A single documentary reference, a payment of thirteen shillings made by the community of the town of Gorey in 1296, hints at a medieval predecessor, but after that the record goes quiet for over three centuries. The town that exists today is essentially a creation of the early seventeenth century, part of a deliberate plantation effort in north Wexford that imposed new English settlers and administrative structures onto the landscape.

Gorey received its first charter in 1619, when it was formally named Newtown or Newborough, a placeholder name that signals how thoroughly the settlement was being reconceived from scratch. One of its more prominent early residents was Bishop Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, whose presence underlines the town's role as a foothold for the new colonial order in the region. The town was laid out on a grid plan covering roughly fourteen acres, a compact and deliberate geometry that still shapes the street pattern today, with Main Street running east-north-east to west-south-west through the original core. Whether the town was ever properly defended is uncertain; there are passing references to ramparts in early eighteenth-century sources, but no wall is confirmed, and archaeological testing within the town boundaries has so far produced nothing to clarify the question. The settlement's vulnerability was made plain in 1641, when it was captured by rebels during the uprising that swept across Ireland that year. Within the town's original area, a graveyard and church site survive, along with the Ram tomb, a physical reminder of the bishop whose name became attached to one of Gorey's more enduring landmarks.