Small tub font standing in the shallow bowl of a larger vessel.

The upper vessel has an irregularly carved, square profile collar 8 cm (3.1 in) wide and about 8 cm (3.1 in) below the rim. Below this collar the sides of the vessel are tapered and stepped inwards. Around the base is a small curving foot-moulding. The font bowl is round with tapering sides and a flat base, in the centre of which is a drain hole. The rim of the font is flat.

The lower vessel is also fairly roughly carved with a flattened, round-edged moulding around the rim above a shoulder half-roll moulding. Below the moulding, the outer face of the vessel is cut to a shallow concave profile, with a sharp edge between this and the tapering, concave lower part of the body. The bowl of the lower vessel is exceptionally shallow, being only 8.5 cm (3.3 in) deep. The centre of the bowl is masked by the base of the upper vessel but there is no reason to assume that the bowl gets any deeper. There must be a central drain, continuing from the upper vessel.

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

Of these two vessels the lower is potentially more interesting. The upper font is probably an early Norman tub font, although it carries no dating cues. The lower vessel is almost certainly a reused Roman column base from Viroconium 10 miles (16 km) away to the north-east along a major Roman road (see also Shrewsbury Abbey discussion, p. 389). In the Woolstaston example, however, the torus mouldings have been cut back and the sides of the vessel re-profiled. The shallowness of the bowl of the lower vessel, together with its probable place of origin, opens up the tantalising possibility that here we have what might be a very early font associated with a Christian presence, and possibly a bishop, in the sub-Roman town (White 2007, 205–6). The wide, shallow bowl would be ideal for adult baptism by affusion or aspersion. Alternatively it could have acted as a base for a detachable metal or wooden font as suggested recently by John Blair in relation to other fonts with exceptionally shallow bowls (Blair 2010, 164–7). The present upper font might then simply be the replacement in stone of the original removable vessel.

[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.