Patrick Comerford
When I was visiting Towcester in Northamptonshire earlier this week, I learned how the local parish is sending ambulances to Ukraine, filled with medical supplies and other aid, including clothing, blankets, and disability aids, and other essential items.
The initiative is led by Saint Lawrence’s Church, Towcester, and the Tove Benefice, which have been working to acquire and fill ambulances with supplies for Ukrainian paramedics. The fundraising initiatives have included a Vicarage Fete and Open Gardens, concerts and hosting families.
In Saint Lawrence’s Church on Monday, I saw yet another ambulance being filled with medical equipment. The ambulance is due to leave Towcester on Sunday (23 March), when Steve Challen from the Tove Benefice and Alex Donaldson begin a 1,350-mile drive to Lviv.
Saint Lawrence’s Church stands in the centre of Towcester, on Chantry Lane, close to the Market Square and the Town Hall, and near the Castle Mound and the River Tove.
The mediaeval rectors of Towcester included Pope Boniface VIII, who was the rector of before his elevation to the papacy in 1294, and Archdeacon Sponne, the great benefactor of Towcester, whose table tomb and cadaver effigy is one of the most unusual sites in the church.
The church stands on the site of a previous Saxon church, built possibly on the site of an earlier Roman building, possibly a temple or basilica, although there was also a bath house in the area, and small fragments of Roman pavement were found next to the church’s boiler room.
The Saxon church was rebuilt in the Norman period in honour of Saint Wandregisile. Its most famous incumbents were Benedetto Gaetani who became Pope Boniface VIII patron of the great Florentine artist Giotto, and Archdeacon William Sponne the town's great benefactor.
Saint Lawrence’s has a 12th-century Norman transitional ground plan and foundation, probably laid over a Saxon 10th-century stone building.
The oldest portion of the church, dating from ca 1200, is in the Early English style of architecture. The east part of the chancel, with the crypt, is in the decorated style.
Benedetto Caetani (1235-1303), the future Pope Boniface VIII, was the Rector of Towcester before he was elevated to the Papacy in 1294 in succession to Celestine V, who had abdicated.
He was born in Anagni, 50 km south-east of Rome, studied canon and civil law in Italy, and became a canon successively in Anagni, Todi, Paris, Lyons and Rome. He accompanied Cardinal Ottobuono Fieschi to England in 1265, and became the Rector of Towcester.
He was consecrated in Rome as Pope Boniface VIII on 23 January 1295. He was a patron of Giotto, commissioning him to work on frescoes in Saint Peter’s Basilica and other churches, and Giotto depicted Boniface VIII in a fresco proclaiming the first Jubilee Year in 1300. Dante places him among the simoniacs in the eighth circle of Hell, Malebolge, in his Divine Comedy. He also founded Sapienza University in Rome in 1303.
The most unusual fixture in the church is the cadaver tomb of the town’s benefactor, Archdeacon William Sponne, who was the Rector at Towcester in 1442-1448.
Four decades after Sponne, the church was rebuilt in the Perpendicular style in 1480-1485, when it was enhanced with a new tower, a finely decorated west door, the roof was raised to accommodate a clerestory and new aisle windows were added. Permission to quarry stone from Whittlewood Forest for this restoration was granted in 1483 by Edward IV – his wife Elizabeth Woodville was from nearby Grafton Regis. The grant was later confirmed by Richard III before the Battle of Bosworth Field.
The church has a chancel, vestry, north and south chancel chapels, a nave, north and south aisles, a south porch and west tower.
The five-bay chancel has a five-light perpendicular east window, three-light Decorated windows on the north and south side, and three-light clerestory windows with cinquefoil-headed lights and four-centred heads. The chancel has 17th century tie-beam trusses and purlins.
The vestry on the north side has a chamfered Tudor-arched north door. The chancel chapels continue into the aisles that overlap the chancel.
There is a projecting stair turret to the former gallery of rood screen between the north aisle and the chancel chapel.
The sanctuary is raised over a stone-vaulted crypt, and has a tomb recess to the east and an aumbry on the north side. The mid-19th century chancel arch incorporates two Romanesque shafts and with lozenge and zig-zag decorations.
The nave has four-bay arcades with octagonal piers, polygonal responds and double-chamfered arches, and three re-used 13th century capitals.
At the west end of the nave, there is a triple-chamfered tower arch.
The chapel in the south chancel or Sponne Chapel has a wide ogee-arched niche and a Pelican in her Piety painted on the back wall. The fragments of 15th century stained glass in the east window of the chapel include Sponne’s heraldic arms moved from Talbot Inn, previously the Tabard Inn, once owned by Sponne’s charity. His arms are surrounded by fragments of green drapery and canopy work.
The octagonal font has a panelled bowl on crocketed nodding ogee arches.
The tall three-stage west tower has a many-moulded west doorway, a deep hollow-chamfered surround with an ogee-arched hood mould within a panelled recess and old double-leaf studded doors. There is a three-light Perpendicular window above. The tower has a peal of 12 bells and a chime of nine bells that many regard as among the finest in the Midlands. The bells were moved in 1994 from Todmorden in Yorkshire.
The Caroline courtier Sir Robert Banastre of Passenham paid for reroofing the chancel in 1640.
The church was restored in 1835-1836, and again half a century later in 1883 by John Loughborough Pearson (1817-1897), who was the architect of Truro Cathedral (1879-1910) and the Fitzrovia Chapel (1890), London. He also added the two towers at the west end of Bristol Cathedral and designed additions to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1890.
The monuments in the church include an alabaster wall monument to Jerome Farmore, who died in 1602, with small kneeling figures facing each other at a prayer desk in scalloped niches, flanked by Corinthian colonettes.
The most striking and unusual monument in the church is the table tomb and cadaver of Archdeacon William Sponne, who was the Rector of Towcester in 1422-1448. It is a double tomb chest, with an the effigy of Sponne, dressed as a cathedral canon on top, and his skeleton below, within an arcade.
William Sponne was educated in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before becoming Rector of Heavingham and Blofield in Norfolk. He became Archdeacon of Norfolk in 1419, and in 1422 he became Rector of Towcester, a post he held until he was succeeded by Thomas Taylard in 1447.
Sponne died a year later in 1448. He had bought the Tabard Inn (later the Talbot Inn) and its lands in 1440 and in his will he left the income to found a chantry and school in Towcester, to help the poor and to repair the footways in the town.
The small college or chantry Sponne founded had two priests, one to say mass for Sponne in the chapel at the east end of the south aisle of the church, the other to teach children of the town.
Cadaver tombs or table tombs were fashionable between 1420 and 1480, but surviving examples are rare, with only about 150 still in existence. Sponne’s fully clothed effigy in Saint Lawrence’s is dressed in a cassock, surplice and tippet, with fur-lined sleeves and collar.
The head and hands were carved locally of oak, with his face as a portrait. They were removed in 1884 and were lost. Over time the figure has been repainted several times and not always in the same colours. A Sunday newspaper reported a near disaster in the early 1980s when Archdeacon Sponne was repainted and considerable restoration work was needed to repair the damage.
The missing face and hands were rediscovered in the vicarage attics in the 1980s, but the wooden appendages were thought to be replacements. However, radiocarbon dating in 1984 confirmed that the wooden head is the original and the head and hands were restored to the tomb in 1992.
The sides of the tomb are open arches and Sponne’s heraldic arms of are repeated on the ledge. Inside the arches in the lower section is a representation of Sponne’s emaciated corpse, indicative of mortality and evidently meant to teach humility.
The monument was moved from the chancel in 1835 to make room for new pews. When it was moved, it was reported, the skeleton was in a perfect state of preservation, lying on a bed of fine white sand. Within a few hours of the grave being opened, however, the bones had crumbled to dust. The tomb has since been returned to its former position.
The large five-light east window with perpendicular tracery is flanked by two three-light windows on the north and south.
The east window was erected, against a backdrop of fierce local opposition, in 1898 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The richly painted stained glass window it replaced had been previously donated by John Lovell and Ann Sabin. But, with the support of influential people and the Church Commissioners, the vicar overruled both his parishioners and the diocesan chancellor and raised the necessary funds for a new window.
The window was designed by Harvey Harry Alexander Hymers of Chelsea, and the main scene depicts the Crucifixion. Other images in the window include the four patrons of this islands: Saint George with a dragon; Saint Andrew with a saltire cross; Saint Patrick with snakes under his feet; and Saint David with a dove descending.
Two crowned shields are inscribed the dates 1837 and 1897, and the royal arms are encircled by the Garter.
The West Window is a modern window in memory of Emily Moran of Codicote, Hertfordshire, who died in 1968. The window, made by Agnes Charles of Codicote, is designed to be read from the top down, each light separately:
A 1-6: God in Trinity flanked by angels and the redeemed on the seventh day of Creation;
7a: Creation of Adam;
6a: Creation of Eve;
5a: Paradise;
4a: The Temptation;
3a: God confronts Adam and Eve;
2a: Expulsion from Paradise;
1a: Adam delving and Eve spinning (Genesis 2: 7 to 3: 24);
B 7b: First Day of Creation;
6b: Second Day of Creation;
5b: Third Day of Creation;
4b: Fourth Day of Creation;
3b: Fifth Day of Creation;
1-2b: Sixth Day of Creation (Genesis 1: 1-31);
C 7c: The Annunciation (Luke 1: 26-31); 6c: The Nativity (Luke 2: 4-7);
5c: The Baptism of Christ (Matthew 3: 13-17);
4c: The Transfiguration (Matthew 17: 1-8);
3c: The Crucifixion (Matthew 27: 33-44);
2c: The Harrowing of Hell (I Peter 3: 18-20);
1c: Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-4).
Before he died in 1976, BJ Moran commissioned his neighbour, the artist Agnes Charles, to make the window in memory of his wife. BJ Moran and Agnes Charles met the former vicar of Towcester, Canon Douglas Curtis, and his wife Susan on a painting holiday in Greece.
BJ Moran died in 1976 and the window was dedicated by Dr Leslie Brown, former Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, in 1982.
The late 17th century vicarage on Moat Lane was extended 1854 by the Northampton architect Edmund Francis Law (1810-1882). He also restored Saint Mary’s Church, Roade, in the 1850s and 1860s, Saint John the Baptist Church, Blisworth, in 1856 and Saint Mary’s Church, Badby, in 1880-1881. His other works in the area includes the lychgate on Calverton Road, Stony Stratford (1856-1857).
Law practised in Northampton from 1837, based in Priory Cottage. He was Northamptonshire County and Northampton Town Surveyor and was Mayor of Northampton in 1859. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA) in 1862 on the proposal of Sir George Gilbert Scott. His son, Edmund Law (1840-1904), was an architect in his practice, and he too was Northamptonshire County and Northampton Town Surveyor.
Interesting details in the vicarage include a datestone with fluted pilasters supporting a frieze, and a panel with the heraldic arms of Sir Robert Banastre, inscribed S/RB/1613.
Beside the church, the Chantry House is a Grade II listed 15th century house that now serves as the Tove Benefice office. The house was built as a house for the two priests serving Archdeacon Sponne’s chantry, which was suppressed at the Reformation. The house was bought back in 1552 by the trustees of Sponne’s Charity for use as a grammar school, and it served as the school and master’s house until 1866.
This two-storey, four-window range house has a studded plank door in a moulded wood surround and a late 18th century doorcase. The projecting tower to the left was originally a stair-turret. The gateway dates from the 15th century.
The Chantry House was bequeathed to the then incumbent, the Revd James Atwell, and the Churchwardens of Towcester by Alice Jenkinson in 1982. After fundraising and renovation work, it opened in 1987 as the parish office, with rooms available for community use.
• The Tove Benefice is in the Diocese of Peterborough is centred on Towcester and includes the parishes of Bradden, Easton Neston, Greens Norton and Towcester with Caldecote. The Revd Paula Challen is the Rector of the Tove Benefice. There is a service in Saint Lawrence’s Church every Sunday at 9:15 am and a service at 11:15 am in one of the other churches in the benefice.
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