Towcester / Lactodurum / Toucestre / Tovecestre

There is an entry for Towcester [variant spelling] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/SP6948/towcester/] [accessed 20 February 2016], but it mentions neither cleric nor church in it. Simpson (1828) describes and illustrates an octagonal mounted baptismal font here; the bowl "designed with much less taste than the stem, has suffered the least injury of the two", mutilation being especially noticeable on the lower part of the stem and the obvious empty niches which had surely housed figural sculptures originally. The ornament around the basin sides consists of two cinquefoil arches on each panel. The underbowl has traces of reticular pattern in the spandrel area of the large trefoil (?) windows of the stem. The whole appears raised on a quadrangular block in Simpson's illustration of 1828, but the font stands now [2016] on an octagonal lower base and has a small plinth or priest-stone at its west end, both modern replacements. Whellan (1874) writes that this church "is supposed to occupy the site of the Roman basilica", but mentions no font in it. Listed in Cox-Harvey (1907) as a noteworthy example of 15th-century fonts. In Pevsner & Cherry (1973): "Stem with nodding ogee arches supporting the bowl, which simple panelling." The entry in the Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northamptonshire, Volume 4, Archaeological Sites in South-West Northamptonshire (London, 1982), pp. 149-160 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/northants/vol4/pp149-160 [accessed 19 February 2016] mentions traces of early materials in the church but no font. [NB: there is evidence of a Norman -and perhaps Anglo-Saxon- church here, but we have no information of a font of that early church] -- [Feb. 2016: vol. 8 of the Nhants VCH, which will include Towcester, is at present a work in progress]