Crowland No. 2 / Croyland

There is no individual entry for Crowland in the Domesday survey. Rickman (1825) writes: "The church has a large Perpendicular font, of the block shape, noticed at Kelby, but ornamented with panelling; it has also a very large stoup under a niche at the entrance; this is remarkable, as being a plain cylinder on the floor, as large as a font, and the same date as the font itself ." Allen (1833) notes the later font but adds in a footnote: "At the south-west angle of the present church is a small baptistery with a more ancient font than the one above described." Noted in Lewis' Dictionary of 1848 simply as "a cylindrical stoup". Bond (1908) writes "it is not unknown to find a so-called stoup containing a drain inside one of the lateral doorways of a church and not far from the font [...]. There is a remarkable example at Croyland [...], where, hard by the font, is an ancient piscina which apparently was built into the tower wall about the time the font was erected. In such a case it is possible that the piscina is really the drain into which, after a baptism, the drippings caught in a a basin were poured so that they might passed out into consecrated ground. It might also be used for the disposal of the water in which the sponsors washed their hands after baptism." [NB: this object was identified as a stoup originally in Cotman (1838, vol. 2)]. Pevsner, Harris and Antram (1989) write: "Font. One, E[arly] E[nglish], round with corner shafts, is built into the tower arch as a stoup." Stocker (1997), however, identifies this object as a 13th-century font that was "enclosed within the south east pier of the parochial bell tower, which was built in the 1460s." [cf. Index entry for Crowland No. 1 for the later font in this church]