Coventry No. 2 / Coventru / Coventrv

There is an entry for Coventry [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://domesdaymap.co.uk/place/SP3379/coventry/] [accessed 26 February 2015], but it mentions neither cleric nor church in it. This font is described and illustrated in Gailhabaud (1850, t.III: unpaged): octagonal mounted baptismal font; the basin has vertical sides, each ornamented with two Gothic windows; the chamfer of the underbowl is plain and very short. Ruprich-Robert (1855) mentions a noteworthy font here, without further details. The pedestal base has an octagonal stem of vertical sides ornamented with three quatrefoil windows lined vertically; a round moulding separates it from the splayed lower base which is plain and octagonal. Listed in Cox & Harvey (1907) as a baptismal font of the Early English period. Described in Woodhouse (1909): "old Purbeck marble font, said to have been given by John Cross, Mayor, in 1394. As, however, the form, material, and shallow decoration are all quite consistent with a thirteenth-century date there can be little doubt that this one is the predecessor of that given by John Cross, which was condemned and removed by the Puritans as superstitious. A small brass, bearing a shield with four crosses, the ancient merchant mark, is fixed upon it." [cf. Index entry for Coventry No. 3 for the disappeared font, a gift of John Cross -- two other fonts in this church, a large 18th-century font later removed to the Lady Chapel and the new one that replaced it are not listed in this Index on account of their late dates]. The Victoria County History (Warwick, vol. 8, 1969) notes: "St. Michael's is first mentioned by name in a charter granted between 1144 and 1148 [...] An exact date for the chapel's foundation has not been discovered, but it may have been serving the earl and his tenants in the Earl's Half by 1113 [...] During the 12th century St. Michael's was 'the earl's chapel' and was served by the earl's chaplain but in 1241 it began to be called a 'church'; the VCH (ibid.) entry informs about a font here "taken down", in the extremism of the Commonwealth period, but being restored back to the church soon thereafter; "Loose fragments of Norman stonework have survived, but there were no structural remains of the 12th-century church. [...] Few original fittings had survived to the 20th century. In the Lady Chapel were portions of screens and fourteen carved miserere seats. [...] A brass eagle lectern of 1359 and a font of 1394 had been removed in 1645, but a Purbeck marble font bowl, probably of the 13th century, was preserved in the church." In its description of the new cathedral church of St. Michael, the VCH (ibid.) mentions its font: "The font bowl is hollowed out from a rough boulder brought from a hillside at Bethlehem."