Thomastown No. 1

Described and illustrated in Pike (1989) as the basin and font cover of a square mounted medieval baptismal font "said to have come from Jerpoint Abbey in the 16th century. It has no pedestal but is mounted on a table. It is decorated on each face. Two coats of arms of the Butler and Fitzgerald families on front face. One side has a pelican plucking her breast and another has an architectural Gothic window design and three flutes. There is a wooden font cover." Noted in Hourihane (2003), who describes the pelican motif in some detail: "The small carving is on the south face of the font, the decoration of which is divided into three parts. The pelican, which appears to the left of an architectural motif, is in profile with its neck curved and its beak on its breast. Its plumage is depicted by a series of deeply cut parallel lines. Three long-beaked chicks are shown in the nest, which resembles that of the example at Kilcooly Abbey [...] The nest is chalice-shaped, with a long stem that appears to have no base. The cup of the chalice is decorated in an all-over chevron pattern. This work seems to have been influenced by the example at Kilcooly Abbey; not only are the distinctive nests similar, but the use of architectural designs on the other sides of this font are also paralleled on the font in the northern transept at Kilcooly. The use of vaulting as a design element on such pieces of architectural furnishing dates from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Ireland, and it is not widely found there. The heraldic arms of the Butler and Fitzgerald families on the east side of the Thomastown font are again related to those on the sacristy walls at Kilcooly [...] On the basis of its heraldic iconography, this font has been dated to around 1516-46. The association of the pelican with the sacrament of baptism is unsusual and appears to have been introduced towards the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century." [cf. Index entry for Thomastown No. 2 for a fragment of another medieval font in the C. of I. church in this town]