At the close of the Medieval period the open field method of farming came to an end. Tenant farmers or land owners worked their own fields and began to enclose them. At the end of the seventeenth century the whole of the parish was divided into small fields with hedges and open-field farming ended. The look of Bingham town, however, hardly changed. It remained a small, self-contained market town, dominated by agriculture from the end of the Middle Ages through to the middle of the twentieth century. The farmers, who worked the land around Bingham, had their farms in the town itself. Farm workers lived in little cottages in the town, often with a narrow strip of land behind. Many of these cottages survived until the national slum clearance schemes of the 1950s changed the face of much of rural England. Now there are very few buildings left in Bingham whose origins can be traced to the seventeenth century. (See the Built Heritage).

Despite its apparent rural isolation Bingham was not immune to national events during this period. The church suffered at the hands of Thomas Cromwell during the Reformation. One of the church bells is said to have been placed in the tower in 1589 to commemorate England's victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Perhaps the biggest excitement, however, was during the Civil War. Adelaide Wortley, in her book A History of Bingham, suggests that Prince Rupert and his men rested at Bingham on 21st March 1644 on his way to battle in Newark. Bingham was part way between the parliamentary stronghold at Nottingham and Royalist Newark and the presumption is that Bingham, sitting on the intersection of the Fosse Way and a major east-west road must have been visited by troops of both sides at various times. Miss Wortley suggests that some of the earthworks in Crow Close were created during this time. It is believed that the church font was desecrated at about 1650. The Bingham estate itself became a trophy of war when it was taken out of the hands of the Royalist Earl of Chesterfield for some time.

After the Civil War, little noteworthy happened in Bingham. Most histories of the town are reduced to describing the 30-year incarceration in a specially built prison in the Market Place of a mentally deranged man who was found guilty of setting fire to parts of the town in 1710 or when, in 1775, the church was struck by lightening. Then, in 1850, the railway arrived and Bingham's isolation ended.

To read more about the period go to:
Summary of 19th and 20th century Bingham
1000 years of crime and punishment in Bingham
Farming in Bingham