Allerton Mauleverer is a village 5 miles east of Knaresborough in the West Riding. The medieval church of St Martin was almost entirely rebuilt in a neo-Norman style c.1745-6, retaining only the fourteenth-century S arcade. Leach and Pevsner (2009), 98, call it 'a very strange but not unattractive church... a mixture of Gothick, simplified Burlingtonian Palladian and what seems to be a proto-Neo-Norman - what the C18 would have called 'Saxon''. The plan is symmetrical, cruciform with an aisled nave and a tower over the W bay of the chancel: this plan may in part relate to the medieval building, see Comments. The church was declared redundant in 1971 and came into guardianship of the Redundant Churches Fund (now Churches Conservation Trust) in 1973. No Romanesque remains are visible, but material has been recovered from a small excavation in 1976. No photographs are currently available.

The priory of Allerton Mauleverer (which probably held the advowson of St Martin's) was founded in the reign of Henry I by Richard Mauleverer c. 1100-1105. It was the first cell of Holy Trinity, the alien priory in York, but soon acquired its own independence, being subject only to Marmoutier Abbey (near Tours) from about 1109-1114. The priory was granted to King's College Cambridge by Henry VI and there are no remains.

Photos of present church are in the Conway Library.

Regarding the 1976 excavation in the chancel, Lawrence Butler writes:

'Two periods of medieval construction were indicated by the wall footings. The first is the unbuttressed apsidal foundation which is likely to be twelfth-century in date. The character of the footings and the tooling of the incorporated piece of carved column support such a date. From the small amount of visible foundations it is impossible to tell whether the apse ran unbroken into a chancel, as at Bengeo, Herts., or whether it joined a wider chancel as part of a three cell building, as at Birkin, Pontefract Castle or Steetley, Derbys. Assuming that the present west tower marks the medieval division between nave and chancel, this church at Allerton Mauleverer is similar in proportion to Birkin and may also be of similar date.' (1978), p. 188.

Butler (1978), p. 176, comments on the excavated sculpture fragment, saying 'The piece of carved column could have been taken from an earlier building, or, more probably, be a fragment broken during construction work'.