Flaxley

No individual entry found for Flaxley in the Domesday survey. The entry for this parish in the Victoria County History (Gloucester, vol. 5, 1996) reports on a complicated situation in which the old abbey here "sought a licence in 1253 to hold services in a new chapel before the abbey gate"; by 1650 it had become a vicarage, and "By 1839 it was called a perpetual curacy and by 1870 more usually a vicarage", but the building itself appears to have to have been abandoned at the Dissolution, and later replaced in a series of re-buildings that culminated in GG Scott's 1856 church dedicated to St. Mary, retaining a few fittings from the 18th-century re-buildings. The VCH entry makes no mention of a font of any of the above iterations of the chapel, or of the original chapel itself, though there must have been one there to warrant the 'vicarage' title. Verey & Brooks (1999-2002) note: "Font. Very elaborate; round bowl of Painswick stone with almost detached Serpentine marble angle shafts." Baptismal font of the 19th century but made on the late-Norman/Transitional design of the Bodmin-type; the rendition is, however, characteristically Victorian, down to the coloured marble colonnettes. [NB: perhaps by G.G, Scott, responsible for the mid-19th century renovation of the church]. [NB: it is possible that the nearby Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founded ca. 1150, may have had a baptismal font in its church, as mosty medieval abbey churches did, but we have no information on that font]