Botley / Botelie / Boteleigh / Boteligh / Bottele

There is an entry for Botley [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/SU5113/botley/] [accessed 24 July 2018]; it reports a church in it. The National Gazetteer of 1868 reports "a curious old font" in All Saints' Botley. White (1878) reports a remarkably fine font in this church. Listed in Cox & Harvey (1907) as a baptismal font of the Norman period. Described and illustrated in Bond (1908) as a baptismal font the crude [Bond actually uses the adjective "barbarous"] work of which tends to suggest an earlier dating than it should; Bond (ibid.) indicates that "the interlacing arcading is not likely to be earlier than that in the work of Priors Ernulph and Conrad of Canterbury (A.D. 1096-1130)"; rather, Bond continues, "it is safer to assume that the archaic look is due to the clumsiness of a twelfth century village mason, rather than it was the best that could be done in the eleventh century." Bond's illustration shows a cylindrical basin with a roll moulding at the rim and a rope moulding just below it; the bottom of the basin sides has herringbone motif and so do the vertical bands that connect top and bottom; in between, a crudely executed blind arcade of round arches; the prismatic underbowl and base are plain and very irregular, and the whole base looks as if it had been recarved from a tall cylinder by a very unskilled mason, probably at a time when chalice-shaped fonts on polygonal bases where more fashionable. The Victoria County History (Hampshire, vol. 3, 1908) notes: "The church of Botley, with the manor, belonged to Ralf de Mortimer at the time of the Domesday Survey [1086]. [...] Of the old church of All Saints only the chancel is now left standing. [...] The church now in use, in the main street of the village, was built in 1836 [...] The font, which is said to have been dug up on the river bank, is a roughly-shaped round bowl, its base cut back to a hexagonal shape at some later time. Its ornament is equally rough, and though doubtless of twelfth-century date, is probably not quite so early as it looks. A band of cable moulding runs round the top of the bowl, and a band of lozenge ornament lower down, the space between being divided into panels by vertical lines of lozenge or cable moulding, in which are round arched arcades—in one case of three interlacing arches, and in the others of two arches side by side." The site [freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~villages/botley.htm] informs that the font "has been through unknown adventures, for it was found in the river" [NB: there is no reference as to when these 'adventures' took place but one should assume that they took place before Bond's time, i.e., prior to 1908. Buck (1951) mentions the 'cut away' feature of the Botley font in the context of his entry for the font at Great Durnford, Wilts. The Botley site [http://mti.botley.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=40&Itemid=58] notes: "It was apparently dug up near Fairthorne Manor in about 1740."