About Us

Our church was built originally in Saxon times and our earliest mention in history books is when the son of Duncan, King of Scotland gave our church back to the then Archbishop of York and the Prior of St Mary’s Church, Embsay. We are able to boast that our Patron is the Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford; the daughter of a past Dean of that college was called Alice and inspired a Victorian scholar called Charles Lutwidge Dodgson to write a story about her. Dodgson’s pen name was “Lewis Carroll” and the book he wrote was “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

There are three bells in the Tower; consecrated during reign of James I; the second in the Restoration of the Monarchy under Charles II, in 1660, and inscribed ‘It is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord’.; the third is dated 1713 and commemorates the Treaty of Utrecht. Black marks on the north wall are popularly reckoned to be relics of the Scots’ attack after the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

In a niche by the pulpit stands one of the church’s two alabaster statues of Our Lady and Child, discovered, in the 19th century, buried in the ground at the rear of the church, and placed in their present positions in the 1970s. A second and smaller statue of Our Lady and the Infant Christ is situated below the east window of the chapel. It is an unusual and remarkable carving of Mary breast-feeding her Child. Their removal may have occurred in the 1530s when Henry VIII ordered the suppression of Marian shrines, or perhaps as late as the 1640s when the Puritans were beheading what statues they could find.

The Tempest family of Broughton Hall became patrons of the church on their arrival in the early 15th century. The Lady Chapel was set up by Roger Tempest and parishioners in 1442 as a charity worth 40 shillings after he and his nephew, Sir John Tempest, signed a charter for the appropriation of the church.

Latterly we were visited by the playwright, Alan Bennett, according to his book “Untold Stories” (pg 235) on 31st August 1998 when he remarked;

“We sit outside listening to the wind streaming through a huge copper beech and talk about this ordinary enough church which has been bound up with great events in the nation’s history”

 

As good a summary of us as any!