Qualla: Monmouth

Monmouth: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aloys5268 at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cross the Monnow into Monmouth and you walk through something no other British town can offer: the country's only surviving medieval gated bridge, a thirteenth-century fortified causeway with a stone gatehouse sitting plumb in the middle of the road. People still drive through it. The arch was built when Welsh raiders were a credible threat, when iron-working in the Forest of Dean kept forges glowing through the night, and when a small Anglo-Norman market town beside the confluence of the Monnow and the Wye was important enough to need a defensible front door. Henry V was born up the hill at the castle. Charles Rolls grew up just outside, lost his life in Britain's first powered-flight fatality, and got a statue in the square. The Council for British Archaeology calls Monmouth one of the top ten towns in Britain for archaeology. Most of the people who live here just call it home.

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Image: Aloys5268 at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Monmouth: Iron, Saints, and a Saxon Raid

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WelshDave, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name is an English contraction of "Monnow-mouth", the place where the River Monnow joins the Wye. In Welsh the town was once Abermynwy and is now Trefynwy. People have lived here a long time. Excavations near Monnow Street have turned up a Bronze Age boat-building community o...

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Image: WelshDave | CC BY-SA 4.0

Monmouth: House of Lancaster

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. After the Normans built Monmouth Castle in the late 1060s, the town settled into its medieval rhythm. In 1233 royal forces under King Henry III were routed near here by Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. In 1267 the castle became part of the lands of the Earl of Lancaster. A cent...

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Image: Public domain

Monmouth: Last Sentence of Its Kind

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hugh Colyer Hrcolyer, CC BY 3.0. In January 1840, in the Shire Hall, three Chartists, John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, and William Jones, became the last men in British history to be sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Their crime was leading the Newport Rising of November 1839, when twenty supporters o...

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Image: Hugh Colyer Hrcolyer | CC BY 3.0

Monmouth: The Rolls Family and Modern Monmouth

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1904, the local landowner Charles Rolls met an engineer named Henry Royce in Manchester and went into business with him; the cars they built together still bear both their names. Rolls was also a pioneering aviator. On 12 July 1910, his Wright Flyer broke up over Bournemouth a...

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Image: Public domain