The shape of this font is trapezoidal, like a cone with convex curved faces that has been trimmed flat on the east and west sides to form a vessel that is, in plan, rectangular with rounded ends. The base of the stone is circular. The curving faces at the northern and southern ends and the flat eastern and western faces are covered with fairly coarse diagonal tooling. The cut-back surfaces on the eastern and western faces have semi-circular lower edges, suggesting that originally these faces were curved like the northern and southern ends. The northern hasp from a lockable lid is still present: the southern hasp has been broken out of the stone. The bowl of the font is lead lined with slightly tapering sides, a flat bottom and a central drainage hole. In plan it is a slightly swollen-sided rectangle.

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

The conical shape of the north and south ends of the stone from which this font was carved, together with the curving outline left around the cut-back areas on the eastern and western faces, and the fact that the base of the stone is circular, suggests that this was originally a large capital, almost certainly Roman and probably from Viriconium (see also Shrewsbury Abbey 1 discussion, p. 389). Whether the surface was originally carved it is not possible to tell, although there are some faint traces of what might be carving on the northern end (see also Chapter V, Further thoughts on fonts, pp. 62–4).

[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.