The Berwick Estate makes an outstanding contribution to Shrewsbury. Its landscaped park straddles the Baschurch road and forms an elysian wedge, the point of which runs down to Coton Hill on the north-western edge of the town. It is unsurprising that mercantile wealth has played an important part in the development of Berwick, albeit much of it from towns other than Shrewsbury.

The twenty-first-century Berwick Estate comprises Little Berwick – or Berwick House – and also Great Berwick (q.v.), which were formerly two separate landed properties, and which are treated as such in this book. Little Berwick’s medieval succession saw the property inherited by Roger de Leyburne I (died by 1244), who hailed from Kent and married the Berwick heiress, Eleanor, daughter of Stephen de Turnham.

In 1348 Beatrice, widow of the last of the Leyburn family, John de Leyburn II, appears to have settled Little Berwick on Sir Roger de Trumpington of Moggerhanger, Bedfordshire, with his son, Walter, selling the estate in 1457 to the Enderby family. The Enderbys, in turn, sold the property in 1507 to Sir Edmund Lucy (d. 1516) whose family held the property for two generations before Sir Edmund’s grandson, Edmund Lucy, his son Henry, and wife Ann, sold the estate in 1629.

The purchaser was Isaac Jones, the younger son of the Shrewsbury draper, William Jones (d. 1612), and his wife Eleanor (d. 1623) who lived at the corner of Grope Lane and High Street in Shrewsbury. Isaac’s generation had all been successful: the eldest son Richard (d. 1638) followed his father as a draper in Shrewsbury; the second son Thomas, also a draper, was High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1624/5, an alderman and bailiff of Shrewsbury, and also had the distinction of being the town’s first Mayor in 16382; the third son, Edward, became a lawyer with an important town house on the corner of St Mary’s Street and Church Street in Shrewsbury; a sister Sarah had made an advantageous marriage with Thomas Harries of Boreatton (q.v.).

Isaac had, in 1608, married Elizabeth Prynce, daughter of the builder of Whitehall (q.v.) and he had reputedly made a fortune as a merchant taylor in London. Using his fortune, he purchased Berwick for £4,400.