St Peter's Church, Barton-upon-Humber

St Peter's Church at Barton-upon-Humber was declared redundant in 1972 and taken into public guardianship in 1978 by the then Department of Environment. Given that it had long been recognised that it had a late Saxon origin, a major programme of excavation and survey was instituted. This explored the church and its churchyard, and ran from 1978 to 1984 under the direction of Warwick Rodwell. The programme has meant that this is the most intensively studied and recorded parish church in the country. It also produced the largest collection of human remains ever excavated in the UK. The latter provide a unique insight into the population of a small, relatively isolated, market town over 900 years.

Before Barbican was founded, one of the directors had written the project design for the post-excavation work. So it was pleasing when we were asked to manage the final stages of producing the publications a decade or so later. Two letterpress volumes were produced with an extensive digital resource that included the reports on the loose finds, appendices dealing with archive sources, parish registers, the parish magazine, the clergy and church-wardens and a description of the funerary monuments. The database includes the records of the osteological work carried out on the human bones, the full catalogue of the finds, and a transcription of the parish registers.

The digital finds are available here on the Archaeological Data Service. The books are

Rodwell, W. with Atkins, C. 2011. St Peter's, Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire - A Parish Church and its Community. Volume 1: History, Archaeology and Architecture, (Oxbow Books, Oxford).
Waldron, T. 2007. St Peter's, Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire - A Parish Church and its Community. Volume 2: The Human Remains, (Oxbow Books, Oxford).

All the work was been funded by English Heritage and its predecessors.

Clicking on the image will take you to the publisher's web site