The area takes its name from a church that once served as the focal point of a settlement, and that settlement, rather than the abbey, may represent the original core of religious life in this part of County Kilkenny. It is the kind of place where the name outlasts the building and the building outlasts the record.

Jerpoint Abbey was founded in the twelfth century, most likely in the 1160s, by the King of Ossory, Dónal Mac Gilla Pátraic, and was later granted to the Cistercians. The church at Jerpointchurch is associated with the earlier, pre-Cistercian layer of occupation in the area, linked to a parish and community that existed before the monks arrived and reorganised the landscape around their monastic enclosure. Medieval Irish monasticism frequently involved such layering, with older foundation sites absorbed into or displaced by new religious institutions. The townland name is itself a kind of fossilised memory, preserving the fact of a church long after the physical structure has lost its prominence in the historical record.