The Jenkins family of Charlton Hill had an association with Shropshire dating back to 1651, when Richard Jenkins (1621–1697), of a family formerly of Dorset, came to settle there. Blandford-born and a lawyer, he had accompanied the Royalist Lord Culpepper, Baron of Thorseway in exile at St Germains and later in Russia, when Culpepper served as Ambassador there. That he settled at Charlton Hill was as a result of friendship and employment with Francis Newport, 1st Earl of Bradford of the first creation, who gave him the site of Charlton Hill and from which a drive formerly extended directly to the former Bradford seat at Eyton-on-Severn (q.v.).

The house was surrounded by the Eyton estate and relied for its financial support on Jenkins’ income from elsewhere. It survives largely as at the time of its building, a wonderful small manor house of the late seventeenth century, which was probably built circa 1660. Of brick, two-storeyed and of seven bays, with three gabled dormers peeping out from its hipped roof, the centre gable sits atop the projecting porch. The exterior is also enlivened with much use of decorative brickwork, which is employed in the rusticated pilasters that flank the arched ground floor opening on the southern porch and also in the exterior friezes around the house. The interior contains a good contemporary oak staircase, with silhouette balusters, some of which have incised decoration. There are also a number of panelled rooms, whilst in the early twentieth century H.E. Forrest found fascination in the ‘remarkable…set of spits in the kitchen, including several in cage form for roasting poultry of different sizes’.

Richard Jenkins (d. 1679) was married to Mary (d. 1717), the daughter and co-heiress of Richard Bagot of Hargrave on the Long Mountain, and their son, Thomas (1676–1730) was Sheriff of Shropshire in 1720. Thomas Jenkins was described as ‘of Abbey Foregate’ since he resided at the Abbey House, a handsome stone-dressed brick house which he built in 1706 and which still stands, with a particularly fine wrought iron gate screen, beyond the east end of Shrewsbury Abbey.

Thomas had married Gertrude, the daughter of Captain Richard Wingfield of Preston Hall (q.v.). His eldest son, Richard, married the heiress of John Muckleston of Bicton Hall (q.v.), bringing that property into the Jenkins family and further augmenting their possessions.