Until this century, Longner was a part of the Shrewsbury parish of St Chad and, together with Berwick, Onslow and Sundorne, it remains one of the estates that, in spite of retail and business parks of dismally banal appearance elsewhere, still give the approaches to Shrewsbury a well-maintained rural aspect. Since the fourteenth century at latest, Longner has been the seat of the Burton family, said to have previously been seated at Boreton, or Burton near Condover. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, members of the family represented Shrewsbury in Parliament and they further distinguished themselves as Yorkist knights in the Wars of the Roses. Sir Edward Burton, was Master of the Robes to Henry VII, and, with his wife, Jocosa Cressett, he is commemorated by a figuratively-incised slab in Atcham Church.

Sir Edward’s grandson and namesake, was not afforded such a monument and, being a Protestant who is said to have died of joy on the death of Bloody Mary, was refused burial by the remaining Catholic authorities at St Chad’s. His family buried him in the garden of Longner, where a table-tomb to his memory remains.

The earliest representation of the Burton’s seat is a late eighteenth-century view which shows Longner with a gabled west front of apparently early seventeenth-century stone construction. At the south end of this front, was a stuccoed gabled projection, with a jettied first floor – presumably an earlier half-timbered building. Humphry Repton produced watercolours of the house, circa 1800, which also show this view, and on the north side he showed visible half-timbering, the house’s moat, and also a square gabled four-storey tower of early seventeenth-century appearance. Little is known of the interior, although Mrs Stackhouse Acton gives tantalising reference to ‘a curious wide staircase of wood, with large pillars of the same material on each side, in one of which was a sliding panel which formed the entrance to a hiding place’. Quite who the client was for these different phases of building work is difficult to deduce. Certainly ample funds had become available in the time of Thomas Burton (b. 1542), with his marriage to the heiress, Katherine, daughter and co-heiress of William Beyst of Atcham Grange, which brought her family home to the estate.