Ruscombe / Roscombe / Roscompe / Rotescamp / Rothscamp / Rotiscamp / Rowescompe / Ruscoumbe

No entry for Ruscombe found in the Domesday survey. Keyser (1919) notes: "The font is a relic of the earlier church [i.e., Early English of the 13th-century]. It is composed of Purbeck marble, with an octagon bowl, on a modern base, and apparently coeval with the chancel" [i.e., early part of the 13th century]. The Victoria County History (Berkshire, vol. 3, 1923) notes: "The oldest part of the present church is the chancel, which dates from late in the 12th century"; the VCH (ibid.) reports the baptisms register starts in 1574, but does not mention a font in this church. Listed in Tyrrell-Green (1928) as one in a very large group of baptismal fonts of the 14th or 15th century that are plain octagonal with straight-sided basins. The font here is noted and illustrated in theCRSBI (2015): "The Purbeck font dates from c.1200 at the earliest, and could well be 13thc [...] NW end of nave. In its present state, the font consists of a plain octagonal bowl of Purbeck marble (or a similar limestone with smallish fossils) standing on a 19thc. base of the pilier cantonnée type. The cracked N face of the bowl, carved with a plain blind arcade in shallow relief and more weathered than the rest, suggests that the bowl was originally of the square arcaded type, more commonly found in Sussex. The upper edge of the rim is chamfered, and the inner bowl is circular and lined with lead."