Descending into Morville village, on the Bridgnorth to Shrewsbury road, Morville Hall makes a tantalising appearance between the trees. On the left, before the road bends up out of the village, a pair of gate pillars, capped with sphere finials, announce the presence of the hall. They mark the entrance to an avenue of young lime trees that lead across the front of the house, and its pair of pavilions, to the parish church of St Gregory. Morville is indeed a sizeable house and is remarkably close to Aldenham Park, the proprietorial tentacles of which extend into the village of Morville with the public house, known as the Acton Arms, referencing the heraldry of Aldenham’s owners. Yet Morville Hall, although owned for a time by the Actons, has always been a separate entity, content to rule over the valley of the Mor Brook.

Morville had been an important Saxon settlement with a collegiate church of eight canons. This had been suppressed and was refounded as a Benedictine Priory under Shrewsbury Abbey. The Hall is thought to be on the site of the monastic buildings, and fragments of thirteenth-century stonework were found during the 1930s in the rubble core of the walls.

After the Dissolution, Morville passed initially, on 4th December 1545, to John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, Lord High Admiral, who, on 18th February 1546, sold on the reversion to Roger Smyth (d. 1565). Smyth was Bailiff of Bridgnorth in 1545 and an MP for the town in 1547 and 1553, and his interest in acquiring property around the town also included the purchase, in 1556, of the manor of St James. Roger’s father had been resident at Morville and had married Mary, the daughter of Richard Gery of Clive, a high status match which might well have given the family further pretensions to gentility. Roger had married well himself, to Frances, daughter of Richard Cressett of Upton Cressett (q.v.), and the couple produced three sons.

It may have been Roger and Frances or even their eldest son, George (d. 1600) – who succeeded to both Morville and St James – who was responsible for building the core of the house at Morville. The Tudor work seems to be the whole of the U-plan centre block, with its staircase turrets in the re-entrant angles that appear to have originally risen up beyond the roofline of the house.