Habberley had been an estate of the Corbet family of Caus. Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Fulk Corbet married John Mawddwy (d. 1403) and the manor eventually passed to their daughter, Elizabeth, the wife of Hugh Burgh. When their successor Sir John Burgh died in 1501, Habberley was a part of the estates that were inherited by his daughter Eleanor, the wife of Thomas Mytton (d. 1504) of the family later to become associated with Halston (q.v.).

Their descendant, Edward Mytton (d. 1568), who succeeded in 1553, was responsible for the building of the core of the present house, the timbers of which have been dendro-dated to felling in 1555. His house appears to have been a rectangular building of jettied construction on all sides, its hall with a central smoke-hood. After Mytton’s death, the property was occupied by William Leighton, fourth son of Sir Edward Leighton of Wattlesborough, who was married to Jane, natural daughter of Sir Edward Grey, Lord Powis. Leighton appears to have effected a large-scale reconstruction of the house that included the addition of two gabled, jettied east wings with close studded ground floors and lozenge-within-lozenge framing above. It was probably as a part of these works that the hall was floored over, the hall re-roofed with a collar-and-tie-beam roof, and a projecting chimney stack on the west side of the hall. The evidence for Leighton’s work comes from an inscription in the inner porch which replicates an original, reading: ‘THIS HOVS: BVILDED AS YOU SEE AD 1593 by W.L.’4

From the middle of the seventeenth century the house was tenanted, but in the early eighteenth century Habberley was the home of the antiquarian younger son of the Myttons, William Mytton (d. 1746) who was buried at the nearby Church of St Mary. After his death, the mansion appears to have been let as Hall Farm to Richard Burley who, in 1787, was paying £62 10s half yearly.

After the melt-down of the Mytton estates during and after the tenure of ‘Mad Jack’ John Mytton (d. 1834), Habberley passed to his son, John Fox Fitz-Giffard Mytton, who, two years after coming of age, sold Habberley to William Hanbury Sparrow (d. 1867).