The Paschal taper at Reading and Westminster

On Easter Eve the medieval church lit a huge Paschal taper, and a font taper beside it. Brand, quoting the churchwardens’ accounts of Reading for 1559 from Coates’s History of Reading, gives five shillings and eightpence for making the Paschal and the font taper. A note there added that the Westminster Abbey taper of 1557 weighed 300 pounds, and a Cottonian manuscript set the Paschal candle at Christ Church, Canterbury, at the same weight.