Before the dissolution of religious houses, this church belonged to a priory of Benedictine monks, which was founded by Hamelin Baladun, {310} who is also said to have built the castle. The priory house, adjoining the nave of the church, is converted into a commodious dwelling, which was lately tenanted by the Gunter and Milborne family. The free-school in the town was founded by Henry the Eighth, and amply endowed with the revenues of forfeited monasteries, &c. Abergavenny was a Roman town, the Gobannium of Antoninus. Leland describes it to be “a faire waulled town, meately well inhabited;” and an account of Monmouthshire written in 1602 represents it as “a fine town, wealthy and thriving, and the very best in the shire.” But during the last century it was in a very declining state until the establishment of some great iron-works, which have lately sprung up in the adjacent mountains. When full-bottomed flaxen wigs were the rage, the town enjoyed a temporary prosperity from a method peculiar to its inhabitants of bleaching hair; but, perriwigs being no longer the rage, the place was hastening to decay: just at this juncture the faculty proclaimed that goats-whey was a specific in consumptive cases; and crowds of invalids, under the fiat of death, immediately enlivened the town. But the fashions of doctors are no more stationary than those of beaux; the _ton_ for goats-whey soon diminished; and, deprived of patients as well as perriwigs, the place was relapsing into poverty and desertion, when the fortunate discovery of the Blaenavon iron mines, (a grand concern in the recesses of the Blorenge mountain well worth the tourist’s attention) gave a new face to the town, and still daily encreases its population. CHAP. XX. WERNDEE—FAMILY PRIDE—LANTHONY ABBEY—OLD CASTLE. About two miles from Abergavenny is WERNDEE, a poor patched-up house: though once a mansion of no less magnificence than antiquity, it is now only interesting as being considered to have been the spot where the prolific Herbert race was first implanted in Britain. Henry de Herbert, chamberlain to king Henry the First, is supposed to have been their great ancestor. Of the vast possessions that formerly supported the grandeur of the Herberts, the inheritance of Mr. Proger, the last lineal descendant from the elder branch of this family, who died about twenty years since, had dwindled to less than two hundred a year. Mr. Coxe relates an anecdote of this gentleman’s pride of ancestry, which may be compared with the remarks on Perthir; {313} at the same time, it conveys a brief outline of the family’s genealogy.