Ewerby / Geresbi [Domesday] / Ieresbi [Domesday] (Lincs.)

Thre are three entries for Ewerby [variant spellings] in the Domesday survey [https://opendomesday.org/place/TF1247/ewerby/] [accessed 29 July 2021], one of which mentions a priest and a church in it. A hexagonal baptismal font in the Decorated style dated to the late 14th century by Paley (1844); it is raised on a round base which appears to be a truncated upside-down Norman font. Paley (ibid.) says of this base that "appears to have been the lower part of a Norman Font, and is ornamented with a band of reversed intersecting arches" of single-line beaded-tape [NB: Paley's engraving, done ca. 1844, indeed shows the round arches as being reversed and there is no reason to doubt Paley's accuracy in either the description or the depiction. The base was reversed at some point after 1844]. Brandon (1849) describes it simply as "an hexagonal font, with the sides richly diapered". The illustration of this font in Bond (1908) is a photograph and probably dates from ca. 1908, the date of publication of the original edition of his book; it clearly shows the arches of the base in an upright position, not reversed, suggesting therefore that by Bond's time the base had been overturned to show the arches in the upright position. The basin of this font has profuse window tracery covering almost every part of it. The two parts are raised on a round one-step plinth. Listed in Stocker (1997) as one of the partially buried fonts in Lincolnshire. Described and illustrated n the CRSBI [www.crsbi.ac.uk/ed/li/ewerb] [accessed 1 August 2004]: the "base has beaded, intersecting arches which were once part of an intersecting arcade motif. In the spandrels of the arches there is a large single bead while at the points of intersection between the arches there is a single raised cross motif on the N and W sides. Much damage on the NW side where ornamentation is missing. Rectangular repair inserted in the SW side. What is visible of the top suggets that it was without ornament." Noted in Pevsner, Harris and Antram (1989): "Font. The base is part of a Norman font with intersecting arches. The bowl is Dec[orated], six-sided, with blank windows."