Narrow, circular font on a circular stem. The bowl has been cut into the upper end of a column shaft, the lower 10 cm (3.9 in) of which has been sharply tapered to fit a stem which consists of a short piece from a slightly smaller column. The smaller column sits on a circular base with a heavy roll moulding around the column seating. The bowl is curving in cross-section and quite small, with no drain hole. The inner part of the rim around the font bowl is flat and about 4–4.5 cm (1.6–1.8 in) wide. The outer part of the rim is 4 cm (1.6 in) wide and chamfered downwards. The face of the upper column is covered with heavy, mostly vertical, tooling; the lower shaft and the base are much smoother.

Appendix K item (Fonts and stoups in the Western Midlands).

All three elements which make up this font are almost certainly reused Roman material, presumably from the nearby Roman town of Magnis (R.C.H.M.(E.) 1932, 93). The lower column shaft is probably still on its original base. The font bowl is very small, perhaps indicating that this was initially conceived as a holy water stoup or a lavabo bowl rather than a font, or as a stand for a larger detachable bowl as suggested by John Blair for several other fonts with very small, shallow bowls (Blair 2010, 164–70, figs.). (see also Shrewsbury Abbey 1 discussion of reused Roman material, p. 389, and Chapter V, Further thoughts on fonts, pp. 62–4).

The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the MagonsÆte, whose kingdom covered Herefordshire as well as parts of western Gloucestershire and southern Shropshire, may have taken their name from Magnis (Richmond and Crawford 1949, 39: but see Gelling 1978, 102–5; Freeman 2008). A bishopric was founded in between c. 675 and 680 and the episcopal see was located at nearby Hereford by 801 (see Chapter II for a more detailed discussion).

[1] There are, beside the Deerhurst font in Gloucestershire which has been shown to be of ninth-century date (Deerhurst St Mary 3, p. 163, Ills. 132–44, 740), a number of fonts in the study area that have been said to be Anglo-Saxon or could be Anglo-Saxon. There are also objects like Bisley All Saints 6 (below, Ills. 732–4) that has been described as a font fragment, and Kenchester 1 (p. 382, Ills. 735–6) that now functions as a font, but that are much smaller than all of the other vessels and may, therefore, have originally been used as stoups or lavabo bowls (see below, and 'Further thoughts on fonts' in Chapter V, pp. 62–4, Table 1). In the following Appendix three vessels that were probably stoups have been listed first, followed by the fonts in chronological order by form (cylindrical tub fonts, square tub fonts, tapering or cone-shaped fonts, and bowl-shaped fonts). Some clearly belong to the Overlap period but are included because they show continuity of form and decoration into the later decades of the eleventh century and beyond.

The tub font at Deerhurst is the earliest securely datable font, and an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon ivory panel in the Victoria and Albert Museum that depicts the baptism of Christ also show a tub font (Beckwith 1972, 119, cat. 5, ill. 20). Tub fonts have, therefore, been placed first in the catalogue below. However, in the south-west of England the earliest surviving fonts are bowl-shaped (copies of domestic bowls) and it seems inherently likely that both tubs and bowls were in use at the same time (Cramp 2006, 38; Blair 2010).

Many of the western Midlands fonts seem to have been carved from newly worked stone, but several are carved into reused Roman capitals and bases. One of the reused Roman bases (at Woolstaston, Shropshire), almost certainly came from the Roman city of Viroconium (Wroxeter) but, unlike the similarly reused bases at Wroxeter St Andrew and Shrewsbury Abbey (pp. 390, 389, Ills. 762–3, 768–70), this vessel has been very crudely reshaped and the bowl is only 8 cm deep (p. 386, Ills. 756–7). It does not look like a font at all but it would, in fact, be ideal for the baptism of adults by affusion or aspersion. Adult baptism must have been very rare by the later Anglo-Saxon period, so it seems possible that the Woolstaston font might be very early, perhaps even sub-Roman.