An early pagan Saxon cemetery, believed to be linked with this enclosure and dated to the first half of the seventh century, was discovered at Castledyke, south of the church, and was used to bury high-status individuals.

[1][2] The earliest graves on the site of the church date from the ninth century, around one hundred years after the southerly cemetery was abandoned.

[9] Barton thrived as a town, and was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as housing two mills and a ferry, worth £4 per year.

[2] In the early Norman period, perhaps the late eleventh century, a third storey was added to the tower of St Peter's, using dressed limestone[8] in a Romanesque style.

The chancel of St Peter's was demolished c.1100 to make way for a larger early Norman building east of the existing tower, the foundations of which were found under the present nave during the 1970s excavation.

[5] The earliest parts of this extension are in the Decorated Gothic style, with some of the arcade capitals reused from the earlier building.

[9] His inspection led him to describe the principle of "structural stratification" – where one phase of building rests on another, the second must be of an earlier date.

This enabled him, for the first time, to persuasively argue that the standing structure must be of Anglo-Saxon date, as the Norman top storey of the tower was supported by two stories constructed in a very different, then unknown, style.

He noted that, as the building had been examined repeatedly by architectural historians, there was little possibility of resolving the considerable questions about its construction and history without excavations.

In 1977, he secured funding from the Department of the Environment, and began the most extensive archaeological investigation ever undertaken of a British parish church,[9] not completed until 1985.

[16] 3,000 skeletons were removed from the site, providing what has been described as "an osteological record unparalleled for any small town in England".

[16] In 2007, the skeletons were placed in an on-site ossuary, so as to leave them in consecrated ground close to their original location, while still permitting future study.

The fourth, 2 feet 8 inches in diameter, with this inscription, "Sweetly tolling, men do call to taste, on meats that feed the soul."

The sixth or tenor bell, 3 feet 4 inches in diameter, with this inscription, "Henry Nelthorpe and William Gilders, churchwardens, 1743.