Sundorne is said to have been a grange of Haughmond Abbey which, at the Dissolution, passed with its surrounding land in 1540 to Sir Rowland Hill (d. 1561) of the Hawkstone (q.v.) family. His sister and co-heiress, Elizabeth, married John Barker and the Haughmond and Sundorne property then passed into that family.

The Barkers’ son James married Dorothy Clive and the couple are thought to have adapted the south-west part of the Abbey as a house. This incorporated the fourteenth-century former Abbot’s Hall, with its four large mullioned and transomed southern windows, into which a sixteenth-century chimneypiece was added.

Private monastic rooms to the east – dating from the thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries, when the surviving canted bay window was added – also formed a part of the mansion. Mrs Stackhouse Acton depicted what seems to have been a late sixteenth-century timbered section of the house, with jettied first floor and cusped-lozenge panel decoration, which bore the carved arms of Edward Barker and his Charlton wife.

In the seventeenth century, the house at Haughmond Abbey was reputedly damaged by a fire during the Civil Wars. The then Barker heiress, Amy, married Edward Kynaston of Hordley, and their grandson, Corbet Kynaston (1690–1740), duly succeeded to the property on the death of his father, John Kynaston (1664–1733) of Hardwick Hall (q.v.). Corbet Kynaston was a staunch Jacobite and spent heavily in electioneering, causing him to flee to Boulogne to avoid his creditors. On his death, at the age of just fifty in 1740, the Sundorne and Haughmond property was inherited by his second cousin, Andrew Corbet of Albright Hussey (q.v.) and Leigh Hall.

Andrew Corbet died just one year later, in 1741, and was succeeded by his brother, John Corbet (d. 1759). John first married Frances Pigott of Chetwynd and then Barbara Letitia Mytton of Halston. His second wife gave him two sons and a daughter – the latter growing up to marry her cousin, Sir John Kynaston Powell of Hardwick Hall (q.v.).

John Corbet, upon succeeding his brother, chose to sell the family’s ancient estate of Leigh Hall near Minsterley and make his seat at Sundorne. What existed before his time on the site is uncertain, although he was probably responsible for the rectangular twostoreyed eighteenth-century house with its hipped roof set with dormers and segmental-pedimented doorcase.