Page 38

The church was restored again in the late 14th or early 15th century and a new chancel wall was built, new windows were placed in the south walls, a tiled sanctuary floor laid and a new roof found necessary. There are two bells in the tower whose inscriptions throw doubt on its dating to the 18th century as the treble is inscribed ‘Te Deum Laudamus 1672’ and the tenor ‘Gloria in altissimis deo 1672’. The porch was rebuilt in the 18th century and the remaining windows and stone mullions date back to 1909 when Sir George Ordby Wombwell had the church restored and it was dedicated in the honour of All Saints by the Archbishop of York. The last restoration was undertaken in 1981 after the church was briefly abandoned when the roof began to give way. When the Victoria County Histories were written at the end of the 19th century there was a black letter inscription on the east wall of the chancel partly obscured by whitewash — its date and origin are unknown and it was later painted over but read

The monks hardly had time to settle in Byland on the Moor before disputes about service bells with the monks of Rievaulx and possibly the amalgamation of the Cistercian and Savignian orders caused them to decide to move in 1147 first to a site near Kilburn and finally to Byland by Wass where they built their abbey. The Byland abbots continued to run Old Byland, Wethercote and Murton as granges and are likelt to have followed the local monastic practice of providing chaplains to conduct services at their church in Old Byland and this is likely to have continued until the surrender of the abbey in 1538. The Torre manuscript in York Minster lists no incumbents for Old Byland before 1650 and although the list on the following page is far from complete it shows some of the rectors who have served the community during the past 350 years

The simple interior of All Saints showing the early Norman chancel arch and the sanctuary whose tiled floor was laid by the Byland monks over six hundred years ago