The Ouse is navigable for another 19 miles (30 km) and river traffic played an important part in the village's life until the middle of the twentieth century.

A hermitage or small monastic settlement may have existed at Nun Monkton during the Anglian period in Northumbria, prior to the arrival of the Vikings, giving rise to the 'Monkton' part of the village's name.

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.

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.

Because of its proximity to the battlefield, Nun Monkton must have been directly affected but there seem to be no traditions, though older villagers in the late twentieth century reported claims that fallen soldiers were buried around St Mary's Church.

Nun Monkton was visited in the summer of 1898 by the future Provost of Eton and ghost story writer, M.R.James on a boat trip from York during a meeting of Convocation.

He wrote in a letter: "At Nun Monkton a beautiful house adjoins the church — Queen Anne with a sweet garden and leaden statues and a summerhouse."

The largest secular building in Nun Monkton and architecturally by far the finest after the church, is the hall or manor house formally known as the Priory,[6] and 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.

[9][8] 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 impact of the Tractarian movement, the village squire of the day, Isaac Crawhall, commissioned a new east end, built in high Anglican style.

On the evening of the first day of the feast, young men went through the village with large baskets for the purpose of collecting tarts and cheese cakes and eggs for mulled ale, all being consumed at the above ceremonies.

[16] The Alice Hawthorn public house was named after the 1840s equine winner of the Doncaster Cup and Queen's Vase and was formerly The Blue Bell Inn.

[17] The Yorkshire Heart Vineyard and Brewery was founded in Nun Monkton in 2000[18] and won a gold medal in the International Wine Challenge Cellar Door of the Year awards.

[19] There has been a school in Nun Monkton at least since the early-18th century[20] when the Dorothy Wilson Trust was set up in York to endow education for both boys and girls in the village.