Nun Monkton
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Nun Monkton is a village in North Yorkshire, England. It is situated 8 miles north of York at the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Nidd. Cottages and houses are grouped around a village green of 20 acres with a duck pond and a maypole. The Ouse is navigable for another 30 km and river traffic played an important part in the village's life until the middle of the twentieth century. Some sort of settlement has probably existed since the earliest times. The name 'Monkton' appears to reflect a pre-Viking or Anglian settlement in the 8th and 9th centuries. The village is mentioned in the late eleventh-century Domesday Book where it is referred to--like all villages in North Yorkshire--as "vastatus" i.e. deliberately wrecked by the invading Normans to prevent uprisings against them. In 1172 an Anglo-Norman landowner, Ivetta of the Arches, endowed a small Benedictine nunnery which owned the village and stood on the important ford route from York and Moor Monkton to the south and Beningbrough and Shipton to the north, coming across the river. These routes ended when the ferry was discontinued in the middle of the twentieth century. The Priory continued until 1536 when it was dissolved by Henry VIII, despite a plea from his second wife, Anne Boleyn, that it be spared. Records suggest that some of the nuns, returned to their families with small pensions of £4 a year and still under monastic vows of celibacy, endured considerable hardship as a result of the closure of the convent.
The village church of St Mary's is the church of the former priory and of high architectural interest for students of Anglo-Norman architecture. At the Reformation the east end of the church was demolished and, until the 1870s, St Mary's Nun Monkton was a truncated low-roofed building with standard 18th-century Anglican fittings such as box pews and monuments. In the 1870s, however, as a result of the Tractarian movement, the village squire of the day, Isaac Crawhall, commissioned a new east end, built in high Anglican style, and a magnificent east window with glass by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris which has a claim to be the best stained glass in North or West Yorkshire. The earlier form of the church is the one which the celebrated writer, Anne Brontë, would have known. During her time as a governess to the Robinson family at Thorpe Green, Little Ouseburn, Brontë also taught the children of the rector of Nun Monkton and almost certainly visited the village.
Nun Monkton ceased to be an estate village in 1934 when the houses of the village were sold off. The population today, of around 250, is well below its high point of about 350 in the 1890s and consists largely of commuters travelling daily to Leeds. The last shop in the village closed in 1986. The village green, however, continues to be grazed by cows and other animals and is one of the last 'working' greens in Yorkshire.
In March 2004, Nun Monkton's 78-foot high green-and-white striped maypole, which had been standing since the 1870s, snapped and fell down in a gale. The village has now replaced the maypole. Another maypole exists in neighbouring village Whixley, and 14 miles away in the village of Barwick-in-Elmet a taller maypole stands at 87-foot high.
The largest property in Nun Monkton, known as The Priory, was used as a location in the television series A Touch of Frost in an episode entitled Endangered Species. Observant viewers who know the location will note that when Jack Frost (played by David Jason) drives up to The Priory it shows the gate to the left of the cattle grid, over which a temporary wall was erected for the TV programme.
In 1989 'The History of Nun Monkton' was written by Rosemary Enright and published by DP Aykroyd.
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