The completely excavated nave of St Peter's, Barton-upon-Humber, is one of the iconic images of church archaeology – a field with which Warwick Rodwell has been associated for more than thirty years. This is the final report on a long programme of work that followed the redundancy of the church in 1978. Rodwell justifiably claims that ‘St Peter's is the most intensively studied and recorded parish church in the British Isles’ and that this is ‘a landmark in church archaeology’ (pp xxii, xvii). It is certainly a big book: its two ‘parts’ weigh more than my kitchen scales can measure. Together they form the first volume of the report; the second, The Human Remains by T Waldron, was published in 2007.

The report is so large because of its ambitious scope. Rather than simply focusing on the cemetery excavations and the architectural development of the building, the findings are placed within a much wider context – for example, it includes discussion of St Mary's (the other medieval church in the town), the development of the settlement, and the relationship with the nearby early Anglo-Saxon cemetery. A related reason for its voluminosity is that, although the church is famed for its Anglo-Saxon tower, the pre-Conquest period is not privileged; an attempt is made to understand as much as possible about the history of the building throughout its life. One of the advantages of its publication now is that it can be related to the considerable amount of relevant research which has recently been published – the text does not read as though it has been languishing on a desk for many years. Another advantage of such a long gestation period is that there has been time for many of the preliminary conclusions presented in the interim report, which was published in this journal (Rodwell and Rodwell Reference Rodwell and Rodwell1982), to have been revised and this is true of many aspects of the site, particularly its chronology and dating. As an example, it had been thought that there were a substantial number of Anglo-Saxon burials, notable for the preservation of organic materials associated with them, including coffins, wooden rods and textiles, but these are now mostly dated to the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The first church on the site is considered to have been ‘a prestigious proprietary chapel’ (p 352) built in the early eleventh century on the site of a recently established graveyard. Although only 250m from an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery, there is a gap of at least 150–200 years between the two: a nice example of the widespread pattern of a dislocation in burials between ‘final-phase’ cemeteries and the earliest phases found in medieval parish churchyards. In the interval, the local population may have used a cemetery on the site of St Mary's where, it is suggested, there was another Anglo-Saxon church. Major building works were carried out at St Peter's in almost every century after it was built. Some of the many interesting features of the site which stand out for me are: evidence for the exhumation of graves prior to the building of the first church; the reuse of material for making coffins, probably including furniture and parts of boats; the encapsulation of burials in riverine mud perhaps ‘to contain disease’ (p 183); and the suggestion that coffins and head supports were designed to facilitate the display of corpses to mourners. Throughout, attention is paid to details – of the finish of the building, its furnishings, and construction methods. It is argued that a finite quantity of reused Roman building stone was available for the Anglo-Saxon structure and that it was allocated from the outset. There is evidence for original internal wall plaster, external render, floor surfaces, pierced boards fitted in some of the windows, perhaps for decorative wooden door surrounds, marks from sharpening knives or swords and arrowheads. Among a considerable quantity of fourteenth-century architectural sculpture are the remains of a remarkable window designed as a ‘representation in stone of the Tree of the Cross’ (p 405) with figures carved on the tracery, only paralleled by the Jesse Window at Dorchester Abbey.

One of the characteristics of Rodwell's work is a willingness to speculate, to push interpretation as far as possible, and there are many interesting hypotheses here: the town was part of the putative ‘Lindsey burh system’; it is on the site of a defended Viking camp; a beam in the church was for hanging a sanctus bell to be rung from outside; external stripwork is likely to have been painted red; belfries were faced with ashlar so there was no need to repaint them white. As it is so full of ideas all readers are likely to find something to quibble with. Is it really justified to call the western chamber a ‘baptistery’ because it originally contained a font? Can there really be little doubt the earliest people buried in the Castledyke cemetery were ‘not indigenous’ (p 153)? One question that is not discussed is why the Anglo-Saxon tower was retained through successive building campaigns.

Frustratingly, problems were repeatedly encountered in dating various elements of the church and cemetery, despite considerable efforts to do so. For this reason, a whole chapter is devoted to ‘Interpreting Chronology’. As Rodwell says at the end of the section on the Anglo-Saxon church, ‘unfortunately, close dating still remains elusive, but such evidence as we have is best accommodated by placing Barton around the turn of the millennium’ (p 355).

The report has been produced with meticulous care. A long cast of specialists has contributed and it is generously illustrated and impressively well proofread. It would, though, have been easier to consult the notes were they footnotes rather than endnotes, and the colour plates if they were not bunched together at the end of Part 2. This is a superb case study of what can be learnt from detailed investigation of a building in its context and yet how difficult it can be to date structures with any precision. Its publication now is part of the current renaissance in the study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman architecture.