Both were governed locally by a prioress and ultimately by the Abbess of Fontevraud, in Anjou, part of the territories in what is now France that were then ruled by the English royal house.

[2] In 1177 Henry II resolved upon suppressing Queen Ælfthryth (Elfrida)'s Saxon foundation known as Amesbury Abbey,[3] a Benedictine nunnery then almost two centuries old.

Henry's plan was confirmed by a bull of Pope Alexander III dated 15 September 1176, which ordered that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of London, Exeter and Worcester formally notify in person the nuns of the intended change and offer them the possibility of remaining in the new institution.

[5] The initiative to re-found at Amesbury was presented officially as part of a general movement to reform monasteries in England, and an inspection was carried out at the existing Abbey which claimed to have uncovered a situation of laxity and immoral conduct.

[7] Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), no admirer of Henry II, narrates that in 1174 the King had vowed to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem but three years later he successfully asked the Pope to be released from it, on condition that he instead found three monasteries.

Firstly, it followed in part the model established by the highly influential and prestigious Cluny Abbey, which by the 12th century numbered more than a thousand monasteries.

However, apparently in contradiction to this is the fact that when in 1486 Dame Alice Fisher was elected prioress, she sent a priest said to be her chaplain to the Abbess of Fontevraud with gifts in token of submission.

In reply received a cordial letter, dated 16 May 1486, which confirmed her in the office, recalled the nature of the Order and the importance of observing the statutes and of keeping the obits of Robert d'Arbrissel, Henry II, Richard I, and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

[11] In general it looks as though there was in principle a fixed number of 12 chaplains in the 14th century, a figure confirmed in the investigations into the troubles of 1400, when the then prioress had apparently been attempting to reduce this to four chaplain-canons, replacing the others with secular priests.

[11] Like the mother Abbey of Fontevraud, Amesbury, for all its royal connections and its institutional endowments, appears to have known real poverty at times, as did its sister houses at Westwood and Nuneaton.

[20] This house was (unlike the others) regarded as an alien priory (i.e., a particular category of English dependency of a French mother-house) and would have suffered various types of more severe harassment whenever there were hostilities between France and England.

While even in the absence of recorded specifics, we must suppose that the daily life at Amesbury Priory went on as in any monastery of its type, the relations with the royal house remained a constant at least till the end of the fifteenth century.

[36] In the reigns of Richard I (1189–1199) and John (1199–1216) there was a gradual increase in the estates of Amesbury Priory, including the acquisition in 1197 of 78 acres nearby in Barford St Martin.

[11] Amesbury Priory seems to have conformed to a general tendency in England as the Middle Ages waned for the proportion of aristocratic nuns in nunneries to decline.

An example of this can be seen in the Abbey of the Minoresses of St. Clare without Aldgate in London, whose initial heavy royal connections seem to have imparted from the outset a certain cachet to the house[38] such that in the early days aspiring nuns had to be of noble birth,[39] whereas by the 14th century the daughters of wealthy merchants were also entering.

On 2 October 1501 Princess Catherine of Aragon landed at Plymouth and proceeded by road via Exeter to her wedding to Arthur, Prince of Wales in Saint Paul's Cathedral on 14 November.

After Robert Dawbeney we find no further mention of priors and it seems likely in view of the drama of his destitution that the system changed so that the former parallel male community was reduced to merely a group of secular priests appointed as chaplains.

Perhaps, too, she and her closer family felt that her future more naturally lay on the Continent, especially given the divide opened up by Edward I's general imperialism and his renewal of military operations to secure territories for the English crown there.

Possibly to prevent his daughter falling into French hands in the event of war with England, Edward refused, and Mary remained at Amesbury, while her allowance was doubled to £200 per year.

In one dated 1301 she assumes the grand style "Maria illustris regis Anglie nata vices reverende matris domine Margarete dei gracia Fontis Ebraudi abbatisse in Anglia gerens" ("Mary daughter of the illustrious King of England, vicegerent of the Reverend mother Dame Margaret, by the grace of God Abbess of Fontevraud").

Had John's claim been true, his marriage to Mary's niece would have been rendered null and void, but despite papal mandates for inquests to be made into the matter, the truth was never established.

For one thing, coupled with the entry there of his daughter Princess Mary of Woodstock, some months earlier, it meant once again visits to the priory by the King, Edward I, who first went to Amesbury in 1275.

Queen Eleanor died at Amesbury on 24 or 25 June 1291 and on 11 September following was solemnly entombed there before the high altar of the priory church in the presence of her son the King, Edward I, and many prelates and nobles.

On the death from typhoid of her second husband, Theobald II de Verdun, on 27 July 1316, his widow Elizabeth fled, pregnant, to the protection of her aunt Mary at Amesbury Priory.

In 1347, the by then 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, where she died and was buried in 1377.

Whether and in what manner her activities and those of other resident royal ladies were a financial burden on the monastery may have been to some degree invisible to the formal accounts, but the priory's spending on the keep of the nuns was higher than average among English nunneries.

The mixed royal and ecclesiastical enquiries into the resulting uproar compromised by saving the reputation of the Prior and ordering the granting of a pension, but not reinstating him in the house.

Having been initially buried at St James' Priory, Bristol, she was then reburied only a month or so later at Amesbury Abbey, which Henry III announced was her chosen resting place.

On 30 March 1539 the three signed a letter to Thomas Cromwell reporting "we have used as many wayes with her as o[ur] pore witte cowed atteyne yet in theende we cowed not by any p[er]suasions bringe her to any conformitye but at all tymes she rested and soo remayneth in theis termes: yf the kinge’s highness commande me to goo from thys howse I will gladlye goo though I begge my breade".

[92] Sir Thomas Malory’s long romance Le Morte d'Arthur reworked old folk tales of the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table, drawing on existing French and English stories.