Brisley / Brisle

Blomefield (1805-1810) writes: "The name of this town does not occur in Domesday Book, as being included under the account of the Bishop of Thetford's capital manor of Elmham, to which township it joins. [...] The Church is a rectory, dedicated to St. Bartholomew [...] The Church is a regular pile, with a nave, a north and south isle, covered with lead, the chancel tiled, with a lofty embattled square tower, and four bells." The earliest reference to a church here in Blomefield (ibid.) is in relation to an "assise to enquire who presented the last rector to the church of Brisle, which William de Stutvile, lord of Gressenhale, claimed against Pandulph Bishop of Norwich elect [...] In the 4th year of King Henry III" [i.e., 1220] [NB: this Pandulph would be Pandulph Verraccio, consecrated bishop of Norwich on 19 May 1222 [Nicholas Vincent, ‘Pandulf (d. 1226)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21230, accessed 31 Jan 2014]]. The present font is listed in Tyrrell-Green (1928) as one in a very large group of baptismal fonts that are plain octagonal with straightsided basins. The underbowl and the lower base have fraded mouldings, the rest is plain. Described and illustrated in Knott (2006): "As at neighbouring Gateley the font is primitive and bulky, and topped off by a jaunty coloured cover" [NB: the basin of this font is plain, as is that of the Gateley font, but the latter is mucgh cruder work]. The painted wooden cover is an octagonal pyramid with spiked -rather than crocketed- arrises; appears modern; Victorian?