Situated in what is still relatively remote country in the lee of Wenlock Edge, the manor of Church Preen was held in 1086 by Helgot, of Roger, Earl of Shrewsbury. Helgot’s descendants as lords of Castle Holgate maintained an over rule until the sixteenth century. However, from before 1163 the manor had been granted to Wenlock Priory and a monastic cell with two or three monks was established. The long and low Church of St John the Baptist, with its simple lancet windows and nave and chancel within the same overall structure, dates from this period. Adjoining the church at right angles on its southern side, and built of the same local stone, stood the principal monastic structure, known as the Prior’s House. This structure survived as the nucleus of the Manor House until its demolition in 1870.

At the Dissolution, in 1534, the Prior of Wenlock handed over Preen to the Crown, and in 1536 it was conveyed to Gyles Covert or Cirrote. Covert’s brother, Richard, who succeeded in 1559, sold Church Preen to Humphrey Dickins of Bobbington, Staffordshire, in 1560. The property then passed by descent through the Dickins family until the mid eighteenth century, and it appears that they were themselves seated at the so-called Prior’s House. Thomas Dickins – Humphry’s great-grandson – was certainly recorded as such, whilst other members of the family were recorded as church wardens of the parish church, several with monuments therein.

In the early eighteenth century, the then scion of the Dickins family, John, son of Thomas Dickins (d. 1710), ran into financial difficulties. Arthur Sparrow, the nineteenth-century squire historian of Preen, relates that in 1709 he owed one Joseph Girder, Serjeant-at-Law, £1,056, however it does not appear that he necessarily squandered his inheritance without an attempt to salvage the estate at Church Preen. An extraordinary prospectus was compiled for John Dickins, dated 1727 and entitled, ‘Leases for Twenty-One Years To be granted of an ESTATE Capable of such Improvements That the Lessees will be thereby entitled to the Gain of Six-Hundred Pounds for the Payment of One’.

No doubt inspired by the scenes of industry, and their supposed returns, at Coalbrookdale, Dickins made exaggerated boasts of the mineral wealth of Church Preen with a view to persuading investors to sink money into the establishment of bar iron furnaces on the estate.