Medbourne / Medburne / Metorne

There are two entries for Medbourne [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/SP8093/medbourne/] [accessed 19 August 2015], neither of which mention cleric or church in it. A font here is noted and illustrated in Upcott (1818). The Victoria County History (Leicestershire, 1964) notes: "There was a church at Medbourne in the late 12th century [...] The fabric has been so much rebuilt and restored that it is almost impossible to reconstruct its history accurately. The task has been made more difficult by the discovery in 1911 that the sedilia in the south transept had been built with previously tooled stones. Some other stones in the south wall had been subjected to considerable calcination, which led Professor A. Hamilton Thompson to conjecture that the original church had been destroyed by fire c. 1250. [...] The 13th-century circular font was then [in the 1880-1881 restoration of the church] placed on a new stem, and its four shafts attached to the basin were continued to the base." [source: www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=22062] [accessed 22 November 2006]. In Pevsner (1984): "Font. Circular, drum-shaped, E[arly] E[nglish], with four short shafts no doubt originally carrying heads (cf. Hallaton)." [NB: unless the basin has been shortened at the upper rim, it is unlikely that there would had been any heads decorating the capitals of the outer colonnettes; the moulded shapes appear to be original and there would not have been any room left for the heads -- the basin itself is original, but the base is a later re-construction [cf. VCH supra]]. Wooden cover probably 17th-century.