Font cut from a reused (inverted) Roman column base, set on top of a section from a larger Roman column. The double torus moulding around the base has been re-modelled. The bottom of the column base (now the top of the font) has been carved with 4 concentric rings, in the centre of which is the font bowl. The bowl of the font is flat-bottomed with sloping sides, lead-lined with an off-centre drainage hole.

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

The lower stone in the shaft of the font does not match in diameter the shaft of the reused base and it has been much trimmed down to fit. This could, therefore, be another font (in this instance with a very short stem) that might originally have been set on the ground or on a plinth (see Chapter V, Further thoughts on fonts, pp. 62–4). It is possible that this font is of a similar date to the early ninth-century church building for which evidence survives at the site (see Wroxeter St Andrew 4, p. 318, and perhaps the surviving north wall), but a date in the tenth or eleventh century would seem more likely (see also Shrewsbury Abbey 1 discussion, p. 389).

[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.