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Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples hunted and settled in the Ouse Valley and its tributaries. Stone and bronze axes have been found at Olney, Ravenstone, Chicheley, Newport Pagnell and Bradwell. Bronze Age burial sites have been excavated at Ravenstone, Wolverton and near Milton Keynes Village, whilst in the meadows near Tyringham a cemetery of this period has been identified by aerial photography. The remains of a nationally important large circular timber house dated 1000 BC were excavated at Bancroft.
From then on, the local population expanded and from 500 BC Iron Age settlements began to develop in several locations around the borough. At Danesborough, near Bow Brickhill, the remains of an Iron Age camp enclosed with a massive bank and ditch are visible.
By the time of the Roman conquest in AD 43, the area was extensively settled and farmed. A major Roman villa, containing some of the finest quality mosaic floors, was excavated at Bancroft Park. The occupants erected a large stone mausoleum on an adjacent hilltop, on the site of an earlier cemetery. The remains of the villa have been preserved and on-site interpretation panels give a good impression of the building and account of life in Roman Milton Keynes.
There were other Roman buildings in various parts of the borough and several areas such as Haversham, Stanton Low, Emberton and Olney were extensively settled.
To the south of Fenny Stratford, in the Southeast of the borough, the Roman town of Magiovinium was established on Walling Street, the famous Roman Road which passes through the Borough. From Magiovinium a road ran north to the Roman town of Orchestra, near Wellingborough, and this passed through a major Roman settlement which existed just north of Olney.
The first Saxon settlements in the area were at Pineland, Milton Keynes Village, Great Linford and Bancroft. These date from the 6th and 7th centuries, and a cemetery of this date was discovered at Newport Pagnell. By the 9th and 10th centuries the villages and parishes now encompassed in the borough were established. Excavations at Great Linford, Walton and Woughton have shown how the size and location of the villages has varied over the years, largely as a result of economic changes.
In the 9th century the borough area was contained within the Saxon Hundreds (a Hundred was an administrative area made up of units of land known as hides) of Bunsty, Moulsoe and Secklow. The elders were entitled to gather outdoors at a special meeting place, usually a specially-constructed mound, to discuss land management, collect taxes and dispense justice. The Secklow mound was thought to have been located on what is now Bradwell Common, but in 1978 it was reconstructed on a site behind the Central Milton Keynes library to be preserved as an Ancient Monument. Later these Hundreds were combined to form the Newport Hundred which, coincidentally, covered roughly the same area as the current borough.
Milton Keynes is the name of one of the villages that were in the original designated area of the new "city" of Milton Keynes. This had the name Mideltone (middletown) in the Domesday Book and by 1422 the name of Kaynes had been added after the feudal family name Cahaignes.
Tony Greenwood announced the name, tho` Lord Cambell claimed Dick Crossman actually came up with it -" He used to say that it combined poetic vision and economic realism."