Amesbury Abbey

Melor,[1] 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.

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.

Pope Alexander III issued a bull on 15 September 1176 approving the plan but specifying that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of London, Exeter and Worcester were to visit the convent and notify the nuns of the need to cooperate.

The new regime was then to be introduced, and when the commission of bishops decided the moment had come, the abbess and a party of nuns from Fontevraud Abbey were to come to complete the handover.

In the event, it was said that scandal was discovered when the bishops of Exeter and Worcester made their inspection in the octave of the feast of St Hilary, 1177.

[2] The Plantagenets were great benefactors of the mother abbey at Fontevraud in its early years, and Henry II's widow, Eleanor of Aquitaine, went to live there.

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.

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.

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.

[2] Dame Sybil seems in effect to have abolished the system of male priors, though this caused a great upheaval and involved the intervention of the new King, Henry IV, against the background of his seizure of power from Richard II.

[14] The nearby country house, also called Amesbury Abbey, was not part of the nunnery: it was built in 1834–1840 by architect Thomas Hopper for Sir Edmund Antrobus.

It has three storeys and attics, and replaced a previous house built in 1660–1661 by John Webb for William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset.