Almelo

The entry for this church in Rijksmonumenten.nl [http://rijksmonumenten.nl/monument/507692/st-georgiusbasiliek/almelo/] [accessed 7 December 2015] notes: "The late Gothic sandstone baptismal font (now stoup) probably dates from the fifteenth century and comes from the Great Church in the church square" [source: Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed]. The font consists of an octagonal basin with a wide upper rim, the sides divided into panels by thick moulding and piping; inside the panels are several paterns of window tracery; plain chamfered underbowl; octagonal pedestal base with rounded lower end, the panels trefoiled. There is no font cover present but one of the sides of the rim has damage consistent with the earlier presence of old font cover hardware. As indicated in the site above, the font came originally from the Grote Kerk, at Kerkplein, just across the centre of town. Pol Herman's communication to BSI (e-mail of 6 November 2021) notes: "Baptismal font in Almelo, Sint Georgiusbasiliek The baptismal font excavated in the garden of the Roman Catholic rectory is of Bentheimer stone, quite intact, an octagonal upper part with a rounded edge, standing on a more slender octagonal lower part. The 8 upper compartments are alternately occupied by two Gothic window arches; the other four compartments also contain a Gothic figure. In one of the compartments with window arches is a mason mark, a letter L. The window arches somewhat resemble those of the baptismal font at Kampen, depicted and described in: »Overijsselsche Almanak voor voor oudheid en letteren,1842, p. 93," but are closer together. When the present dean and vicar came here, over twenty-five years ago, he found in the rectory garden a flower bed, surrounded by a stone border : the top of the baptismal font, which was filled with sand. What kind of stone ridge this was had never been investigated. During the excavation of the site for the new construction of a Roman Catholic church, this flower pot was also excavated, which then turned out to rest on a pedestal standing upright in the ground. No one can remember how and when it got there in this position. In 1236 the Lord of Almelo was granted leave to build a chapel: from a charter of 1299 it appears that it was then an ecclesia curata with a plebanus and a churchwardens and that it was part of the Almelo castle; in this charter there is mention of an ecclesia inferior, so that there is ground for the opinion that the church was arranged as a 'double church'. In 1390 Bishop Hubertus van Yppuse gave a letter of indulgence to the parish church at Almelo dedicated to the martyrs St. Mauricius and Georgius. He who bestowed “ad fabricam luminaria, ornamenta aut quaevis alia necessaria” deserved indulgence. Now I suspect that the gifts given about 1390 included the baptismal font and that, when Pastor Holtman himself passed over to the Reformation, the font came with the church in the possession of the Reformed, who probably cleared them up as "old rubbish". when the church was almost completely demolished in 1733, cf. ersl. & Meded. der Vereeniging tot beoef. van Overijss. regt en geschiedenis XI. 45. XXI 3, 21, 26. This baptismal font, not destroyed, seems to have been preserved either by the Lord of Almelo or by the Church Council, and probably was returned to the Roman Catholics when they started building a church in 1784 by leave of the Lady of Almelo; for which leave 6000 guilders had to be paid. Before that, Almelo belonged to the Tubbergen station. The baptismal font, which has been put back into use, was probably removed from the church when a more attractive font could be purchased and dug into the rectory garden as a permanent flower pot. Hattink, Mr. R.E. (1901, December). Doopvont te Almelo. In: Bulletin uitgegeven door den Nederlandschen Oudheidkundigen Bond, 3e Jgn. No. 3., p. 105-106."