Church of England Saint dedications
This page began as an attempt to answer a question posed by my mother-in-law at the St Albans Pilgrimage, in which a parade of 12-foot puppets heads to the cathedral to recreate the death of St Alban. As part of the parade there were representatives from seven or eight churches dedicated to St Alban from around the country, and I was posed the question of how many churches are there dedicated to St Alban, are they all near St Albans itself? I found no easy way to give the answer, and so created this page to count church dedications and to give details on where they are.
According to The Church of England's website, achurchnearyou, as of 2016 there were 16139 Anglican churches in England, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man most of which are dedicated to one or more saints. Some churches have since closed, but I've kept them in the lists below, generally indicated by not having a link. (Their site actually claimed 16500, but contained a lot of repeats!)
To find a list of saints or dedications matching a particular prefix (eg St Al, Holy or Christ) enter it into the search box. To then list the churches with that dedication click on a saint's name. Where possible, the saints also have a link to the relevant Wikipedia article; click on the small 'W' icon.
Churches that are dedicated to more than one saint are added to the count for each of those saints. For interest, the top pairings of dedications are St Peter & St Paul (299), St Mary & All Saints (38), St Philip & St James (34), St Peter & St Mary (15), St Simon & St Jude (13).
Note that many saints are known by a number of names. In some cases I have merged these (eg St Edburg, St Eadburga and St Eadburgha are all listed in the results under St Edburga, or St Luke the Evangelist under St Luke), whereas in others I have kept them separate (eg St Mary, St Mary the Virgin, The Blessed Virgin Mary, etc, meaning 2369 churches are dedicated to St Mary in total) so that the actual wording of the dedication is clear. In other cases the name is ambiguous; the churches dedicated to "St James" will be mostly meaning "St James the Great" but some may mean "St James the Less", and all three are given separate entries in the results.
See also: Stats on multi-parish benefices.
Most common dedications:
Printing 1-100 of 446 dedications.
