The village of Dorrington to the south of Shrewsbury owes greatly to the Netley estate for the construction of numerous solid nineteenth-century houses, for its church designed by Edward Haycock in 1845, the school of 1874, and the Hope-Edwardes Institute or village hall of 1906. This development reflects the consolidating management on behalf of the Hope-Edwardes family, who owned the estate at this time, and who, between 1854 and 1858, built the present mansion at Netley.

By 1470, Netley was a possession of the de Stapleton family when it was divided between the four heirs of John de Stapleton – John Leighton, Robert Cressett, Thomas Walwen and Thomas Horde. The lands of the latter three heirs were purchased from their successors, between 1612 and 1619, by Thomas Phillips of Smethcott – a small village which adjoined Netley. Phillips is thought to have built Netley Old Hall, a part-timbered house of early seventeenth-century date which, in 1662, had eight hearths. Of an L-plan, the house may have been intended to be larger, although the south wing’s jettied upper floor and a former parlour, which has wainscoting and evidence of a decorated plaster-ceiling, suggests a house of some pretensions.

Phillips’s son, Richard, sold his father’s estate causing it to once more become slightly fragmented. He had been a Royalist at the time of the Civil Wars and is recorded in 1655 as having been compounded for £117. In 1658 he sold Lower Netley, Higher Netley and Netley Old Hall to John Haynes, whilst, in 1664, Richard Nash became the purchaser of the farm where the present Netley Hall stands – a property that he sold in 1671 to Thomas Broome.

Haynes’ daughter, Mary, married Thomas Edwardes, a lawyer and younger son of Sir Thomas Edwardes (d. 1660), first baronet, of Shrewsbury and Greete near Ludlow, and thus took the Haynes Netley estate to the Edwardes family. Sir Thomas Edwardes had formerly lived at the College in Shrewsbury, but had bought Greete Court and 800 acres from Thomas Foxe in 1639.