Bawtry is a market town and civil parish in the City of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England.

The site in Aethelfrith's time lay in the southern reaches of Northumbria, a dangerous marshy region close to the border with Lindsey and easily accessible from the Kingdom of East Anglia.

While the village originally lay in Nottinghamshire, boundary changes before the Norman conquest moved it just inside the West Riding of Yorkshire.

In 1213, de Vipont received a royal charter specifying an annual four-day fair at Pentecost, and a market was first recorded in 1247.

The town grew as a river port and as a local commercial centre and stopping point between Doncaster and Retford.

[7] Trading in Bawtry later declined and by the 1540s John Leland recorded it as being "very bare and pore", but it grew again in the Elizabethan period through the shipping of millstones.

[8] Bawtry is where the western branch of the Roman Ermine Street crosses the River Idle in the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

Nearby towns include Gainsborough to the east, Retford to the south-southeast, Worksop to the south-west and Doncaster to the north-west.

The county boundary with Nottinghamshire runs just to the south of the town – the southernmost house on the Great North Road names itself "Number One Yorkshire".