The New Murrey and Blue blog

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Olde_Murenger_House) in Newport, South Wales, there stands Ye Olde Murenger House.  It is a 19th-century public house with a mock Tudor façade that stands on the site of the 17th-century Fleur de Lys, “…a single-storey stone structure that was demolished in 1816….” Should you wonder what murenger means, it’s the name given to the medieval person who collected tolls to repair the town walls.

Now why am I writing about this public house, do I hear you ask? Well, it’s because yet again while leafing through a book of county folktales (in this instance Monmouthshire by Roy Palmer), I came upon an anecdote about its association with Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell had ordered the slighting of Newport Castle, and while his forces were encamped near Fairoak Hill, Christchurch, some 2½ miles from Newport, a man came to Cromwell and said for a suitable sum he’d show him an underground passage leading into the castle. Cromwell took the castle, and then had the man hanged for his treachery. (Pause here for some wishful thinking that Richard III had been able to administer the same punishment to the rotten-to-the-core Stanleys after Bosworth. Alas, it wasn’t to be….)

From Christchurch Cromwell moved to the Fleur de Lys/Ye Olde Murenger House. This is when something happened that I thought you might all appreciate. We all know that he had a penchant for taking pot shots at whichever site it pleased him to damage, and it seems that while staying at the original Fleur de Lys he spotted just such a target.

He ordered cannon be used to shoot off the head of a statue of Jasper Tudor which was in a niche on St Woolos Church (Newport Cathedral of the Church in Wales since 1949).

Nice one, Ollie! (Please overlook the sacrilege of taking aim at a church. The cathedral is still there, so it was only Jasper’s head that came to grief.)

You can read a very detailed article about the church here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_Cathedral and another article here https://www.visitwales.com/attraction/historic-site/newport-cathedral-st-woolos-509747