14th Century

The 14th Century marks the beginning of Banfield’s recorded local history: the village was said to have formed when people fled the Black Death in more densely populated towns. Its later story draws force from the contrast between those beginnings and the sudden attention brought by the claimed miracles at St. Joseph’s Church, which offered the once-obscure village a chance to remake its future.

Settlement and Origins

Banfield’s local history, as recalled by George Southworth, begins with people escaping the horrors of the Black Death. The settlement was then known as Banefeld, and its founders established themselves on the area’s rich agricultural land. The account presents the village as shaped first by refuge and then by farming: its prosperity rested on the land, and its inhabitants remained there as England changed around them.

The villagers’ roots were described as extending back through the centuries to the community’s beginnings. That continuity gave local families a strong sense of belonging, but the village’s history offered little fame to match it. Southworth characterized Banfield as a place where nothing of great consequence had happened, apart from minor misdeeds. The 14th-century origin therefore serves not as the start of a sequence of public triumphs, but as the foundation of a long, settled obscurity.

From Rural Obscurity to Pilgrimage

The village’s remembered isolation makes its later transformation especially striking. When crowds began travelling to St. Joseph’s Church and the adjoining field, Banfield became a destination for believers, the curious, and people hoping for cures. On a cold, drizzling Sunday, unusually heavy traffic and a crowd at the church gate signalled that the village was no longer receiving only its familiar community. The gathering included people with illnesses and disabilities, many accompanied by relatives who carried intense hopes for what Alice Pagett’s appearance might bring.

By a later procession, the field was being called the Field of the Holy Virgin, and thousands had come from Banfield and farther afield. The contrast with the small agricultural settlement described in its origin story is not simply one of scale. The village had become a place onto which visitors projected religious expectation, while its old history of local continuity was being recast as the prelude to a public religious event.

The Past as a Promise of Renewal

Southworth saw the new attention as an opportunity to rescue Banfield from decline and obscurity. The old local families, whose histories were entwined with the village’s uneventful past, could imagine the claimed miracle bringing prosperity and giving their community a more prominent history. The 14th-century foundation thus became a source of rooted identity at the very moment the village hoped to change: its age lent weight to its claim of continuity, while pilgrimage offered a possible route to renewed importance.

That hope existed alongside the Church’s caution. Bishop Caines warned that the event could not yet be called holy and that Alice Pagett’s vision and the reported cures required examination. The village’s history therefore frames a tension between spiritual claims and civic expectation: the same gathering that inspired religious hope also appeared to promise Banfield economic revival. The distant origins do not settle the truth of the later claims; they show how sharply the new pilgrimage era departed from the village’s remembered past.