Newark Priory was founded at the end of the twelfth century by Ruald de Clane and his wife Beatrice of Send and dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Thomas a Beckett. It was a "novo loco" - a new place for monks from nearby, the name changing over the years to Newstead and then finally Newark.

In the fourteenth century Pyrford was a thriving community : seventy of the one hundred and seventy tenants recorded around this period had their own smallholdings. At this time a resident of Pyrford would have received a penny a day for haymaking or twopence for stacking corn.

The Black Death, the bubonic plague, swept across England in the middle of the fourteenth century and in common with many other towns and villages, the population of Pyrford was halved.