Amesbury was already a sacred place in
pagan times, and there are legends that a
monastery existed there before the Danish invasions. There may have been an existing cult of
St Melor which led Ælfthryth to choose Amesbury. Melor, the son of a leader of
Cornouaille and a boy-martyr, was buried at
Lanmeur and venerated in
Brittany, but a later tradition claims that some of his relics were brought to Amesbury and sold to the abbess. However, the 12th-century life of St Melor says the nunnery at Amesbury was founded before Melor's relics arrived. The cult of St Melor is commemorated in the dedication of the
current Amesbury parish church.
Saxon abbey The monastery was founded by
Queen Ælfthryth in about the year 979 on what may have been the site of an earlier
monastery. She founded two religious houses at about the same time, the other being at
Wherwell in Hampshire. Ælfthryth's motive was long believed to be contrition for the murder of
Edward, another boy-martyr, making the date of 979 given by the
Melrose chronicle appropriate. However, she is now considered not to have been personally responsible for the murder. As to the Abbesses of Amesbury, the references are sparse. For the period before the Conquest there is only a retrospective mention much later of Heahpled (?), in the years 979 and 1013, and at the time of the house's re-foundation, of the then incumbent Abbess, Beatrice (1177). Some of the other nuns were compromised and unrepentant and these were also expelled. Those willing to make amends received the offer to stay on; it seems that there were some 30 nuns and they were all expelled. became the chosen mausoleum of the Angevin dynasty and the centre of a new monastic order, the Order of Fontevraud. The Fontevraud monastic reform followed in part the lead of the highly influential and prestigious
Cluny Abbey in adopting a
centralized form of government, whereby in a federated structure the superiors of subsidiary houses were in effect deputies of the Abbot of Cluny, the head of the Order, and their houses were hence usually styled
priories, not
abbeys, governed therefore not by
abbots but by
priors. In the analogous case of the Order of Fontevraud, its head was the Abbess of Fontevraud, who at the death of the Order's founder,
Robert of Arbrissel, in about 1117, already had under her rule 35 priories, and by the end of that century about 100, in France, Spain and England. Fontevraud also took up a feature that had appeared sporadically in early centuries, whereby its houses were
double monasteries, with separately housed convents of both men and women, under a common superior, which in the case of the Order of Fontevraud was a prioress. The men had their own male superior, but he was subject to the prioress. At Amesbury and in some other places this model seems to have broken down, and by the beginning of the 15th century Amesbury seems to have become an exclusively women's house, with a small group of priest-chaplains external to the Order.
Amesbury Priory Though it was above all Henry II who over his long reign (1154–1189) introduced the Order of Fontevraud into England, there seem only ever to have been in the country four houses in all. Apart from Amesbury, these were
Westwood Priory (Worcestershire), Eaton or
Nuneaton Priory (Warwickshire) and
Grovebury Priory (Bedfordshire), the latter three founded roughly between 1133 and 1164, so before Henry revamped the foundation at Amesbury about 1177. Although the later Amesbury monastery is popularly referred to as an "abbey", it was not one. The first monastery appears to have been truly an abbey, but the Fontevraud daughter house was always a priory. Perhaps the fading memory of historical fact after the
English Reformation, the end of links with Rome, and later the inroads of
Romanticism, explain the use of the word. The choice of the name for the later country house may also have been a factor.
Some women of Amesbury Priory Eleanor of Brittany (died 1241), a princess held captive for most of her life for her presumable claim to the English throne, donated her body and was buried here, and in 1268
King Henry III would grant to the abbey a manor of
Melksham in suffrage for her soul and that of her brother
Arthur, who was widely believed to have been murdered by Henry III's father
King John; Henry III would also order the abbey to have Eleanor and Arthur commemorated as well as the late English kings and queens.
Eleanor of Provence,
Queen consort of
Henry III of England, died in
Amesbury on 24 or 25 June 1291, and was buried in the abbey on 11 September 1291. From about at least 1343 to her death some time before February 1349,
Isabel of Lancaster was Prioress of Amesbury. She was the sister of
Henry of Grosmont, 1st Duke of Lancaster, a great-grandson of
Henry III. She was also younger sister of the formidable
Maud of Lancaster, Countess of Ulster. In 1347, the twice-widowed Maud also entered a nunnery, in her case
Campsey Priory, a house of Augustinian canonesses near
Wickham Market in Suffolk, but in 1364 she transferred to the
Poor Clares community at
Bruisyard Abbey, also in Suffolk, where she died and was buried in 1377. Not half a century later, the prioress was Sybil Montague, a woman well-placed as a niece of
William Montague, 2nd Earl of Salisbury (d.1389) and sister of
John Montague, 3rd Earl of Salisbury. Her election as prioress in 1391 was confirmed by the King,
Richard II. The Amesbury estate was subsequently obtained from
the Crown by
Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, a nephew to
Jane Seymour,
Queen consort of
Henry VIII, and the eldest son of her brother,
Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset,
Lord Protector of England during the minority of King
Edward VI, the Earl's cousin, with whom he had been educated in infancy. ==19th-century house==