Waresley is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being a historic county of England.

In 1085 William the Conqueror ordered that a survey should be carried out across his kingdom to discover who owned which parts and what it was worth.

[5] The Domesday Book does not explicitly detail the population of a place but it records that there were 28 households at Waresley.

The Domesday Book uses a number of units of measure for areas of land that are now unfamiliar terms, such as hides and ploughlands.

In different parts of the country, these were terms for the area of land that a team of eight oxen could plough in a single season and are equivalent to 120 acres (49 hectares); this was the amount of land that was considered to be sufficient to support a single family.

[5] The tax assessment in the Domesday Book was known as geld or danegeld and was a type of land-tax based on the hide or ploughland.

A parish council is responsible for providing and maintaining a variety of local services including allotments and a cemetery; grass cutting and tree planting within public open spaces such as a village green or playing fields.

For Waresley the highest tier of local government is Cambridgeshire County Council which has administration buildings in Cambridge.

[17] Waresley is part of the electoral division of Buckden, Gransden and The Offords[15] and is represented on the county council by one councillor.

[18] Waresley Wood, a Site of Special Scientific Interest,[19] is managed as a nature reserve by the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire.

The original church stood in the east of the village and was mentioned in the Domesday Book[9] but was destroyed by a storm in 1724.

In 1728, it was rebuilt but was pulled down and the current church built on a new site, at the junction of the roads to Great Gransden and Eltisley in 1856.

The church's spire blew down in a storm of March 1987,[21] just missing a bus-stop full of school kids that had left minutes before it came down,[citation needed] but it was rebuilt by John Charlton, Paul Raffles and Chris Phillips of Waymans.