Austerfield / Estorp

There is an entry for Austerfield [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/SK6694/austerfield/] [accessed 1 October 2018]; it reports a priest and a church in it. Baptismal font probably of the Norman period consisting of a roughly cylindrical basin raised on a cylindrical stem and lower base, all plain. A convoluted of this font story is told in Addison (1911) claiming that the present bowl is "a trough from his [the sexton's] own farmyard" that was brought in to make up for the original Norman bowl which the said sexton, "one Milner", had sold to John Jackson, a local farmer; when Jackson sold his farm to a Mr. Fielding [this same source mentions an auctionneers' record of a "Garden--Stone baptismal font (formerly in Austerfield Parish Church)] the new owner gave the font to his mother who, "in turn handed it over to the trustees of the [Primitive Methodist] chapel at Lound, where it still remains jelously garded in the incongruous surroundings of its alien home". Addison (ibid.) infors that all attempts to have the said bowl returned to Austerfield have failed. Addison (ibid.) illustrates both objects: the present font is Austerfield and the original bowl now in Lound, in nearby Nottinghamshire. Unless the captions under the photographs have been reversed, the denizens of Austerfield need not worry about their font: the object in the chapel at Lound is most unlikely as a Norman font, and a more likely candidate to have been a large mortar or other such farm/domestic implement, whereas the one which Addison claims is Milner's trough is probably the original Norman bowl. Whatever it was that Milner sold away, it was not a baptismal font. This contrived story would be of little interest were it not for the fact that William Bradford, one of the Pilgrim fathers, is said to have been baptised in the Austerfield font. [cf. Index entry for Lound (Nottinghamshire) for the object described by Addison as the original Norman bowl]. Morris (1932) noted a "very plain, circular font, contemporary with the original structure", which he describes as early-Norman. An article by Eric P. Olsen (2003) shows a photograph of the old baptismal font re-installed back in the interior of the church. The font here is noted and illustrated in the CRSBI (2018): "The font stands near pier 2 of the N arcade and opposite the S door. Basically a plain cylinder, but it narrows slightly to the top. The lower part of the bowl appears to have been fairly roughly reshaped to fit a smaller support at some time. At the restoration in the 1890s, it was rescued from a farmyard and set on the present cylindrical stem (Austerfield guide, n.d., 8). The base and stem are modern but suitable."