Quenington is a village about nine miles E of Cirencester on the W bank of the River Coln. The church lies to the S of the village and consists of a rubble stone structure. The W part of the chancel and the aisleless nave are Romanesque, including the N and S windows and the pilaster buttresses. The church was extensively restored by Fredrick Waller in 1882-3: the bellcote and the N vestry are from this date. Romanesque sculpture consists of the stringcourse, the numerous fragments reset into the interior N and S walls at the W end of the nave and, especially, the N and S round-headed doorways with carved tympana still in situ: in 1990 Nimbus Conservation carried out conservation work on the Romanesque doorways, which won the John Betjeman Award for good conservation practice.

The Domesday Survey records that 'Quenintone' had a priest. In 1066 the manor was held by Alwold and Doda. In 1086 it passed under the lordship of Walter of Lacey, who probably received it from William fitzOsbern; Roger, the eldest son of Walter de Lacey, inherited the manor. Quenington was the only Lacey manor in Gloucestershire with a reeve, and this may be seen as an indication of its importance.

In 1100 Samson, Bishop of Worchester, granted to Gloucester Abbey a pension of two marks from Quenington. In 1138 Hugh I de Lacey granted the church of Quenington to St Peter's Abbey at Gloucester. The estate was leased from St Peter's Abbey by the Knights Hospitallers in 1193, when Agnes de Lacey established a preceptory for the Hospitallers.

According to Samuel Lysons (1804), on the S tympanum the Virgin holds a dove in her L hand: regrettably the stone is now too worn to clearly identify this. Lucy Abel Smith, a Ph.D. student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, who lives in Quenington Old Rectory, offered the opinion that the head of Christ in the N tympanum is stylistically close to that of the Chichester reliefs. As well, she believes the pair of arcs attached to the terminal bead of the beaded-tongue clasps of the second order of the S doorway are identical to the hinges of the house of Lazarus'sisters on the Chichester relief, in the scene of The Raising of Lazarus. However, these arcs with the bead in between are also stylistically related to the continuous hollow horseshoe cusping of the N doorway at Iffley,in the third order of the arch. In other words, the Quenington motif is one half of two units of the Iffley motif. The S doorway of Quenington has many correspondences to the S doorway at South Cerney. David Talbot Rice (1952), 79-80, dates The Harrowing of Hell tympanum over the N doorway of Quenington as c.1134-54, and identifies The Harrowing of Hell over the S doorway at South Cerney as from the same school, but of a little earlier date. Dina Portray Dobson (1933), 274-5, identifies the capitals in the arch on the tympanum as 'the most interesting part of the whole piece of sculpture for they are of precisely the same design as those of the responds to the chancel at Deerhurst priory, 10thc. This parallel should be sufficient to establish the date of the whole composition, which gives a different presentation of Harrowing'.

Romanesque sculptural fragments were reset into the W end of the N and S walls of the nave during the restoration by Fredrick Waller in 1882-3. Photographing the fragments on the N wall of the nave was extremely difficult due to poor illumination.