Wentbridge

Wentbridge in the valley of the Went, developed as a staging post complete with inns and a hospital. In 1339 the fellows of Merton College, Oxford, stayed there on their way north to attend to their Northumbrian manors. By the early seventeenth century there were at least four inns, one of which acquired an evil reputatuon; its landlord was deprived of his licence for harbouring footpads and ne’er-do-wells. (Holt, Robin Hood, pp. 84-85) A small hamlet throughout the later middle ages, Wentbridge had acquired its modern name form by 1302 and a leper house by 1385.(1) By at least 1487 Wentbridge possessed ‘an in’ capable of providing beds for overnight accommodation, see York Civic Records, ed. A. Raine, II, (Y.A.S., Record Series, CIII, 1941), p.5. (Dobson and Taylor, Rymes of Robyn Hood, n. 4, p.21)

Wentbridge is not actually named in the Gest, but it does mention ‘as he went at a brydge ther was a wraste-lyng’ (stanza 135) possibly a play on the name. The reference is unmistakable in the early ballad Robin Hood and the Potter, ‘Y met hem bot at Went breg, s(e)yde Lytyll John’ (stanza 6).

1. 172. WENTBRIDGE LEPER HOUSE. The only known allusion to the former existence of this house is contained in the will of John de Gysburne, citizen and merchant of York (1385). (fn. 96) He bequeathed 5s. domui leprosorum apud Wentbrig [96]. ( B. H. Cooke, Early Civic Wills of York, 5).

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A view of Wentbridge by the bridge, which carried all the A1 traffic prior to the construction of the Viaduct. The present bridge is largely 18th century, but almost certainly encloses an earlier bridge. (Eric Houlder, British Archaeology, Issue no 48, October 1999)

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The plaque on the bridge.

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A surviving remnant of the original medieval highway, on which Robin Hood may have practised his brigandage, climbs through the woods out of the valley to the north. Signed as a public bridle-way, this track was the only route until the adjacent cutting was blasted through the rocks to provide a safer road for the mail coaches. (Eric Houlder, British Archaeology, Issue no 48, October 1999)

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Brockadale Nature Reserve is a unique wildlife area about two kilometres long that covers much of the valley eastwards between the villages of Wentbridge and the Smeatons. (Yorkshire Wildlife Trusts) There is a public footpath out of Wentbridge that runs along the south side of the river and under the A1 Viaduct.

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