Unlike other Shropshire houses where the family took their name from the lands, Davenport was named after the family who created it. This was, in every sense, a statement of their rightful ownership of, and pride in, an estate which had passed by descent since the middle ages, albeit that the Davenports were relatively new to the inheritance that had come to them through the female line.

This fine, early Georgian house dominates its parkland plateau above the meandering valley of the River Worfe. Of the earlier house, little is known except that it stood a few hundred yards to the north of the present house. The place was then known as Hallon, or Haune, a name still perpetuated in the hamlet to the east of Worfield. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the seat of the Barker family, a branch of which later established itself at Haughmond (see Sundorne q.v.). In the late fifteenth century, the Barker’s heiress, Ann bore a daughter, Joan, by her second husband, William Waverton.

Joan married Sir George Bromley (c. 1526–89), the Chief Justice of Chester in 1581 and a member of the Council for the Welsh Marches. Bromley was brother of Lord Chancellor, Thomas Bromley (1530–1587) and is considered to have been overshadowed by him. At his death in 1588 he was commemorated with a handsome alabaster tomb-chest monument in St Peter’s Church, Worfield. The recumbent figures of Sir George and Joan, Lady Bromley, which suggests that their seat at Hallon must have been of some pretensions.

It was Joan’s granddaughter, Jane Bromley, who brought Hallon to the Davenport family when she married William Davenport of Chorley, Cheshire, in 1602. This was not a match of her family’s choosing and her mother and stepfather, Walter Wrottesley of Wrottesley, refused to acknowledge William Davenport’s right to the estate. In response, Davenport brought a legal case which revealed the full vitriol of the arguments, with his denials of enticement and ‘stealing away’. The case was not lightly won and, even in the time of Jane and William’s grandson, Henry (c. 1644–1698), in 1674, the action was once more revived. Henry had married, in 1665, Elizabeth, daughter of Sharington Talbot of Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, bringing about a close connection between the two houses in the early eighteenth century.