In the Drapers' or Lady Chapel, which is divided from the north aisle by an oak screen, we are continually reminded of the powerful Trinity guild, as well as the drapers' company, whose priests said daily service here. This part of the church was chosen as a burial place for the chief members of the latter society. In a brass plate let into the north wall of the chapel you may see the memorial inscription to the most notable of these:—"Here lyeth Mr Thomas Bond, draper, sometime mayor of this cittie, and founder of the Hospitall of Bablake, who gave divers lands and tenements for the maintenance of ten poore men so long as the world shall endure, and a woman look to them, with many other good guifts; and died the xviii day of March, in the yeare of our Lord God MDVI."
Bond's Hospital still stands by S. John the Baptist's church. May it endure—as the epitaph has it—as long as the world itself.
The dark oak roof of the chapel is ancient, and in some cases angels carrying shields are figured on the corbels. The first of these, at the east end of the north wall, bears, however, the Agnus Dei, a reference to S. John the Baptist, one of the patrons of the guild; the next a pelican "in her piety," i.e. feeding her young from her own breast, a symbol of Christ.
The Communion-table is of seventeenth-century work; there are curious poppy-heads in this chapel; and on the other side of the screen, which is made up of ancient fragments, is an old oak chest showing that favourite Coventry subject, the Coronation of the Virgin, with swans, Tudor roses and grotesques.
The miserere seats are worth inspection, though the carving is somewhat rough. They seem to fall into three classes, illustrating:—
1. The labours of life.
2. The saints of the guild.
3. The certainty of death, and judgment to come, illustrated by the favourite mediæval series, the Dance of Death.
They may be taken in the following order, beginning with the north wall:—