Passing between Lords Wood and Lady-Park Wood and skirting Greatwood and Newton Court, the Wye arrives at Monmouth. Encircled by hills, and itself seated high, this town, still unspoiled by the modern builder and restorer, occupies a position between the Wye and the Monnow. Monmouth has had its ups and downs; for long before the Conquest a fortress existed here, and to build a castle has ever been to invite a siege. In the days of Henry III. the castle was levelled with the ground so effectively that Lambarde writes: "Thus the glorie of Monmouth had clean perished; ne hade it pleased Gode longe after in that place to give life to the noble King Henry V., who of the same is called Henry of Monmouth." John of Gaunt lived here, and Henry IV. also, and, as the ancient writer says, Henry V. was born in the castle. This event has not been forgotten, for a statue of the popular king stands opposite the Town Hall in Agincourt Square, the centre of the town. In more ancient days Monmouth was a walled town, and one of the four gates of the wall still stands; and a bridge built in 1272, remarkably narrow, but sturdy and strong, still spans the Monnow; while the meagre ruins of the castle look down from the brow of the river-cliff on the meadows by this tributary stream. St. Mary's Church has a spire 200 feet in height; St. Thomas's Chapel, dating from the days of the Normans, stands in the centre of the part of the town which used to be given up to the making of the renowned Monmouth cap, of which Fuller, in his "Worthies," says: "These were the most ancient, general, warm, and profitable coverings of men's heads in this island. It is worth our pains to observe the tenderness of our kings to preserve the trade of cap-making, and what long and strong struggling our State had to keep up the using thereof, so many thousands of people being thereby maintained in the land, especially before the invention of fulling-mills, all caps before that time being wrought, beaten, and thickened by the hands and feet of men, till those mills, as they eased many of their labour, outed more of their livelihood." Not far from the parish church is the picturesque remnant of a Benedictine priory, founded in the reign of Henry I. by Wyhenoe, third Lord of Monmouth; and here it is not improbable that Geoffrey of Monmouth, compiler of the fabulous "History of the Britons," out of which grew the Poem of the Table Round, was educated.