Stanley had been a possession of Shrewsbury Abbey and the Abbey’s ownership of lands there either began or continued with a gift of a farmstead in 1252 from Stephen and Julianne de Stanley. After the Dissolution, Stanley passed to the Billingsley family who are believed to have rebuilt their capital mansion house in stone, possibly replacing an earlier timber-framed structure.

During the Civil Wars, Colonel Francis Billingsley of Stanley took the Royalist side and was killed in the siege at Bridgnorth on the 31st March 1646. The house that he left behind appears to have been intended as a U-plan mansion, facing west, built in 1642. By the late eighteenth century, however, only an L-plan structure stood on the site – the southern wing having been either demolished or unbuilt.

The Colonel’s successor and namesake, Francis Billingsley, sold Stanley in 1647 to Francis Huxley of Broseley. In 1730, Mary, the daughter of John and Margaret Huxley, married Edward Jones, son of Edward Jones (1653–1737), one of the Canons of Windsor, and so conveyed the estate into the hands of the Jones family. Jones’ grandfather, Sir Thomas Jones (1614–1692) had been an MP for Shrewsbury, 1660–1677, and enjoyed a successful legal career being, from 1671, Chief Justice of the North Wales Circuit and, from 1683–6, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.

At Stanley, Edward and Mary Jones appear to have been responsible for rebuilding the stables which, by the late eighteenth century, had gained an eight-bay west-facing front of two storeys, with the centre two bays crowned by a low ogee-headed pediment that was flanked by finials and crowned by a cupola. The highly distinctive ogival pediment – since lost – is suggestive of the architectural hand of perhaps William Hiorne or Thomas Farnolls Pritchard.

The Jones’ son, Thomas (d. 1782), inherited the family properties around Shrewsbury and at Mold, Flintshire, in addition to Stanley. He served as MP for Shrewsbury, was High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1760, and was knighted. He did not marry, though, and so, on his death, Stanley and the other family estates passed to his second cousin, Thomas Tyrwhitt, the eldest son of John Tyrwhitt of Netherclay House in Somerset and his wife Catherine Booth. Catherine’s mother, a former Catherine Jones, was Sir Thomas’s aunt.