Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/267

Rh the Americans who have visited Haddon Hall in Derbyshire ever visit this village Westminster Abbey of all the Verons? It is doubtful. It is even possible that I am the first and only American who ever saw it. Even a man well read in the general history of the country will be astonished on entering this miniature cathedral, for such it is and looks in its interior and exterior aspects. In the first place, it is doubtful if any other village or provincial church in England contains within its walls so many beautiful and costly monuments to the memory of so many noble families as this little Westminster. You see here how and when these various families intersected with each other in wedlock and interweaved the new branches they put forth as the result of the union. Here you may read their histories, their graces, and virtues if you can decipher monumental Latin. The first and probably oldest tomb is that of Sir Fowke de Pembrugge (Pembroke?), who died in 1408, not quite a century before America was discovered. He was the last of his long line who owned Tong Castle and reigned lord of the manor. The Haddon Hall Vernon, Sir William, married his daughter and heiress and her inheritance at Tong. He died in 1460, as an inscription on his brass tomb opposite the pulpit affirms. A little further on toward the later centuries we see how and when another family was grafted into the Pembrugge