ABSTRACT
This paper examines two tomb monuments in Abergavenny Priory church (Monmouthshire). They are here identified as commemorating Lawrence Hastings, earl of Pembroke (d. 1348), and his bastard half-brother, William (d. 1349). The effigies seem to display some of the developments in armour defences demanded by warfare in France, but it is suggested that the sculpted armour cannot be uncritically accepted as a literal transcription from real armour.
The monuments are remarkably idiosyncratic, even by the standards of a period characterised by fertile invention in the representational idioms of tomb-effigies and by restless innovation in the styles and formats of monumental architecture. Recent conservation has exposed the perplexingly eccentric constructional techniques employed by the sculptors.
The extinction of the Hastings earls of Pembroke offers a poignant illustration of the uncertainties of survival in the male line for great aristocratic families in the Middle Ages. The destruction of their later burial places, away from Abergavenny, exemplifies the capriciously uneven impact of the dissolution on the survival of great medieval tomb monuments.
