The toponym derives from the Old English words burh meaning fortified town or hilltown and ford, the crossing of a river.

[1] The town began in the middle Saxon period with the founding of a village near the site of the modern priory building.

[4] Described by David Verey as "a complicated building which has developed in a curious way from the Norman",[5] it is known for its merchants' guild chapel, memorial to Henry VIII's barber-surgeon, Edmund Harman, featuring South American Indians and Kempe stained glass.

The local dialect was so thick that, in the 1890s, Gibbs had to publish a glossary to explain George Ridler’s Oven, one of the folk songs he collected.

In the late 19th century, the Cotswolds assumed a Sleeping Beauty charm, akin to that of Burne-Jones’s Legend of the Briar Rose at Buscot Park in the Thames Valley.

[10] It was remodelled in Jacobean style, probably after 1637, by which time the estate had been bought by William Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons in the Long Parliament.

After 1912 the house and later the chapel were restored for the philanthropist Emslie John Horniman, MP, by the architect Walter Godfrey.

[11] From 1949 Burford Priory housed the Society of the Salutation of Mary the Virgin, a community of Church of England nuns.

[13] On 17 May 1649, three soldiers who were Levellers were executed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell in the churchyard at Burford following a mutiny started over pay and the prospect of being sent to fight in Ireland.

Corporal Church, Private Perkins, and Cornet Thompson were the key leaders of the mutiny and, after a brief court-martial, were put up against the wall in the churchyard at Burford and shot.

[19] Monk deduces from the fact of the Synod being held at Burford, that the Britons in some numbers had settled in the town and neighbourhood.

[20] In the end Æthelhum, the Mercian standard-bearer who carried the flag with a golden dragon on it, was killed by the lance of his Saxon rival.

"[21] The historian William Camden (1551–1623) wrote "... in Saxon Beorgford [i.e. Burford], where Cuthred, king of the West Saxons, then tributary to the Mercians, not being able to endure any longer the cruelty and base exactions of King Æthelbald, met him in the open field with an army and beat him, taking his standard, which was a portraiture of a golden dragon.

[25] In September 2001 Burford was twinned with Potenza Picena, a small town in the Marche, on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

[26] In April 2009 Burford was ranked sixth in Forbes magazine's list of "Europe's Most Idyllic Places To Live".

[32] Ross Andrews speculates that the apparition may have been caused by a local tradition of burning effigies of the unpopular couple that began after their deaths.

The visitations were reportedly ended when local clergymen trapped Lady Tanfield's ghost in a corked glass bottle during an exorcism and cast it into the River Windrush.

[34] During droughts locals would fill the river from buckets to ensure that the bottle did not rise above the surface and free the spirit.