Humphrey Cotes of Cotes, near Stone, in Staffordshire is believed to have acquired Woodcote in circa 1450 and his descendants remained the owners of the estate into the twentieth century.

Humphrey’s grandson and namesake – who was married to Eleanora, the daughter of Sir Humphrey Blount of Kinlet – was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and the property thereafter passed through a succession of direct descendants, some of whom are commemorated in the Chapel of St Peter at Woodcote with a handsome series of memorials.

Following the Battle of Worcester in 1651 – which led Charles II to hide at Boscobel (q.v.) – the Earl of Cleveland is recorded as having taken refuge at Woodcote. The appearance of the house, at that time, does not appear to have been recorded, although Leighton suggests that there was a Tudor house on the site.

In 1765, John Loveday of Caversham noted Woodcote as ‘the very handsome seat’ of Colonel Cotes, when its owner was James Cotes (1708–1766), who was married to Frances, the daughter of the 5th Lord Digby. By this time, the house seems to have appropriated Woodcote Hill as a part of its pleasure grounds, and a group portrait by Arthur Devis of the Colonel’s father, John Cotes (1680–1756) at Woodcote, circa 1745, shows the family assembled with what appears to be a distant classical pavilion on Woodcote Hill, with the Wrekin rising up behind.

After the death of Colonel James Cotes, Woodcote passed briefly to his brother, Admiral Thomas Cotes (1727–1767), before being inherited by a nephew, John Cotes (1749–1821), who served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1826 and was a noted agricultural improver. An advocate of potato growing, he was one of the founders of the Shifnal Agricultural Society and his endeavours were commemorated by the artist Thomas Weaver, who depicted him in the park at Woodcote instructing his ploughman, with the house in the distance, in 1809. Weaver shows the north front of the house as a regular building of nine bays and two storeys, with a giant Ionic tetrastyle portico supporting a triangular pediment before what appears to be a high pitched roof.