Gilbert de Southworth of Warrington acquired half of the manor by marriage to Alice d'Ewyas and is credited with building the Great Hall around 1325. His great-grandson Thomas built the south-west wing. Southworth descendants held their part of the manor until 1677–78, when it was sold by Edward Southworth to Thomas Bradyll. Bradyll never lived at the hall but stripped much of its interior features to use at his main house of Conishead Priory at Ulverston. He then rented the hall out to handloom weavers before it was converted into the Bradyll Arms inn in 1830. The next owner was John Cooper, who bought the building in 1850 and leased it to Mrs Mary Ann Harrison as a co-educational boarding school. She established a Pestolozzian Institution at the hall, based on the ideas of the 18th-century Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. The school was well ahead of its time and in some ways anticipated the better-known Montessori system by about fifty years.