Monnow Bridge

Monmouth had been a place of consequence since the Roman fort of Blestium, but the easily fordable Monnow appears to have had no crossing until after the Norman Conquest. The first bridge was of wood, built in the mid-12th century; flood-defence work in 1988 uncovered its remains directly beneath the present bridge, and dendrochronology dated its timbers to trees felled between 1123 and 1169.

Roger of Wendover's Flores Historiarum may record that wooden bridge and the nearby Church of St Thomas the Martyr damaged by fire in the Battle of Monmouth in 1233, fought between supporters of Henry III and the forces of Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. Both the site and the bridge involved are debated: the local historian Keith Kissack placed the fighting on Vauxhall Fields, some way from the Monnow, while other historians keep it at Overmonnow.

The stone bridge was completed in the late 13th century; tradition gives 1272, though no documentary evidence supports it. The gatehouse, Monnow Gate, followed twenty-five to thirty years later, at the end of the 13th or start of the 14th century, set mid-channel rather than, as was commoner, on the roadway at one end.

In 1297 Edward I granted Monmouth a murage, a tax for building or repairing town walls, at the request of his nephew Henry of Lancaster; it funded the walls, the gates and the gatehouse itself, and its renewal on 1 June 1315 indicates work still incomplete or in need of repair. All traffic then passed beneath a single arch closed by a portcullis, whose grooves are still visible; the arched machicolations were added at an unknown medieval date, possibly the late 14th century.

Tolls were authorised in the Patent Rolls of 1297 and 1315 and in later charters, and much of medieval Monmouth's development was funded by them; the charter of 1297 levied on such goods as “five fat hogs, (a) horse-load of honey and a thousand (roofing) nails”.

Whether the gate was built to defend or to collect has divided historians. Mary Ellen Bagnall-Oakeley, who wrote its first history, called it “a little fortress complete in itself, though of course, useless in time of war”, erected solely to take tolls; Kissack followed her, noting that the Monnow could easily be crossed on foot upstream. Ian Soulsby and Michael Rowlands read it the other way, Rowlands arguing that bridge and gate served defence and revenue alike.

In the Civil War the town changed hands several times, and in 1645 Royalist soldiers from Raglan seized the bridge in a failed attempt to retake Monmouth from the Parliamentarian forces under Colonel Kyrle — “the most resolute Royalist attack made (on) Monmouth” in Kissack's account, which left eight of Kyrle's opponents killed and five captured. By 1705 the battlements had been replaced with solid walls and the gatehouse refitted as a two-storey dwelling with lath extensions over the river, leased to a resident gatekeeper; part of it still served as a lock-up.

By 1804 the dwelling had been abandoned; Charles Heath found the interior used only as “an occasional guardhouse, or powder room, for the military”. The extensions came down around 1815, a pedestrian passageway was driven through the upstream side in 1819, and a second followed on the downstream side in 1845. Ownership passed from Monmouth Corporation to the Duke of Beaufort in an exchange begun in 1830 and concluded in 1835, and the roof was rebuilt in 1832.

In 1839, at the time of the Newport Rising, the gatehouse was garrisoned as the authorities feared a Chartist attack on Monmouth; later guidebooks put the three loopholes on the tower down to that alarm, but Rowlands showed them in illustrations made long before 1839. Conservation ran from 1889 to 1902 under Monmouthshire County Council: tie rods stopped the tower's two faces parting, piers undermined by riverbed erosion were repaired from 1892, and the gatehouse opened to the public. In 1900 Henry Somerset, 9th Duke of Beaufort, transferred it to the county council.

The bridge and gate were protected as an Ancient Monument in 1923. A double-decker bus struck the bridge on 18 May 1982 and closed it for a month. Funding of £1.3 million was secured in 2003 and the new crossing opened on 15 March 2004, leaving the medieval bridge to pedestrians; the gatehouse reopened in 2014 with public access one day a week. It is a scheduled monument and a Grade I listed building, its listing describing it as “an outstanding medieval fortified bridge, now unique in Britain”.