Robert Clough (d. 1582), a freeholder within the manor of Minsterley, built a ‘handsome new house’ at Minsterley in circa 1580–1 and this seems to be the north end of the present Minsterley Hall. Externally this appears to east and west as a single broad-gabled and jettied range, lower in height than the rest of the house, and with greater decoration in its timbering. Its lower storeys have lozenge-in-lozenge studding, whilst the gable is emphasised by cusped square panelled decoration. Much of the present extent of the house was erected almost seventy years later by Sir Henry Frederick Thynne (1615–1681), who extended the original building to the south-west. This resulted in a façade of three broad gables of equal size facing westwards. To the east, a single broad southern end gable contrasts, in its close studded form, with the earlier wing at the northern end of the front. These sizeable additions were made in 1653.

The Minsterley Hall property had been acquired by Sir Thomas Thynne in 1634 and was chosen as the replacement residence by his son, Sir Henry, following the destruction of the family’s main seat at Caus Castle, which had served as a Royalist garrison, during the Civil War. The dining room at Minsterley contains panelling with an arched opening that dates from the early seventeenth century and is said to have been brought from Caus.

The acquisition of Caus, and the Thynne family’s foothold in Shropshire, had previously come about following the marriage of Sir Henry’s grandfather and Sir Thomas’s father, Sir John Thynne (1555– 1604), to Joan (1558–1612), the seventeen-year-old daughter of the London merchant, Sir Rowland Hayward in 1576. Joan Hayward brought the Thynnes not only Caus but also the manor of Church Stretton and proved to be an effective chatelaine of both Caus – from which the family had to eject its former occupier, Lord Stafford – and of Longleat, Wiltshire, an estate which her fatherin- law had acquired and where he had been the builder of the sixteenth-century house.