Nun Monkton is a village and civil parish in the county of North Yorkshire, England. It is situated 8 miles (13 km) northwest of York at the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Nidd. Cottages and houses are grouped around a village green of 20 acres (81,000 m²) with a duck pond and a maypole. 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.

Until 1974 it was part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. From 1974 to 2023 it was part of the Borough of Harrogate, it is now administered by the unitary North Yorkshire Council. On 1 April 1988 the parish of Widdington was abolished and merged with Nun Monkton.

Some sort of settlement has probably existed since the earliest times. The name "Monkton" appears to reflect a pre-Viking or Anglian settlement in the 8th and 9th centuries. The village is mentioned in the late 11th-century Domesday Book where it is referred to – like most villages in northern Yorkshire – as vastatus i.e. deliberately wrecked by the invading Normans to prevent uprisings against them.

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. The arrival of the nuns came about a century after the Norman Conquest. 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. These routes ended when the ferry was discontinued in the middle of the 20th century. The Priory existed until 1536 when it was dissolved by Henry VIII, despite a plea from his second wife, Anne Boleyn, that it be spared. 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.

Though Nun Monkton village remained a single estate until the 1930s, it changed hands several times after the Protestant Reformation. Its first owner was John Neville, the 3rd Baron Latimer and the second husband of Katherine Parr the last wife of Henry VIII. Latimer, who had been granted in 1538, bequeathed it and lands in Hammerton to his daughter at his death in 1543. During the later 17th century and the first half of the 18th century, it was owned by the Payler (or Paylor) family.

On 2 July 1644 the Battle of Marston Moor, one of the largest battles ever fought on English soil, took place in fields some miles to the south-west of the village. Royalist troops under Prince Rupert crossed the Ouse between Beningbrough and Nun Monkton and proceeded on to Skip bridge where they crossed the River Nidd and joined battle with the Parliamentarian army. 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.

In 1748 the estate and those in surrounding villages passed to William Tufnell Jolliffe upon the death of his uncle Nathaniel Payler. A painting dated to 1773 shows Squire William Tufnell with his son on horseback amid a pack of hounds, looking across from the Moor Monkton bank of the Nidd at Nun Monkton Priory and Church. Despite the passage of 251 years, the view is relatively unchanged today. An elaborate early nineteenth century monument to the Tufnell family is today in the sacristy on the north side of the church. Before 1871 it was in the old sanctuary of the church and seems to have been somewhat damaged while being moved.

George IV while Prince of Wales, is believed to have had lunch at the Priory during a visit to Yorkshire.