[3] It was founded in 1218 by Jordan de Santa Maria and his wife, Alice, who was the granddaughter of Bertram Haget.

A short distance to the east of the village is Dam Dyke which flows via Catterton Beck and The Foss into the River Wharfe near Bolton Percy.

[5] St Heiu, Abbess of Hartlepool, is said to have settled here as an anchoress in the 7th century; a tombstone, possibly hers, discovered at a depth of six feet was described by Daniel Henry Haigh in 1842 but is now lost.

According to several accounts,[8][9] in 1842 a broken tombstone was discovered about six foot below the surface in the kirkyard at St John the Baptist Church.

The similarities seem to confirm that Healaugh was the latest settlement of St Hieu, a 7th-century Irish abbess who worked in Northumbria.

The Venerable Bede quotes that a nun, Hieu, founded a convent near Hartlepool, then somewhere near Calcaria (the old name for Tadcaster).

It is thought that Abbess Hieu opened a monastery or hermitage on the site of The Old Priory down the coach road about a mile or so from the village.

At the Norman Conquest the surrounding land to the church was chiefly held by a Scandinavian named Tochis, from whom it passed to the Percys and then Healaugh later came to the Haget family who, as patrons for the building of a stone church here possibly in 1150, are believed to be the couple shown centrally carved above the stone arch of the south door.

Nothing is known of her early life, until she met Aidan of Lindisfarne who appointed her abbess of Hartlepool Abbey and subsequently a monastery at Healaugh.