ABERGAVENNY, a market town and municipal borough in the northern parliamentary division of Monmouthshire, England, 14 m. W. of Monmouth on the Great Western and the London and North-Western railways. Pop. (1901) 7795. It is situated at the junction of a small stream called the Gavenny with the river Usk; and the site, almost surrounded by lofty hills, is very beautiful. The town was formerly walled, and has the remains of a castle built soon after the conquest, frequently the scene of border strife. The church of St Mary belonged originally to a Benedictine monastery founded early in the 12th century. The existing building, however, is Decorated and Perpendicular, and contains a fine series of memorials of dates from the 13th to the 17th century. There is a free grammar school, which till 1857 had a fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. Breweries, ironworks, quarries, brick fields and collieries in the neighbourhood are among the principal industrial establishments. Abergavenny was incorporated in 1899, and is governed by a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. Area, 825 acres.
This was the Roman Gobannium, a small fort guarding the road along the valley of the Usk and ensuring quiet among the hill tribes. There is practically no trace of this fort. Abergavenny (Bergavenny) grew up under the protection of the lords of Abergavenny, whose title dated from William I. Owing to its situation, the town was frequently embroiled in the border warfare of the 12th and 13th centuries, and Giraldus Cambrensis relates how in 1175 the castle was seized by the Welsh. Hamelyn de Baalun, first lord of Abergavenny, founded the Benedictine priory, which was subsequently endowed by William de Braose with a tenth of the profits of the castle and town. At the dissolution of the priory part of this endowment went towards the foundation of a free grammar school, the site itself passing to the Gunter family. During the Civil War prior to the siege of Raglan Castle in 1645, Charles I. visited Abergavenny, and presided in person over the trial of Sir Trevor Williams and other parliamentarians. In 1639 Abergavenny received a charter of incorporation under the title of bailiff and burgesses. A charter with extended privileges was drafted in 1657, but appears never to have been enrolled or to have come into effect. Owing to the refusal of the chief officers of the corporation to take the oath of allegiance to William III. in 1688, the charter was annulled, and the town subsequently declined in prosperity. The act of 27 Henry VIII., which provided that Monmouth, as county town, should return one burgess to parliament, further stated that other ancient Monmouthshire boroughs were to contribute towards the payment of the member. In consequence of this clause Abergavenny on various occasions shared in the election, the last instance being in 1685. Reference to a market at Abergavenny is found in a charter granted to the prior by William de Braose (d. 1211). The right to hold two weekly markets and three yearly fairs, as hitherto held, was confirmed in 1657. Abergavenny was celebrated for the production of Welsh flannel, and also for the manufacture, whilst the fashion prevailed, of periwigs of goats’ hair.
The title of Baron Abergavenny, in the Neville family, dates from Edward Neville (d. 1476), who was the youngest son of the 1st earl of Westmoreland by Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt. He married the heiress of Richard, earl of Worcester, whose father had inherited the castle and estate of Abergavenny, and was summoned in 1392 to parliament as Lord Bergavenny. Edward Neville was summoned to parliament with this title in 1450. His direct male descendants ended in 1587 in Henry Neville, but a cousin, Edward Neville (d. 1622), was confirmed in the barony in 1604. From him it has descended continuously, the title being increased to an earldom in 1784; and in 1876 William Nevill (sic) 5th earl (b. 1826), an indefatigable and powerful supporter of the Conservative party, was created 1st marquess of Abergavenny. (See Neville.)
ABERIGH-MACKAY, GEORGE ROBERT (1848–1881), Anglo-Indian writer, son of a Bengal chaplain, was born on the 25th of July 1848, and was educated at Magdalen College School and Cambridge University. Entering the Indian education department in 1870, he became professor of English literature in Delhi College in 1873, tutor to the raja of Rutlam 1876, and principal of the Rajkumar College at Indore in 1877. He is best known for his book Twenty-one Days in India (1878–1879), a satire upon Anglo-Indian society and modes of thought. This book gave promise of a successful literary career; but the author died at the age of thirty-three.
ABERNETHY, JOHN (1680–1740), Irish Presbyterian divine, was born at Coleraine, county Londonderry, where his father was Nonconformist minister, on the 19th of October 1680. In his thirteenth year he entered the university of Glasgow, and on concluding his course there went on to Edinburgh, where his intellectual and social attainments gained him a ready entrance into the most cultured circles. Returning home he received licence to preach from his Presbytery before he was twenty-one. In 1701 he was urgently invited to accept charge of an important congregation in Antrim; and after an interval of two years, mostly spent in further study in Dublin, he was ordained there on the 8th of August 1703. Here he did notable work, both as a debater in the synods and assemblies of his church and as an evangelist. In 1712 he lost his wife (Susannah Jordan), and the loss desolated his life for many years. In 1717 he was invited to the congregation of Usher’s Quay, Dublin, and contemporaneously to what was called the Old Congregation of Belfast. The synod assigned him to Dublin. After careful consideration he declined to accede, and remained at Antrim. This refusal was regarded then as ecclesiastical high-treason; and a controversy of the most intense and disproportionate character followed, Abernethy standing firm for religious freedom and repudiating the sacerdotal assumptions of all ecclesiastical courts. The controversy and quarrel bears the name of the two camps in the conflict, the “Subscribers” and the “Non-subscribers.” Out-and-out evangelical as John Abernethy was, there can be no question that he and his associates sowed the seeds of that after-struggle (1821–1840) in which, under the leadership of Dr Henry Cooke, the Arian and Socinian elements of the Irish Presbyterian Church were thrown out. Much of what he contended for, and which the “Subscribers” opposed bitterly, has been silently granted in the lapse of time. In 1726 the “Non-subscribers,” spite of an almost wofully pathetic pleading against separation by Abernethy, were cut off, with due ban and solemnity, from the Irish Presbyterian Church. In 1730, although a “Non-subscriber,” he was invited to Wood Street, Dublin, whither he removed. In 1731 came on the greatest controversy in which Abernethy engaged, viz. in relation to the Test Act nominally, but practically on the entire question of tests and disabilities. His stand was “against all laws that, upon account of mere differences of religious opinions and forms of worship, excluded men of integrity and ability from serving their country.” He was nearly a century in advance of his age. He had to reason with those who denied that a Roman Catholic or Dissenter could be a “man of integrity and ability.” His Tracts—afterwards collected—did fresh service, generations later, and his name is honoured by all who love freedom of conscience and opinion. He died in December 1740.
See Dr Duchal’s Life, prefixed to Sermons (1762); Diary in MS., 6 vols. 4to; Reid’s Presbyterian Church in Ireland, iii. 234.
ABERNETHY, JOHN (1764–1831), English surgeon, grandson of John Abernethy (see above), was born in London on the 3rd of April 1764. His father was a London merchant. Educated at Wolverhampton grammar school, he was apprenticed in 1779 to Sir Charles Blicke (1745–1815), surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. He attended the anatomical lectures of Sir William Blizard (1743–1835) at the London Hospital, and was early employed to assist as “demonstrator”; he also attended Percival Pott’s surgical lectures at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, as well as the lectures of John Hunter. On Pott’s resignation of the office of surgeon of St Bartholomew’s, Sir Charles Blicke, who was assistant-surgeon, succeeded him, and Abernethy was elected assistant-surgeon in 1787. In this capacity he began to give lectures at his house in Bartholomew Close, which were so well attended that the governors of the hospital built a regular theatre (1790–1791), and Abernethy thus became the founder of the distinguished school of St Bartholomew’s. He held the office of assistant-surgeon of the hospital for the long period of twenty-eight years, till, in 1815, he was elected principal surgeon. He had before that time been appointed lecturer in anatomy to the Royal College of Surgeons (1814). Abernethy was not a great operator, though his name is associated with the treatment of aneurism by ligature of the external iliac artery. His Surgical Observations on the Constitutional Origin and Treatment of Local Diseases (1809)—known as “My Book,” from the great frequency with which he referred his patients to it, and to page 72 of it in particular, under that name—was one of the earliest popular works on medical science.
