Norwich No. 3 / Norwic

There are ten entries for Norwich [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [https://opendomesday.org/place/TG2308/norwich/] [accessed 13 October 2020], one of which records "22.7 churches. 2.57 church lands" in it; a separate entry records a priest and a church in it. Octagonal mounted font of the 14th or 15th century in the late Decorated style, according to Paley (1844), the Decorated according to Cox and Harvey (1907). Each basin side is ornamented with a shield in an Ogee frame of trefoils. The underbowl has winged cherubs, one at each angle. The stem of the base is also octagonal and has a large cinquefoil and two small trefoil arches on each side. Paley (1844) describes this font as "a well proportioned Font of considerable beauty" and reports that the foot of the base "is singularly ornamented with grotesque heads and foliage placed alternately"; Paley makes reference to "a large and lofty cover, which has been removed some years." [NB: the Jacobean cover now on the font is octagonal and flat with an eight-ribs-around-a-pivot centre piece]. Paley's illustration, which does not include the cover, shows the font raised on a plain octagonal plinth with an attached two-step stone. This plinth had been replaced by 1937 by a wider, more elegant one, octagonal and with a kneeling stone; on the sides of this plinth runs the inscription: "Except man be born of water and of [...]" Noted in Pevsner & Wilson (1997): "Late C14, octagonal. At the foot four rather alarming grotesque busts and four lions' heads. Against the bowl shields in cusped fields above eight angels. Font cover. Jacobean. Low with volutes." In The Norwich Roots of the Connecticut Lovelands, Part I, the following notes regarding this font appear: "The font [St.Gregory's] was repaired and made in the manner we now see it in, in 1624 at near 40 shillings expense, to which Edmund Reve, Esq. afterwards a judge, Mr Francis Bacon, who was a judge also, Mr Stoneham, Minister and Mr John Loveland, Sheriff this year, were benefactors. (Norwich, Blomefield, Vol.4, p274) (Note: The Rev Francis Blomefield was writing around the beginning of the 19th century.)" [text found in the genealogy web page of Doug Murphy, of Omaha, Nebraska, USA -- it is not clear which changes to the font it refers to, obviously not the change of plinth] [We are grateful to Jonathan Plunkett for the photograph of this font, taken by his father, George Plunkett, in 1937-1938]