The Most Popular Anglican Church Names in England and Wales

A database in development is The Churchwardens' Accounts of England and Wales. It lists over 13,600 parishes for which about 2,500 have surviving churchwarden accounts, typically going back to the early 18th century, either original documents or transcripts. I've yet to explore the data, looking at that for Kirklinton, Cumberland is on my to-do list as it's where my earliest known Reid ancestor was a Churchwarden for part of the time records are available.

Below is a list of the top 20 most frequent names across England and Wales. St Mary has almost double the next most frequent. There's a lot of double counting for cases where a parish has more than one entry. That shouldn't have much impact on the relative frequency.

How do you think the church name was chosen? I'm imagining St Mary may have been favoured prior to the Reformation. Did All Saints get selected as a compromise? Were saints associated with fishing or sailing more common in coastal parishes? As the names likely go back hundreds of years the way the choice was made is likely lost to history. 

Parish	Count
St Mary	2100
All Saints	1074
St Peter	813
St Michael	625
St Andrew	551
St John the Baptist	400
St James	346
St Nicholas	341
Holy Trinity	307
SS Peter & Paul	227
St Margaret	224
St Giles	163
St John	147
St Bartholomew	140
St Martin	139
St Leonard	136
St George	128
St Laurence	121
St Mary Magdalen	117
St Helen	114

It would be interesting to look at regional variation. St Mary remains the most frequent in Norfolk, which has the most parishes. In Cornwall, St Michael is the most frequent along with several that occur in no other county.