Farringdon is a village in the East Hampshire district of the county, 2.8 miles S of Alton. All Saints' church stands in the E part of the village, known as Upper Farringdon. The church has a W tower with a shimgled broach spire, a nave with a S porch and a N aisle, and a chancel with a N organ room and vestry. The nave and its aisle are 12thc., as shown by the presence of round-headed lancets in the S wall, and a plain, blocked N doorway (photographed but not described here as it is entirely plain. The chancel and its addition are largely of 1858, by Woodyer, Most of the tower is 13thc. but the upper storey is 14thc., with quatrefoil bell-openings. The tower is of flint, the chancel of malmstone and the nave rendered. The brick porch dates from 1634. Romanesque features described here are the N arcade, the font and a quadruple capital used as a support for the font.

Before the Conquest, Farringdon was held by Godwine the Priest from King Edward. In 1086 it was held by Osbern, Bishop of Exeter and belonged to the church of Bosham (Sussex). It was assessed at 10 hides in 1066 and 5 hides in 1086. Osbern's successor as Bishop, William Warelwast, founded a college of secular canons at Bosham, and in 1243 Henry III confirmed the manor of Farringdon to the Bishops of Exeter. It remained in the hands of successive Bishops of Exeter until the Reformation, when Henry VIII granted it to Thomas Wriothesley. It remained in the hands of the Wriothesley Earls of Southampton until 1596.

The nave was presumably aisleless originally, then it was widened by a bay at its W end, perhaps to add a chapel, so that the present W half of the capital of pier 2 topped a half-column respond. This was in the mid-12thc. Then in the 13thc. two more bays were added at the E, converting the W chapel into an aisle by removing the E wall of the chapel and extending its N wall eastwards, and at the same time replacing the respond with a cylindrical pier. This must have been in the 1st half of the 13thc. This, more or less, is the solution to this puzzle offered by the Hampshire Historic Environment record. Pevsner and Lloyd (1967) offer a similar explanation, but are concerned that the W bay is much wider than the other two, and suggest that this might represent a later intervention after the arcade showed signs of failing, although there is no evidence for this. The latest edition of Pevsner (Bullen (2010)) makes no mention of a later intervention.

Pevsner (1967) remarks the font support as 'a block carved into four capitals', and asks 'what did it belong to?' The 2010 edition simply calls it 'a strange later capital'. VCH describes this support as 'a low pedestal in the form of four hollow-fluted capitals of late twelfth-century date'. It seems possible that this quadruple capital support was originally on short shafts and carried a low, square bowl, but other fonts of this type generally have sparate shafts at the angles of the bowl, and a lage central shaft containing a drain. This wou;ld not be possible here. Another possibility is that the quadruple capital was imported from elsewhere and was never part of a font. It could have been a corner capital from a cloister arcade, as has been suggested for St Dogmael's (Pembroke), Keynsham (Somerset) and Haughmond (Shropshire) (see Harrison (2006), and for Henry of Blois's cloister at Glastonbury (see Massinton). In this case the capital could have been imported from one of several nearby monastic houses.