Plague burial grounds are a genuine and historically documented feature of English towns that experienced significant outbreaks of bubonic plague across the medieval and early modern periods, communities frequently establishing separate burial sites away from parish churchyards to cope with the sheer volume of dead during severe outbreaks, giving Bury Field's own local name and tradition a plausible historical basis even without a specific documented outbreak or burial record for Newport Pagnell having been traced in the sources consulted for this entry.
The field's dual identity, its official name Bury Field itself carrying an etymological echo of burial, alongside its informal but evidently more commonly used local name the Plague Fields, gives this site an unusually direct linguistic connection between its physical name and its claimed grim history, a pattern of name-as-historical-record also seen elsewhere in this wider register through sites such as Whiteladyes Lane in Berkshire.
As with several of Newport Pagnell's other collectively documented hauntings recorded throughout this register, no specific date, number of victims, or individually named ghost has been traced for Bury Field in the sources consulted for this entry, and this tradition is recorded as local legend attached to a real and still-accessible open space, its plague association reflecting the very genuine historical vulnerability of English communities to epidemic disease throughout the period the tradition implies.
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