Set on higher ground above the River Roden, just a few miles north-east of Shrewsbury, Ercall Magna was one of the Domesday manors forfeited to the Crown after Robert de Bellesme's rebellion. Henry I granted Hamo Peverel the manor, but within a couple of generations the lordship was divided (and in a later generation subdivided further) among female heirs, one of whom married (ca. 1134) Hamo Peche, whose own lands were in Suffolk and who was a sheriff of Cambridgeshire (1164-66); their thirteenth-century descendants would establish markets at a number of Suffolk and Lincolnshire manors, none of which attained urban status. This division of lordship must have inhibited any of the interested individuals from taking any initiative in developing Ercall, but several family members enfeoffed William de Hadley, who had married an illegitimate daughter of Hamo Peverel, in their shares of the manor. From this union came the de Ercalewe family which, taking its name from the district, resided there, and had become the seigneurial tenants of the greater part of the manor of Ercall by about 1165; within a century the family seems to have consolidated its hold on the manor and would continue to provide its lords until the late fourteenth century.

It was John de Ercalewe who obtained the grant of a Monday market and September fair in May 1267. He had succeeded to the lordship in 1256, shortly after the consolidation process was about completed, and he was the first of the family to abandon the surname of de Hadley. He had ambitions, or aspirations, and Eyton believed he took up knighthood in 1266/67, the earliest reference to him as a knight being in August 1267, when his sister and three other individuals complained to the king he was intimidating them. John's purchase of a market licence was probably in the context of founding a borough within Ercall; burgages there are recorded in the time of John's grandson William (1303-45). After John de Ercalewe's death (ca.1280) his son and heir William married a niece of Robert Burnell, the Shropshire native whose royal service led him to become Lord Chancellor (from 1274) and Bishop of Bath and Wells (from 1275), and who had already become, during John's lifetime, mesne lord of Ercall through his acquisition from the Peverel heirs of their interests in the manor. Burnell was himself very active in establishing markets in towns and villages, though this activity was all later than John de Ercalewe's initiative, and it is hard to imagine he had much, if any, influence over the development of High Ercall; yet the families evidently were connected.

John de Ercalewe's descendants seem to have been more focused on building up their estates than developing those already held. Some of their property transactions connect them to the lords of the manor of Careswell, or Cresswell (Staffs.), and it is evident that a link was formed by marriage, which led around the mid-1330s to William de Careswell becoming lord of High Ercall. In 1347 William acquired licences for markets and fairs at his manors of Ercall and Cresswell. The licence for Ercall was in essence a reissue, whose terms indicated that the original market and fairs licensed had not been held there with regularity; perhaps the borough was not flourishing due to competition from other market towns in the region, as well as from Shrewsbury itself. Careswell was described as kinsman and heir of the original grantee; as such, it would not normally have been necessary for him to renew the licence, unless the market and fair had ceased to be operable for some while.

We have no reason to think that the renewed effort to build local commerce, made at an unfortunate juncture, just prior to the Black Death, had any better result than the original attempt. After the Newport family purchased the manor of Ercall in 1398, they made no attempt to obtain the necessary licence renewal for market and fair; presumably the profits from them were not considered sufficient to warrant any costs or effort associated with administering such assets. While it might be going too far to suggest that by the close of the fourteenth century the town was almost devoid of commercial businesses, local needs may have been adequately met by a small number of retail businesses operating on a daily basis, such as the three shops of which we hear in 1399, one of them held by a William Merchant. What little we see of High Ercall in the fifteenth century suggests it had the character of a manorial village, something that did not alter thereafter.

Early settlement at Ercall had probably developed in the same location where the post-medieval settlement persisted, to west and south of the manorial enclosure, along whose west side ran the road from Shrewsbury, where it reached a minor east-west road, off which, from the north-east corner of the enclosure, the through-road from Shrewsbury resumed its route north, towards the river crossing. Immediately south-east of the enclosure was the churchyard, on the eastern outskirts of Ercall. Any burgages may have been in the same area, or perhaps on a separate site, but they have left no trace in the topography, nor is the location of the marketplace evident.