Halston will forever be associated with the name of the early nineteenth-century sporting squire John ‘Mad Jack Mytton’, whose unconventional and spendthrift approach to his family’s estates led to their eventual sale. The Myttons had owned Halston since the sixteenth century, although one of their earliest recorded ancestors was Reginald Mytton (fl. 1413), a Shrewsbury burgess who is said to have lent money to Richard II. He married Hannah Vaughan, through whom the family seem to have inherited the Shrewsbury property of Vaughan’s Mansion. Their grandson, Thomas Mytton (d. 1504), served as Sheriff of Shropshire in 1483 and as bailiff of Shrewsbury, and he married Eleanor Burgh. This proved to be an enormously advantageous match since she was one of the daughters and heiresses of Sir John Burgh, and the Mytton family, as a result, came into Shropshire lands at Habberley (q.v.) and Lee Brockhurst and also at Dinas Mawddwy in Wales. The Welsh estate alone brought the family an additional 32,000 acres – albeit much of it hill country.

Thomas and Eleanor Mytton’s son, William, is said to have removed the family from Vaughan’s Mansion to Coton Hill, where their house stood on a ridge overlooking the River Severn just outside of the town. It was their grandson – William’s son – Richard Mytton (d. 1591) who appears to have been the first of the family to be associated with Halston when he took a twenty-one year lease from Henry VIII in the sixteenth century.

Halston – its name apparently a contraction of ‘Holy stone’ – had previously been a Hospitallers’ preceptory of the Knights Templars, which had been founded between 1165 and 1183. In Elizabeth I’s reign, in 1560, the ‘Commendatory or praeceptory of Halston, with all its numerous appurtenances’ was granted to George Legh or Lee of Shrewsbury, merchant, and to Thomas Bowyer of Salop, tradesman in consideration of £2,426 4s paid to the Royal Treasury. Seventeen years later, it appears that Mytton was in full possession of Halston, suggesting a piecemeal sale by Lee and Bowyer.

The early mansion was on the other side of the River Perry from the present house, close to the fifteenth-century, timber-framed, donative chapel that still remains and, in its monuments, stands testimony to the Mytton ownership of Halston.