Until the 1950s, the parish was a semi-rural village lying one mile north east of Chelmsford, on the old Roman Road, with little to attract the visitor outside of the annual Essex show, a half dozen pubs and the town's prison and Essex Police headquarters, both of which still lie to the east of the Roman road.

The Essex show-ground was once sited on fields north of The Green, and south of Pump Lane.

Since this time, the former show site along with a thousand or so acres of surrounding arable land have been developed to create the most populous suburb of Chelmsford.

[3] A former resident of the village of Springfield, William Pynchon, went on to become one of the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony – a group of New World settlers whose capital city was Boston.

Originally named Agawam (now a suburb of the city itself, featuring the Six Flags New England amusement park), the settlement was renamed "Springfield" in Pynchon's honour, after he had suffered indignities from Connecticut's Captain John Mason – the notorious "Indian Killer" of British America's Pequot War – who expressed disdain at Pynchon's "delicate treatment" of the region's Native People.