All Saints' Church, Brixworth

All Saints' Church, Brixworth, in Northamptonshire is an outstanding example of early Anglo-Saxon architecture located in central England, and has been called "perhaps the most imposing architectural memorial of the 7th century yet surviving north of the Alps"Sir Alfred Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture before the Conquest, Oxford, 1930. It is the largest English church which remains substantially as it was in the Anglo-Saxon period.

History

Brixworth is mentioned in the Peterborough Chronicle as being a monastery founded when Sexwulf became bishop of Mercia, before the death of King Wulfhere in 675AD. Many elements from the original building remain visible, although there are later additions, notably the tower, from further periods of building in the 10th, 13th and 19th centuries. The older building contains features typically found in architecture of a later period, for example an ambulatory. Now it is a parish church and a Grade I listed building.

Roman architecture can be considered the precedent for early Christian church building; hence the term 'Romanesque'. The church design resembled the form of an Early Christian basilica, but with piers instead of columns.

What remains of the original building is an arcaded nave infilled with windows, a presbytery separated from the...
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