The Lawley family was one of Much Wenlock’s oldest families, its association with the town beginning with Sir John Lawley who obtained a Charter from Edward IV. Until around 1555 the Lawleys lived at Rindleford Hall, a building on a site now occupied by The Gaskell Arms in Much Wenlock, and it was they who, at the Dissolution, purchased Wenlock Priory and its associated properties (q.v.) including Callaughton and Bourton.

After 1555, the principal Lawley seat was Spoonhill, near Acton Round, a half-timbered and stone-built house, of apparently similar pretensions to Langley Hall (q.v.). As bailiffs and Members of Parliament they served the town of Wenlock and, in 1641, Thomas Lawley was created a baronet. During the eighteenth century, the family spent much of their time at their Staffordshire seat, Canwell Hall, and the marriage in 1763 of Sir Robert Lawley (d. 1793) to the daughter and eventual heiress of Beilby Thompson of Escrick Park in North Yorkshire, brought that estate into the family. Sir Robert and Lady Lawley had three sons, who each enjoyed political careers and shaped the family’s destiny in Shropshire.

Their eldest son, Sir Robert Lawley, 6th Bt, who had unsuccessfully contested as Member of Parliament for Wenlock in 1794 and went on to represent Newcastle-under-Lyme, was created 1st and last Lord Wenlock of the second creation in 1831. The title was considered by the family to be a revival of the medieval barony of Wenlock, which had gone into abeyance in 1471, and to which they had long laid claim. Following his death without heirs in 1834, the Shropshire properties passed to his brother Sir Francis Lawley 7th Bt. Sir Francis also had a parliamentary career, serving as MP for Warwickshire, and he occasionally resided at Bourton Cottage, whilst his steward Mr Cooper, lived at the Old Hall.

The youngest of the brothers, Paul, had been given Bourton Cottage by his older brother, on his marriage, in May 1817. The house’s incarnation in his time was captured by M.G. Wayne in a watercolour of 1851. It shows an early nineteenth-century cottage orné of local limestone with a slated roof and tall, grouped chimneys of moulded brick, embossomed in foliage. To one side of the house stood a pinnacled bay window and a triple-gabled, single storey porch.