OUSDEN, OR OWSDEN AS ITWAS KNOWN FOR MANY CENTURIES, LIES SEVEN MILES SOUTH-EAST OF NEWMARKET and was owned by four principal families in the five and a half centuries before the Hall was demolished. The manor of Ousden was acquired by Richard Waldegrave at the beginning of the fifteenth century and held by that family until it was sold to the Moseley family in 1567. This family built the house in late Tudor times and extended it in the eighteenth century. They sold the estate in 1800 to John Smith of Staffordshire from whom it passed four years later to the Reverend James Thomas Hand. In 1835 it was inherited by Hand's nephew, Thomas James Ireland, who is reported to have entertained King William IV during visits to Newmarket.

Following Thomas Ireland's death in 1863 the estate was bought by Bulkley John Mackworth-Praed, a member of the Praed banking family whose business became incorporated into Lloyds Bank. It seems that during the period of ownership by Mackworth-Praed, who died in 1876, and his son Sir Herbert, a banker and Member of Parliament for Ipswich, the family did not live at Ousden and the house was let. In 1908, three years after the death of Bulkley John Mackworth-Praed's widow Emily, Sir Herbert put the property on the market. There was considerable interest in the property both from London agents and personal enquirers but no sale was achieved, and in the meantime the house continued to be let principally for the shooting rights. This remained the position until 1913 when Sir Herbert's youngest half-brother, Algernon, bought the estate.

Sir Herbert's difficulties in selling Ousden appear to have stemmed from the fact that he sought an unrealistically high price for the property. In 1910 his agents, Biddell & Blencowe of Bury St Edmunds, wrote to Hamptons, the London property agents, stating that the price had been reduced to £55,000. Two years later professional valuations of £45,000 and £38,000 were made. This latter figure was compared with the £85,000 that the estate was said to have fetched at auction in 1863 when the market was at its highest, ‘just three years before the failure of Overend & Gurney’ (the most famous banking failure of the nineteenth century). These figures exemplify the falling values of landed estates in the years of agricultural depression from the 1870s onwards, which caused problems for many landowners.