Summary
The former seat of the Hussey family still stands across a bridge, within its remnant moat, as a highly picturesque and evocative house, half brick and stone and half of timbered construction. The Husseys, with their successors, the Corbets, were patrons of the nearby church of Battlefield which, at its foundation in 1406, replaced a chapel dedicated to St John the Baptist that had stood near to their manor house, and fragments of which were later adapted as farm buildings.
In 1086 the estate had been held by Rainald the Sheriff but, within a century, Walter Hussey was to be found with a knight’s fee of new enfeoffment there.
In 1403, Sir John Hussey fought at the Battle of Shrewsbury which had raged upon his estate’s Hately Field, and his coat of arms, of a riding boot, is still to be seen at Battlefield Church. The estate descended through the Husseys until their eventual heiress married Sir William Pelham Kt. Pelham’s daughter Anne married William Corbet of Leigh and the property was eventually inherited by their son, Pelham Corbet (b. circa 1601). Richard Gough, in his History of Myddle, was still able to write of both Sir Richard Hussey and Pelham Corbet as owners in the reign of Charles I and so the succession must have been from one to the other.
At the time of the Civil War, Pelham Corbet is said to have fortified the house as a garrison and this might account for the strange appearance of the west wing of the house, with its upper courses of Grinshill stone above what is otherwise a stone-dressed brick wing. Panelling, formerly in that wing, bore the inscription ‘Made by me, Edward Huse, 1601’, suggesting the date of its construction. Gough recalled one of the skirmishes that occurred at Albright Hussey during the Civil War, when the garrison’s governor, Scoggan, fired at a Parliamentarian tailor called Philip Bunny from one of the house’s windows and shot his horse from under him. The window is still identified as ‘Scoggan’s window’.
In the early eighteenth century, the departure of the Corbets to Sundorne Castle (q.v.) may have resulted in some demolitions at Albright Hussey, with the result that today the house appears a fragmentary building of two periods.
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 32 - 33Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021