West Meon were not distinguished, and the earliest record that definitely includes East Meon was in the mid-11thc. when Bishop Alwin (d.1047) granted both Meons to the monks of Winchester. In 1066 Archbishop Stigand held it for the use of the monks, and retained it until his death in 1072, when it passed to the king. It was a vast manor of 72 hides, and of these Bishop Walkelin of Winchester held 6 hides and 1 virgate in 1086, along with the church. The manor remained with the crown until Henry II granted it to the church of Winchester, and it remained with the bishop until after the Reformation.

The so-called Tournai marble is a dense carboniferous limestone quarried on the banks of the river Scheldt near Tournai and either exported as freestone for decorative carving (as at Lewes Priory (Sussex)) or worked nearby and the products, mostly fonts, exported. This vigorous industry extended from the 12thc to the end of the 15thc. An English group of seven Tournai School fonts was established by Allen and Kitchen in 1894 articles. They were: St Mary Bourne, East Meon, St Michael’s Southampton and Winchester Cathedral (all Hants), Lincoln Cathedral and Thornton Curtis (both Lincs), and St Peter’s Ipswich (Suffolk). A fragment of a Tournai font was discovered in the town ditch in Ipswich in 1894, later being moved to Ipswich museum, but it was not included by Allen in his 1903 VCH contribution, probably because it was not in Hampshire. In fact it was largely ignored until the re-examination of the material by Drake (1993). Since Allen's original paper, three other fonts have been attributed to the group: Boulge, Romsey Abbey (Hants) and Iffley (Oxon). More recent scholars, notably Drake (1993 and 2002), have cast doubt on these attributions. According to Drake, the Romsey Abbey font was said to have been destroyed c.1850 during a restoration, but there is no other evidence that it ever existed. The Iffley font is of black limestone but is uneven in shape, undecorated and unlike other fonts in the Tournai group. As for the Boulge font; Drake asserts that the finish of the bowl is too smooth for decoration to have been chiselled off it (as suggested by Eden), and points out that the bowl is too tall for its width, in comparison with genuine Tournai School products.

The Winchester Cathedral font was seen by Allen as the most significant of the group, but the East Meon example is just as skilfully carved and has the advantage that the narrative scenes are easy to understand. The Genesis scenes on the N and E faces tell the story economically from the creation of Adam to the labours of Adam and Eve. The figures are lively and not at all idealised. One classicizing feature included in the NE and SW spandrels is the motif of a pair of peacocks drinking from a vase; a subject familiar from catacomb painting onwards as signifying immortality (because the flesh of the peacock was believed not to decay after death), and thus appropriate to the new life offered by the sacrament of baptism. The same motif is seen in the same position on the Tournai font at St Mary Bourne. These fonts were produced in Tournai and exported to this country, and comparisons have therefore been made with the larger corpus of continental material. The figure style of the East Meon font is similar to that found on the fragmentary Tournai font at St Bavo, Ghent, while the building on the E face at East Meon closely resembles that of the font at Dendermonde (see Drake 2002).

The presnce of a Tournai font, both here and at Winchester, has been linked to the patronage of Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester from 1129 until his death in 1171. The links to the see were very close, and he was the obvious candidate to import expenseive furnishings from overseas. Pevsner (1967) dates the font c.1130-40, a date accepted by Bullen (2010). Blakstad prefers c.1150, which may seem more reasonable given that Pevsner had suggested it as the date of the church.

The W doorway at East Meon is a version of the S doorway expanded by one order. The chevron is simple frontal, and here as well as elswhere in the church; the tower windows and the crossing arches, the capitals are mostly scallops with little in the way of experiment. Most simply have sheathed cones or wedges between the cones, although a couple in the crossing have collars and a few there and on the bell-openings play with the idea of carving cones and shields out of phase with one another. The only capitals that are not scallops or cushions are a form of flat leaf capital with additional pointed leaves in the centre of each face. These appear on the W doorway and the tower windows, perhaps the last parts of the church to be built, and stylistically more likely in 1150-60 than earlier. Work by the same sculptors may be seen on the doorways at Droxford, 6 miles to the SW.