Broome / Brom / Broom

No entry for this Broome found in the Domesday book. There is no mention of the font in Miller's 1890 entry for this church. The font here is listed in Cox & Harvey (1907) as a baptismal font of the Norman period. The Victoria County History (Worcester, vol. 3, 1913) notes: "The bowl and upper part of the stem of the font date from the middle of the 12th century, but the lower part is modern. On plan it is circular and is rudely carved in low relief with a continuous arcade of fifteen interlacing arches, and a band of flowing leaf enrichment above. A modern stone rim has been fixed round the top of the bowl, and the cover is also new. Below the bowl is a narrow necking, and at the head of each of the six panels of the modern stem is a grotesque face, the upper part of the series being original." In Pevsner (1968): "Norman, small and round, with arcading of which it is difficult to say whether it is meant to be intersecting or normal. The arches are beaded. Small bads of scrolls at the top. At the top of the shaft grotesque heads." Brooks & Pevsner (2007) adds that the arches are indeed intersecting, and that only the top of the stem, with its grotesque heads, is 12th-century, like the basin, but the rest is "renewed". Described and illustrated in the CRSBI (2008): "The font has a hemispherical bowl on a cylindrical stem, but only the upper part of the stem is original. The latter is carved with six pairs of almond-shaped eyes, each outlined by a double groove, and with small squared blocks over the forehead, suggesting hair. Between each pair of eyes is a recessed vertical strip, bridged above by beading. The carving continues into the lower, modern part of the stem, made of a paler grey stone, which incorporates the eyes into masks. The bowl bears a beaded intersecting arcade of one order, with pellets or trefoil motifs in the spandrels, carried on 15 plain pilasters with volute capitals. Above, at the rim, is an undulating foliate stem. The whole is carved in shallow relief." [NB: the CRSBI entry for Pedmore [http://www.crsbi.ac.uk/ed/wo/pedmo/index.htm] [accessed 30 Juine 2008] points out that some of the stones from the original 12th-century church here show some stylistic resemblances between carving on the tympanum, particularly the forward-facing lion's head, with a capital in the cloister at Reading Abbey (see Stone 19.., pl.37a), as well as to the font at Holt and the upper stem of the font at Broome"].