Badger, in the early eighteenth century, was owned by the Kynnersley family, a branch of a family seated at Loxley in Staffordshire. They had come into the estate through the marriage of Dorothy Elmbridge with her stepbrother, John Kynnersley (d. 1514/15). Dorothy was the eventual heiress of the de Badger family who had owned the property since medieval times, and Badger ultimately passed to their son, Thomas Kynnersley (fl. 1577).

The house at Badger then would have been a moated timber-framed manor that was located to the west of the church. It seems that in the late seventeenth century this was replaced by a new house, the so-called Stone House, of circa 1698, which remained as service quarters until demolition, although a section of the moat of the old house survived as a canal in the garden until the later eighteenth century. This late seventeenth-century house was largely replaced, in circa 1719, by the body of the house that remained into the twentieth century, a three storey brick house, bound by stone quoins and with a seven bay west front, its centre three bays framed by quoins, and a north front of eight bays. The builder was John Kynnersley, Sheriff of Shropshire in 1721. The Kynnersley family remained owners of Badger until the late eighteenth century when they became solely seated at their Staffordshire property, Loxley Hall, and Badger was leased by them to the ironmaster William Ferriday (d. 1801) from circa 1761 until 1775.

In 1774, Clement Kynnersley sold Badger to Isaac Hawkins Browne (1745–1818) of Foston, Derbyshire – son of the poet of the same name. Isaac Hawkins Browne’s great-grandfather had hailed from Burton-on-Trent although his family had established a foothold in Shropshire with the purchase of the Old Park Estate near Wellington in 1700. The iron trade made the family rich and Browne served Shropshire as High Sheriff in 1783 and, in the following year, became MP for Bridgnorth until 1812. lunette between the drawing room and library. At the ends of the Wolverhampton and Bridgnorth approaches to the house, new lodges of gabled, half-timbered appearance, with tall brick chimneys, were built pre–1892.