St Peter's Church, Barton-upon-Humber facts for kids
Quick facts for kids St Peter's Church |
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Tower and baptistery, from the south
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| 53°41′02″N 0°26′05″W / 53.68379°N 0.43471°W | |
| OS grid reference | TA 03478 21949 |
| Location | Barton-upon-Humber |
| Country | England |
| Denomination | Church of England |
| History | |
| Status | Church |
| Founded | 9th/10th century |
| Architecture | |
| Functional status | Museum |
| Heritage designation | Grade I |
| Designated | 1965 |
| Style | Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Gothic |
| Closed | 1970 |
St Peter's Church is an old church in Barton-upon-Humber, North Lincolnshire, England. It used to be the main church for the local area. This church is famous because it's one of the best examples of Anglo-Saxon buildings. It also helped an expert named Thomas Rickman understand this old building style.
Many years of digging and study have happened here. Today, the church is looked after by English Heritage. It's now a museum where you can learn all about its long history.
Contents
How Did St Peter's Church Begin?
The church is built just east of an old, round area. This area was about 250 meters wide. It used to have a ditch and a wooden fence around it, built before the year 900.
South of the church, an old cemetery was found. It was used by people who lived there before Christianity arrived. This cemetery dates back to the early 600s. Important people were buried there. In 669, a saint named Saint Chad started a monastery nearby. Later, Barton might have become a farm linked to this monastery.
The First Burials and Chapel
The first graves on the church site are from the 800s. This was about 100 years after the older cemetery closed. At first, only people connected to the nearby hall were buried here. There might have been a small chapel too, but we can't find any signs of it now. This was Barton's first Christian burial ground.
Experts have different ideas about exactly when the church was built. English Heritage thinks the baptistery (a room for baptisms) was built in the 800s. They believe the tower's main room was built in the 900s. Other experts suggest a slightly later time, between 970 and 1030. It's not clear if the baptistery is older than the tower or if they were built at the same time.
When the church was being built, the ditch to the east was filled in. This made it easy to walk between the hall and the church. It's also interesting that any graves found during building were carefully moved.
What Does the Church Look Like?
Originally, the church was a "turriform" building. This means the ground floor of the tower was the main part of the church, where people gathered.
Saxon Style Features
The tower shows many features of Saxon buildings:
- The walls are made of rough stones covered in plaster.
- It has decorative stone strips called pilasters. These strips don't actually hold up the wall; they are just for decoration. They were cut from old Roman stones.
- You can still see oak beams inside the tower. These beams once held up higher floors.
- The first floor must have been a gallery, as there are no windows on the ground floor.
- The tower has only a few small windows. They are either round or triangular at the top and have a stone pillar in the middle.
- There were doorways on the north and south sides, likely with wooden porches.
- The roof was probably made of wood, shaped like a pyramid, and covered with wooden tiles.
The tower connects to the baptistery through a narrow doorway. This doorway originally had a wooden frame. Digging has shown that a font (a basin for baptisms) was buried in the floor of this room. Outside, the baptistery is simpler than the tower, with even fewer, plain windows.
On the other side of the tower, a chancel (the part of the church where the altar is) was built. Foundations of a permanent altar and a screen have been found here. Both the baptistery and chancel likely had flat ceilings with storage spaces above.
Barton grew into a busy town. In 1086, the Domesday Book recorded that it had two mills and a ferry. In the early Norman period, around the late 1000s, a third floor was added to the tower of St Peter's. This part was built with cut limestone in a Romanesque style.
Later Additions and Changes
Around 1100, the old chancel of St Peter's was taken down. A larger Norman building was put in its place, east of the tower. The foundations of this building were found during digging in the 1970s. This new part was slowly made bigger in the 1100s and 1200s. Then, in the 1300s, it was mostly replaced by the nave (the main part of the church) and chancel we see today.
The earliest parts of this new section are in the Decorated Gothic style. Some of the stone tops of the pillars (called capitals) were reused from the older building. One of these shows a Green Man, a face made of leaves. The window at the east end of the north aisle is now inside the church because of later additions. It has a rare carving of figures in its stone patterns. This window is from the mid-1300s. It has four sections, and carved into the central stone pillar is a rood (a cross with Jesus on it). The Virgin Mary and Saint John are carved on the other two pillars.
The upper row of windows, called the clerestory, was added around 1430. The chancel was rebuilt in the late 1400s. Its east window still has pieces of old stained glass from the early 1300s. These show Saint George and Saint James. Other old features include a stone statue from the 1400s and a rood screen (a screen separating the nave from the chancel). There are also wall monuments from the late 1500s.
Around 1310, a stone cross was built in the churchyard. This cross is also a protected historical site, as is part of the churchyard wall.
How Experts Studied the Church
Thomas Rickman, an expert in old buildings, studied the church in 1819. He wrote a famous book called An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture.
Rickman's study of St Peter's helped him explain an important idea: "structural stratification." This means that if one part of a building is built on top of another, the bottom part must be older. He used this idea to show that the lower parts of St Peter's tower had to be Anglo-Saxon. This was because the Norman top storey was built on two lower levels that looked very different. Before this, people guessed about Saxon buildings, but they often confused them with Norman ones. Rickman's work on St Peter's and another church helped prove that these towers were indeed Saxon.
Digging Up History and Fixing the Church
St Peter's Church was given a special protection status in 1965. It was closed in 1970, and another church nearby became the main local church. The government department in charge of the environment took over St Peter's.
An archaeologist named Harold McCarter Taylor thought St Peter's was perfect for an archaeological dig. It was a large Saxon church that was no longer used for worship, which was very rare. He knew that to answer the many questions about its history, they needed to dig. In 1977, he got money for the project. This led to the biggest archaeological study ever done on a British local church, lasting until 1985.
During the dig, about 3,000 skeletons were carefully removed from the site. This gave experts an amazing record of people's bones, unlike any other small town in England. Because the ground was often wet, some wooden coffins also survived. Some were made from hollowed-out logs, and some might have been made from old boats. At least ten burials had hazel sticks with them, and one even had a pillow made of plants.
While the digging was happening, the church building was also repaired. In 2007, the skeletons were placed in a special room called an ossuary at the church. This way, they stayed in sacred ground close to where they were found, but could still be studied in the future. Three skeletons are still on display in the church today. You can also see some items buried with people and two coffins. English Heritage opened the church as a place for visitors in May 2007.
Church Bells
In 1859, after some inside repairs, a local newspaper described the church bells. It said there were eight bells in the tower. The smallest bell was about 71 cm wide and had a Latin message. Other bells had names of people or dates, like "Daniel Hedersley, founder 1741." One bell had a sweet message: "Sweetly tolling, men do call to taste, on meats that feed the soul."
Today, there are still eight bells. The largest bell weighs 522 kilograms.
Images for kids
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View from the tower to the baptistery
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The medieval nave
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View from the south east, showing the nave, south aisle, porch and tower
See also
In Spanish: Iglesia de San Pedro (Barton-upon-Humber) para niños
