Why do people say St Andrew’s dates from AD 950? 

For many years, visitors to St Andrew’s have been told that the church dates from around AD 950.

The date appears in guidebooks, displays and descriptions of the church. It gives St Andrew’s an extraordinary history stretching back more than a thousand years.

But what actually happened in AD 950?

The honest answer is that we do not know.

No surviving document records the foundation of St Andrew’s in that year. Nor has an archaeological investigation dated the earliest church building to precisely AD 950.

Instead, the familiar date seems to have developed from something discovered during the restoration of St Andrew’s at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ancient stones within the church

Between 1901 and 1903, St Andrew’s underwent an extensive restoration.

As later walls and structural features were opened up, several fragments of ancient carved stone were discovered. They had been reused as building material within the medieval church.

The fragments had once formed parts of large stone crosses or other Christian monuments. Their decoration included interlaced patterns, figures and animals.

They were clear evidence that Christian monuments had stood at Kildwick long before much of the present church was built.

Scholars including W. G. Collingwood studied and illustrated the stones. From their form and decoration, he concluded that they belonged to the Anglo-Scandinavian period.

In discussing their date, he suggested that some of the sculpture could not be much earlier than about AD 950.

That was not the date of the foundation of the church. It was an approximate date proposed for pieces of sculpture.

But over time, the distinction became blurred.

“The stones date from around 950” gradually became “there was a church here by 950”, and eventually the much more definite claim that “St Andrew’s was founded in 950”.

What modern scholarship tells us

The Kildwick stones have since been examined by Professor Elizabeth Coatsworth for the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture.

Her detailed study confirms that most of the fragments probably date from the tenth century. They represent several different monuments and the work of more than one sculptor.

This is important evidence.

The stones show that a Christian community at or near Kildwick had access to skilled craftspeople and patrons wealthy enough to commission substantial carved monuments.

One fragment, known as Kildwick 1, probably depicts a biblical scene. Dr Aleksandra McClain of the University of York has pointed out that explicitly biblical images were relatively unusual on tenth-century monuments. Whoever commissioned it appears to have been making a deliberate statement.

But the stones still cannot give us an exact foundation date.

They may have stood beside a church, within a churchyard or at another important Christian location nearby. Even if they were originally erected on the present site, they do not tell us precisely when the first church was built.

Was there a church here in the tenth century?

There are good reasons to think that there may have been.

The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland concludes that the pre-Conquest stones suggest the presence of a church at Kildwick from at least the tenth century.

During the 1901–03 restoration, the Revd E. W. Brereton also believed that evidence for a much smaller, earlier stone church had been exposed within the present building. He thought its eastern limit could be identified around the fourth supports from the west.

Modern scholars have suggested that the four westernmost bays of the present nave may preserve the site of this earlier aisleless church, or perhaps its nave.

What we cannot yet establish is the date of that structure. It might belong to the tenth century, but it could represent the church recorded in Domesday Book or a later Norman rebuilding.

That is one of the questions now being investigated.

What we know for certain

The earliest definite written evidence comes from Domesday Book in 1086, which records one church at Kildwick.

By the first half of the twelfth century, surviving documents refer to the church of St Andrew at Kildwick.

We can therefore say with confidence that:

Christian monuments were being erected at or near Kildwick during the tenth century;
a church certainly existed here by 1086;
it was dedicated to St Andrew by the first half of the twelfth century;
and evidence seen during the 1901 restoration suggests that a smaller stone church may survive within the footprint of the present building.

What we cannot yet say is that St Andrew’s was founded in the year 950.

An approximate date which became a tradition

The familiar date of AD 950 is therefore not entirely wrong, but it needs explaining.

It preserves the important truth that Christianity at Kildwick reaches back into the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian period. It reminds us that the story of this place began long before the Norman Conquest.

But 950 is an approximate date associated with the sculpture, not a recorded foundation date for the church.

The more accurate claim is also the more interesting one:

St Andrew’s stands on a site associated with a Christian community and carved monuments during the tenth century, although the date and form of its earliest church remain unknown.

We are now examining records from the 1901–03 restoration and exploring whether a non-invasive archaeological survey might help identify the footprint of the earlier building.

Perhaps one day we will be able to say more confidently when the first church was built.

For now, AD 950 should be understood not as a precise birthday, but as a signpost towards the remarkable pre-Conquest Christian history of Kildwick.