Great Paxton is a village on the E bank of the Great Ouse, 3 miles NE of St Neots. The church lies W of the High Street in the villlage centre. It is built of pebbles and ashlar rubble set in mortar, and consists of a 2 bay chancel, a clerestoreyed nave with N and S aisles, a S porch and a vestry at the W end of the N aisle. The W tower is a 14thc addition. So much is visible from the exterior, although the observant visitor will have noted the unusual height of the nave and the round-headed windows of the clerestorey. Inside it becomes clear that this was originally a cruciform church with aisles - an unusual combination. The nave has been cut short at the W end, and is now 2½ bays long. The arcades are comparatively low, and above them is a large expanse of blank wall below the clerestorey level, suggesting an original scheme of wallpainting. The clerestorey windows themselves are wide, tall and completely plain.

The original building would certainly be called Romanesque were it elsewhere in Europe, but it is generally assumed to be pre-Conquest. This includes the nave and its arcades (thus the aisles too, which were later widened), the crossing including the transepts and the original E crossing arch, now the chancel arch. There is assumed to have been a crossing tower on the evidence of the substantial crossing piers. There is no sign of a W crossing arch, which would certainly have been necessary if there were a tower, but the entire interior is covered with a thick coat of whitewashed plaster which would conceal any telltale scars. The chancel was rebuilt in the late-13thc, the aisles and the S porch in the 14thc. When the W tower was built in the 14thc the nave was shortened. Presumably at that time the central tower was removed, the chancel arch was remodelled, and the S transept was lowered and given a new pointed arch.

The manor of Great Paxton was held by King Edward before the Conquest, and by Countess Judith thereafter. In the Confessor's time it was rated at 25 hides. In 1086 there were 60 villans and 8 bordars, indicating a total population of 300-350 people. The manor had a church and a priest, 3mills, 80 acres of meadow and woodland totalling 1920 acres in two parcels.

The manor later became part of the Honour of Huntingdon, and was held by the Earls of Huntingdon in demesne as late as 1192. Shortly thereafter it was granted to a sub-tenant, as in 1215 King John restored the manor to Gilbert de Hallinge who had it as part of the inheritance of his wife Alice. The later history will be found in the VCH (see bibliography).

The church's dedication to the Holy Trinity appears in a charter relating to an exchange of land, dateable 1124-28 and issued by King David I of Scotland (Parsons (1917)). The same charter refers to a prior and canons serving there. A charter of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (1162-70) gave permission for a college regular there, but this was not, apparently, established. Nevertheless the presence of canons in the 1120s strongly suggests that the church had Minster status.

The earliest detailed modern analysis of this enigmatic building was an article published by Louis Cobbett and Cyril Fox in 1924. The authors considered that the billet-ornamented imposts (abaci) of the chancel arch originally topped bulbous capitals similar to those of the transept arches, and that the capitals were removed when the pointed arch was installed. They rejected the idea of a crossing tower on the grounds that they found no evidence of a western crossing arch. On the issue of dating, they pointed out that arcades carried on purpose-built piers rather than sections of a voided wall are unknown in surviving pre-Conquest churches, but this does not entirely rule out a date before 1066. The authors found no parallel for the bulbous capitals in Norman work, and indications of an Anglo-Saxon date in the pilaster strips flanking the transept arches and the long and short work of some of the jambs. Above all they were taken by the proportions of the nave. They concluded that it was either built before the Conquest, when the manor was held by King Edward, and in a style that was already influenced by continental ideas, or that it was built under Countess Judith in a style that was not Norman. They preferred the former hypothesis and dated it to the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66).

Fernie (1983) agreed with this dating and drew attention to similarities with the capitals and pilaster strips in the design of the tower arch of St Bene't's, Cambridge. In Europe he noted similarities between the pier designs of Great Paxton and such mid-11thc Rhenish churches as Essen Minster, St Lucius in Werden and the crypt of St Martin's, Emmerich. The arcade piers of Saint-Remi at Reims can also be invoked as parallels for the Great Paxton chancel arch and transept arch responds.

The capitals are described as bulbous by Cobbett and Fox (1927) and by VCH, and as lumpy and shapeless by Pevsner (repeated in O'Brien's revision). The present author prefers the former designation, while noting that those of the transept arches are tapered while the nave capitals are doughnut-shaped. In general the author accepts a date in the 1050s or '60s for the original work, which leaves two features to be considered: the billet imposts of the chancel arch and the moulded profiles of the nave arcade respond imposts. Billet is one of the earliest of the Norman ornaments, apppearing locally in the 1080s at Ely and Thorney, and a decade earlier at Lincoln, so it is no great stretch to find it in a great church associated with the Confessor at the time suggested. Rather less explicable are the moulded imposts of the nave arcade responds. Stylistically a date at the end of the 12thc or the very start of the 13thc is likely, and their positioning suggests that they were re-used when the nave was shortened, presumably when the W tower was erected in the 14thc. The E responds appear to be in their correct positions, so it must be assumed that they represent a modification around the year 1200. The chamfered stringcourses above the arcades could belong to the same campaign.