[2] Ælfgifu, the wife of Alfred's grandson, King Edmund I, was buried at Shaftesbury and soon venerated as a saint,[3] and she came to be regarded by the house as its true founder.

[6] William of Malmesbury, in his Gesta regum Anglorum, praised the abbey residents' "steadfast preservation of their purity"[7] and the fervency and effectiveness of their prayers.

[8] In 1240 Cardinal Otto Candidus, the legate to the Apostolic See of Pope Gregory IX, visited the abbey and confirmed a charter of 1191, the first entered in the Glastonbury chartulary.

At the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, a common saying quoted by Bishop Thomas Fuller[9] conjectured "if the abbess of Shaftesbury and the abbot of Glastonbury Abbey had been able to wed, their son would have been richer than the King of England" because of the lands which it had been bequeathed.

In 1539, the last abbess, Elizabeth Zouche, signed a deed of surrender, the abbey was demolished, and its lands sold, leading to a temporary decline in the town.

Thomas Hardy wrote of the abbey ruins: Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal Abbey, the chief glory of south Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel.

[11] Shaftesbury Abbey appears in The Mirror & the Light, the final part of Hilary Mantel's trilogy covering the life of Thomas Cromwell, published in 2020.

[19] The site of Shaftesbury Abbey is used to host events including open air viewings of films, drama workshops and performances, as well as historical lectures.