In the north aisle

The plain stone tub/font was found by workmen during restoration in 1844, upside down about 2 feet below floor level under the present font (which in its turn may be dated to c. 1200) (Bentley 1881, 12; Watkins 1902, 32). A note in the church indicates that the present font, now in the south aisle, originally stood at the west end of the nave.

Holy Trinity

Good although cracked on one side

Font or stone tub. The surfaces of this straight-sided tub are undecorated and covered with vertical tooling. It is slightly oval with a wide (7–8 cm) flat rim around the central bowl. There is a central drain hole in the bottom of the bowl.

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

This stone tub may be eleventh century or earlier in date and, set on the ground or on a plinth, could have functioned as a baptismal bowl/font (see also Chapter V, Further thoughts on fonts, pp. 62–4).

Eleventh century or earlier

Bentley 1881, 12; Bentley 1893–4, 180; Watkins 1902, 32; Cox and Harvey 1907, 166; Marshall 1949–51, ii, 33; Stocker 1997, 24; Blair 2010, 154–7, figs. 2, 3

[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.