Daventry is a center of administration for the larger district of Daventry. The town is just 77 miles north of London and 16 miles to the southeast of Rugby. Borough Hill, a 653 foot hill that overlooks the town, is the location of remains of an Iron hill fort that is one of the biggest found in Britain. The remains of a Roman village have also been found on the hill. The town started as a small Anglo Saxon village in about 920 and was the location of a priory by the 12th Century. It was given its charter to be a market town in 1255. Queen Elizabeth I gave it the status of borough in 1576.

The town was referred to as "Daintree" in Shakespeare's Henry VI. The name is another name for the town that comes from the Danish planting an oak tree on the summit of Borough Hill to mark it has the center of England. This section of the town's history is reflected in the town's seal of that includes a Viking/Saxon axeman and oak tree. On the map made by Christopher Saxton in 1637 the town was referred to as Dauentre.

King Charles I stayed in Daventry in 1645 during the English Civil War after he stormed the garrison of the Parliament at Leicester and on his way to relieve the Oxford siege. Five thousand foot soldiers from the Royalist Army with an equal amount of horses camped out on Borough Hill while King Charles I went to the nearby forest for hunting. Local legend has it that Charles I, staying at the Wheatshead Inn, was visited by the ghost of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Stafford, his friend and former advisor. It is said that the advice of the ghost lead him to keep going north and that he was not going to win with force of arms. However, Sir Thomas Fairfax was leading the newly formed New Model Army that had been created by Parliament was going north from the siege on Oxford after being told to engage the King's central army.

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