Thomas Rickman (1776–1841) is credited with first bringing the church of All Saints, Brixworth, to wider scholarly attention. In his Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England from the Conquest to the Reformation (1825) he laid the foundations for identifying it as a rare Anglo-Saxon survivor by giving an account of changes to its fabric introduced under the Normans and after. Yet, with no written records relating to All Saints before Domesday Book (1086–8), opinions about its date have varied substantially, from arguments that it is a Roman building to arguments placing it in the seventh, eighth or ninth century. Research for Harold and Joan Taylor’s magnum opus Anglo-Saxon Architecture (Taylor and Taylor 1965–Reference Taylor and Taylor78) emphasised the rarity of All Saints. They identified about 400 potentially Anglo-Saxon churches, but only about one-fifth were placed in their earlier periods ‘A’ (600–800) and ‘B’ (800–950), those periods in which Brixworth has most often been placed. Between the publication of the first two volumes of Taylor and Taylor in 1965 and the third in 1978, the Brixworth Archaeological Research Committee was founded in 1972, with a view to improving the evidence for its date and our knowledge about its archaeological, architectural and historical context. This volume is witness to the excellent work the committee has overseen.

Research campaigns like this tend to evolve rather than follow a pre-ordained path and are all the more fruitful for it. The major strands of this campaign consisted of a hand-drawn stone survey with mortar sampling and petrological analysis, a series of rescue excavations and a geophysical survey. Roughly the first half of the volume is taken up with an exemplary presentation of this work and its results – a survey of previous antiquarian work, a summary of the building materials, a structural sequence developed from analysis of the building materials and a summary of the archaeological evidence. Together, this work has yielded some impressive and complementary dating evidence. First, it has been shown that the bricks are indeed Roman in date, but it has been observed that they have Roman mortar adhering to them quite different from the mortar used on All Saints and that few of them are whole; it is probable that they are reused Roman spolia brought in from Leicester. Second, it has been shown that the foundations of the north-west corner of the first church were cut into the fill of a ditch containing eighth-century materials – a pottery sherd, an animal bone and charcoal. Third, samples from the construction mortars in the porticus (chambers) on the north side of the nave, thought to be an advanced stage in construction, are consistent with a date in the later eighth century. Fourth, the stone survey has demonstrated two phases of building – an initial church comprising a nave, a choir, an apse with a ring crypt, a western fore-building and flanking rows of porticus, followed by remodelling(s) that saw the reconstruction of the semicircular apse as a polygonal apse, the rebuilding of the west end as a tower with a stair turret, and the removal of the porticus. In sum, the evidence points to an initial church constructed c 750–c 800, followed by reconstruction(s) sometime in the ninth century and/or later. All this lays the foundations for the second half of the volume, which considers alternative reconstructions, architectural comparanda and possible historical contexts for its construction. Ultimately, the initial church is considered most likely to date to the reign of King Offa of the Mercians, whose emulation of, and competition with, Charlemagne are well documented, whose royal patronage might be key to accessing Roman spolia from Leicester, and whose ecclesiastical policies – a proposed archbishopric at Lichfield and the legatine council of 787 – are consistent with the up-to-date architectural statement made at Brixworth and the liturgical arrangements the building implies.

Thanks to the efforts of the Friends of Brixworth Church and the annual Brixworth Lectures held since 1983 the church is now much more widely recognised within and beyond academic circles. For those who have been attending and reading the lectures and the papers published by those involved with this work, many of these conclusions may be familiar. However, the significance of this volume goes well beyond presenting these important findings together for the first time. Inter alia, it provides a methodological template and powerful argument for hand-drawn stone surveying and detailed petrological analysis of buildings. In its large number of carefully selected, captioned and contextualised photographs and diagrams it demonstrates how modern technology can make visual material much more than mere illustration. Indeed, the work of the principal illustrator, Christina Unwin, deserves special mention. In working out from the building to the liturgical and historical context this volume also provides historians with a timely reminder of the importance of place and space to past experience. If there is one minor criticism to make it is that Brixworth could have been placed within an even more detailed consideration of the Anglo-Saxon church in the eighth and ninth centuries, with an eye to the competition between kings and bishops in extending their lordship over and ‘secularising’ monasteries and to trends in Mercian monastic patronage.