Older theories, repeated for centuries by guidebooks and parish histories, held that the Sandbach Crosses were erected to commemorate the conversion of Peada of Mercia to Christianity in about 653. That date had a satisfying narrative weight: Peada, the son of the pagan king Penda, accepted baptism as part of his marriage alliance with the Northumbrians, and the crosses would have marked the moment when his kingdom turned. More recent and more authoritative scholarship has shifted the dates several centuries forward. The larger cross is now placed in the early ninth century and the smaller in about the middle of that century, when Mercia was still one of the dominant kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England under Coenwulf and his successors. The carvings depict scenes from the life of Christ and other Christian iconography, executed at a level of detail that would have demanded skilled stoneworkers and a serious patron.

At some point the crosses came down. Sources disagree about when. Some attribute the destruction to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII's commissioners and later Edwardian Protestants targeted religious imagery and pulled down crosses, statues and stained glass across England. Others date the smashing to the English Civil War of the 1640s, when Parliamentarian forces with similar iconoclastic instincts did damage of their own. Either way the crosses fell. Fragments were scattered, some used as paving or building stone, others lost. In 1816 the local antiquary George Ormerod oversaw a major restoration that recovered as many pieces as could be found and reassembled them into the two columns that stand on the market square today. The reassembly is visible if you look closely; the surfaces are a patchwork of original carving, weathered fragments and connecting stonework.

Before the 1816 restoration, one of the crosses was painted by William Alexander, the watercolourist who had travelled to China with Lord Macartney's embassy in 1792 and produced some of the first detailed European images of Beijing. His Sandbach watercolour was engraved by John Byrne and published in Britannia Depicta, Part III, Buckinghamshire and Cheshire in 1810. Examples of the print were sold at Sotheby's in February 1977, and now appear in the UK's Government Art Collection. The Cheshire Records Office holds further prints and engravings, and successive Victorian and Edwardian photographers documented the crosses at intervals from around 1860 onward. The image record makes the Sandbach Crosses one of the best-illustrated pieces of Anglo-Saxon sculpture in England.

In 2011, Foden's Band, the championship-section brass band founded in Sandbach in 1900 and named for the local truck-maker Edwin Foden, commissioned its composer-in-residence Andy Scott to write a piece for brass band called To the Ancient Crosses. Scott described the work as a vigorous and rhythmic description of the Saxon stone-carved crosses in the market square, and it was dedicated to Sandbach Town Council for its long support of the band. It is a particularly Cheshire turn of events: an Anglo-Saxon devotional monument, broken twice by religious and political conflict, becomes the inspiration for a twenty-first-century brass-band composition performed in the same square where the crosses stand.

The Sandbach Crosses are recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a Grade I listed building and as a scheduled monument, the two highest levels of protection in the English heritage system. They are unusually large and elaborate examples of their type. Comparable Anglo-Saxon crosses survive at places like Bewcastle in Cumbria and Ruthwell in Scotland, but the Sandbach pair, standing in their original market context rather than tucked inside a churchyard, give a clearer sense of how such monuments would have anchored the public space of a Mercian town. They are now managed by English Heritage and free to view at any time, the carved figures still legible to anyone who pauses on a Saturday market day to look up.