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,…