Colchester No. 7 / Colecastro / Colecestra

There are seventeen entries for Colchester [variant spellings] in the Domesday survey [http://opendomesday.org/place/TL9925/colchester/] [accessed 8 June 2018]; a priest is mentioned as lord three times (two in 1066, one in 1086) and "0.5 church lands" is noted in one of the entries, but none of them mentions a church, though there must have some there at the time. The entry for this borough in the Victoria County History (Essex, vol. 9, 1994) notes: "The church, immediately north of St. John's abbey precinct, was probably built soon after the foundation of the abbey in 1097 and may have replaced an Anglo-Saxon church dedicated to St. John the Evangelist, which stood c. 100 yd. away on the site of a Roman cemetery. [...] St. Giles's was recorded between 1165 and 1171 when the bishop of London confirmed it to St. John's abbey. [...] The church of St. Giles ([was] occasionally called St. Sepulchre's in the 17th century or the early 18th) [...] The church was closed in 1953, and was for some years used as a store by St. John's Ambulance Brigade. In 1972 it was sold and converted into a masonic hall, opened in 1976"; there is no mention of a font in it in the VCH entry]. Bettley & Pevsner (2007) inform that this church was founded in the mid-12th century, "built in the monastic cemetery of St John's Abbey". [NB: we have no information on its baptismal font, which may have disappeared in the 1819 re-building of the church; the church was closed in 1953-1954 and turned into a Masonic Hall]