Church of St John the Baptist

The Church of St John the Baptist is the parish church in the village of Royston in South Yorkshire, England. It is a Church of England church in the Diocese of Leeds. The building is Grade I listed and was built in the 12th century AD. Built by the monks of the nearby Priory of St. Mary Magdalen at Lund (Monk Bretton Priory), the present building can be dated back to before 1234. The association of this church with the monks would have ended abruptly when their priory was seized by the Crown and dissolved in 1539. There was possibly an Anglo Saxon church here, evidenced by some early foundation work, and the discovery of a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon cross, now displayed to the right of the high altar. On the opposite side of the sanctuary, the solid sacristy door with its original iron work is particularly fine. The eastern part of the chancel is probably the earliest part of the present building, the masonry of the north and south walls being part of the church described in 1240 as "newly built". The proportions of the chancel would seem to agree with those of a mid-13th-century structure, though it is uncertain if it was originally flanked by aisles. The Decorated tracery of the east window and the distinctive ogee (onion-shaped) arch of the sacristy doorway in the north wall of the sanctuary are part of a re-modelling of c. 1340, but earlier is the north aisle with its windows with Y tracery of the early 14th century. The nave with the addition of the clerestory and magnificent roof is a re-building in two stages in the 15th century. The three eastern bays with their arcade of unusual basket arches dates to c. 1413–1418. The western bay (c. 1480) is where the tower originally stood. There is an enclosed stairway within the north-west wall, with a lancet window into the church. This was probably the access to an earlier tower. The stonework here matches the arcades in the chancel and the enlarged Lady Chapel of c. 1430–1440. All this is Perpendicular in style, as is the great west tower, which was built in the 1480s. Whilst the tower has the usual diagonal buttresses, crenellated parapet and crocketted pinnacles, it is more remarkable for its extremely unusual oriel window at the same level as the ringing chamber. The present clock mechanism was installed in 1898 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee the previous year. The faces were restored in the early 1970s. The church was extensively restored in 1867–69 by J. L. Pearson. A floor plan (1818) showing how it looked prior to that restoration is displayed at the west end of the north aisle. The chancel was extensively re-ordered in the 1980s, at which time the pre-Reformation altar stone was discovered buried in the floor of the sanctuary. It was restored, and the base upon which the altar stone is now fixed incorporates stones from Monk Bretton Priory, the Shrine of Our Lady of Rocamadour (France) and the now-demolished National School of 1844. The high altar also contains a relic of St. Justin, martyr, (martyred in 165). Upon the altar is the tabernacle, in which is reserved the Blessed Sacrament. The white light burning above reminds us of the presence of Jesus Christ in His Blessed Sacrament. The west end was totally re-modelled in 2001–02 and contains a litch and toilet with spacious gallery above. The 1959 tower screen by Martin Dutton, the ‘Lizard man’, was re-fashioned as the utility room door at the west end of the north aisle. It bears the shields of the Province…