Isle Abbotts / Ile / Ile Abbots / Isle Abots

There are two entries for Isle [Abbots] [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/ST3520/isle-abbotts/] [accessed 26 November 2016], but it mentions neither cleric nor church in it. The Handbook for travellers… (1869) entry for Isle Abbotts notes: "The font is Norman, with a square bowl, on a cylindrical stem, surrounded by 4 shafts. On the bowl are rude arches, with some foliage and grotesque sculpture." Described and illustrated in Bond (1908) who argues against using the crudeness of the carving ["what can be more uncouth than the beast upside down carved or rather scratched on the side of the font at Isle Abbots [...]?] to assign a pre-Conquest date to this and other such fonts; instead, he suggests the late 12th or early 13th century as a more realistic dating. Wade & Wade date to the Norman period. Pevsner (1958) describes this font as "Norman, re-worked Gothic", which is probably right. He expands on this issue: "The Norman carvings survive on one side, an animal carved in the primeval way of, say, the Luppitt font in Devon. Then the bowl was, it seems, turned upside down, the animal carving was placed out of sight, and the other side received pointed arches, quatrefoil fleurs de lis, and other motifs." The font is of the table-top type, a square basin of long but shallow sides carrying some kind of ornamentation; the inner well of the basin is round. On-site notes: the basin rests on five constructional columns, a broad central one and four slender shafts at the corners; the lower base consisting of two square volumes as lower base and plinth. One of the sides (side 2) of the basin has an odd figure on its back, which Bond (ibid.) describes as an uncouth carving of a beast upside down, while Tisdall (1998), with his usual flair, calls it "The Devil 'down and out' renounced and slain by baptism" [cf. Pevsner notes above]; this same side has an unidentified motif to the right of the beast. Side 3 has an unidentified motif on the left followed by four arches containing a candelabrum (?) and three other motifs which may be symbols of plants; side 4 has two other such arches with unidentified motifs on the left, a quatrefoil and fleur-de-lis motif (?) on the right. Side 1 could be read as a bird and vegetation. The whole carving programme is very unclear and there probably are two carving periods mixed [cf. Pevsner supra], some of the motifs clearly belonging to a later period. The font cover is pyramidal octagonal (Jacobean?) and has a pine-cone finial. The brief church-guide informs that the font may be Saxon with Norman carvings and gives its original location as near the south door; it identifies the four-legged animal on the north side of the font as "the dragon reversed by baptism", the west side as having a dragon between a sword and a fleur-de-lis, the east side as a dove and calls the south side ornamentation "undecipherable". This same guide states that the stoup which is now on the east side of the doorway may have been used as a font in earlier days.