Deserted medieval settlements of this kind are scattered across Ireland, the remnants of villages, hamlets, and small clusters of habitation that contracted or vanished entirely during and after the late medieval period, often as a consequence of plague, land consolidation, or the decline of the monastic economies that had sustained them.

Jerpointchurch itself takes its name from the area around Jerpoint, and the presence of a deserted settlement here points to a wider pattern of occupation in this part of the Nore valley. Jerpoint Abbey, founded in the twelfth century and suppressed in the sixteenth, was a significant centre of Cistercian life in Leinster, and the lands around it supported various forms of settlement across the medieval period. When such monasteries fell, the communities that had grown up in their orbit often did not survive long in their existing form. What remains of the settlement at Jerpointchurch is classified archaeologically as a deserted medieval settlement, a category that can encompass anything from earthwork traces of house platforms and field boundaries to more visible above-ground remains.