Caynton was built in the early nineteenth century and is supposed to be on the site of an earlier farmhouse known as Dennetts Hays. It takes its name, in fact, from Caynton Manor (q.v.) near Edgmond and marks an early nineteenth-century re-emergence of the Yonge family, who had long been seated at that north Shropshire property until its sale in 1739.

The land on which the house stands was a part of the property of Humphry Pitt of Priorslee (q.v.). Pitt’s estates were divided between his daughters, and the Beckbury portion of the estate appears to have gone to his daughter Mrs Maria Edwards in 1782. Her sister, Frances, had married Dr William John Yonge (1751–1823) in 1774 and, at the death of Maria Edwards in circa 1800, the family passed a private Act of Parliament for the Partition of the properties. Maria Edwards’ share was vested in her nephew, the Yonges’ son, Henry. Dr Yonge had been raised in America, where his grandfather, Francis Yonge (b. circa 1682), had acquired property.

Francis was the uncle of William Yonge VIII (1708–1768) who parted with the family’s ancestral estate of Caynton at Edgmond. He had established himself in Charleston, South Carolina, prior to 1716 and served as Surveyor-General of South Carolina and the Bahamas, being granted a town lot in Beaufort, SC in 1718. In the same year, he became a member of the Lords Proprietors of South Carolina but, in 1735, appears to have returned to London, where he lived for the remainder of his life, granting to his son, Henry, his lands in South Carolina, which included Orange Island (later renamed Yonge’s Island) in 1743.

Henry Yonge (1712–1778), Francis’s son by the widow Elizabeth Fletcher, followed a similarly impressive career in America, becoming Surveyor-General of Georgia in 1764 and then a member of the King’s Council in 1770. He married Elizabeth Bellinger in circa 1745 and, in 1747, received a grant of land at Skidaway Island, which he named Cedar Groves. At his Orangedale Plantation in 1765, he planted Samuel Bowen’s soy beans – or ‘Chinese vetch’ as he described them – which represented the first soy crop in America. His son, Dr William Yonge, returned to England after the Revolutionary War and is said to have initially made efforts to recover the family’s ancestral estate at Edgmond from the Briscoe family.