It then became a country house, Lacock Abbey, notable as the site of Henry Fox Talbot's early experiments in photography.

[1] Countess Ela laid the abbey's first stone on 16 April 1232, in the reign of King Henry III at a site on Snail's Meadow ("Snaylesmede") lying between the village and the River Avon.

[5] Moreover, when Robert Bingham, Bishop of Salisbury gave his formal approval to the foundation on 20 April 1230, he enjoined upon the nuns the following of the Rule of St Augustine.

[7] It is most likely that Ela intended from the first to become abbess of her own foundation, a sign of this being the fact that the house was ruled in the initial period by a prioress, Wymarca.

Advised apparently by Saint Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, she took the habit as a nun in late 1237 or early 1238 and was elected at the latest by the feast of the Assumption (15 August) of 1239, receiving the bishop's blessing as abbess for some reason at Sherston.

[10] Throughout the thirteenth century Lady Ela's descendants remained close to the abbey, both in bestowing material support and by choosing it as a preferred burial place.

[19] Already in the time of the second abbess, Beatrice of Kent, a water conduit was constructed bringing supplies from Bowden Hill, along with a corn mill within the Abbey close.

[21] As was often the case with medieval English nunneries,[22] the house was not always in financially positive circumstances and in 1403 it was given exemption from royal taxation for reason of poverty and 40 years exemption in 1447 after the bell-tower and bells, the bakehouse, the brewery, and two barns full of corn at Lacock had been set afire by lightning and destroyed, as had the grange buildings at Chitterne.

Still, apart from consumption of meat of animals for their own nutrition, in 1476 the abbey was engaged in sheep-rearing on a commercial scale to the extent of having a flock of over 2,000 sheep, most of them on the manor of Chitterne.

The inventory drawn up at Chitterne at the Dissolution records 600 wethers, 600 ewes, and 300 hogs and, at the same period, among their employees were 15 hinds and a swanherd.

An early benefactor Sir John Bluet claimed burial in a Lady chapel to be constructed for the purpose but it was also agreed that there would be a chantry to may for the souls of him and his wife and that on his anniversary a halfpenny would be given to each of a thousand poor.

Furthermore, the celebration of the liturgy for a large part of the day and night would necessitate texts for the participants; for celebrations of the sacraments, the nuns would rely on one or more chaplains who would also need liturgical books.It is possible that the treatise, Speculum Ecclesiae, was originally written by Saint Edmund Rich (died 1240) in Anglo-French under the title of Miroir de Sainte Eglise[30] for Ela and her community, though none of the surviving manuscripts seem traceable to the abbey.

In 1399 Bishop Ralph Erghum of Salisbury left the Abbess of Lacock "my beautiful psalter which the Rector of Marnhull gave me".

[35] One was a decorated vellum manuscript copy of the work of a 12th-century English clergyman, William Brito,[36] Expositiones Vocabulorum Biblie, was purchased by the National Trust and is now kept at Lacock.

In its binding are leaves from a manuscript, dateable to about 1300, containing theological notes that refer to the writings of St Thomas Aquinas; this has led some to think they might be the work of William of Cirencester, a Dominican friar whom Bishop Simon of Ghent of Salisbury appointed penitentiary (confessor) at Lacock Abbey in 1303.

Its shape is a pointed oval showing the Virgin Mary wearing a crown and seated on a carved throne with the Child Jesus on her left knee.

Above is a panelled and pinnacled canopy surmounted by a cross, and below a trefoiled arch above an unidentified kneeling figure with hands raised in prayer.

[44] According to the 1536 Commissioners the abbey was for the town “and all other adioynynge by common reaporte a greate Releef”, and the nuns were “by Reporte and in apparaunce of vertuous lyvyng, all desyrynge to contynue religios”.

[50] As was the habitual procedure, the abbey's buildings were stripped of lead, which at Lacock realized £193, before being released to the prospective purchaser, William Sharington, later Sir William Sharington (c.1495–1553), a courtier, politician and entrepreneur, who farmed the site of the abbey together with the manor and rectory of Lacock along with other local monastic properties until the purchase was completed in the summer of 1540.