Westwell nr. Oxford / Westwelle

There is an entry for this Westwell [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [https://opendomesday.org/place/SP2210/westwell/] [accessed 31 December 2021] but it mentions neither priest nor church in it. The Ecclesiastical and Architectural Topography of England: Oxfordshire (1850) notes: "The font is very good N[orman], not round, but quatrefoil in plan, and the basin of that form; it stands on four massive shafts, with scalloped capitals and moulded bases, on a square plinth" Described and illustrated in Bond (1908) as one of several Norman fonts that evade classification, this one having "two incomplete bowls"; Bond refers to the lower part as "aproximations of what was to be the characteristic base of early Gothic architecture; one with an undercut 'water-holding hollow.'" The basin is quatrefoil inside and out; the underbowl is actually made of the four capitals of the columnar base; they are shaped just like a typical ribbed basin; the attached outer columns of the base are plain except for roll mouldings at top and bottom of the shafts; the base of these outer columns is a thick roll moulding; the central column is totally plain. It stands on a very flat square lower base and is raised on a tall square plinth. Illustrated in Daubeny (1921) [this illustration shows a wooden font cover, fairly plain and with a knob handle, modern]. Described in Tyrrell-Green (1928) as "an almost plain font of quatrefoil form within and without". Noted in Sherwood and Pevsner (1974): "Font. An unusual quatrefoil bowl carried on short four columns with scalloped capitals. It is of c.1200 and resembles the font at Broadwell." Described and illustrated in The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland [www.crsbi.ac.uk/ed/ox/westw/index.htm]: "The font is clearly from the same workshop as the more elaborate version at Broadwell." [cf. Index entry]. There is a recent photograph of this font by Oxford Church Illustrations in Flickr at [http://flickr.com/photos/oxfordshire_church_photos/202794006/] [accessed 9 September 2007].