Amesbury Abbey

Amesbury Abbey was a Benedictine abbey of women at Amesbury in Wiltshire, England, founded by Queen Ælfthryth in about the year 979 on what may have been the site of an earlier monastery. The abbey was dissolved in 1177 by Henry II, who founded in its place a house of the Order of Fontevraud, known as Amesbury Priory. The name Amesbury Abbey is now used by a nearby Grade I listed country house built in the 1830s, currently a nursing home.

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.

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. At the time of the Domesday Book (1086), the abbey held, as it had had in King Edward's time, the Wiltshire manors of Bulford, Boscombe, Allington, Coulston, and Maddington, totalling twenty-seven hides, together with the manor of Rabson in Winterbourne Bassett. In Berkshire it held Ceveslane in Challow, Fawley, and Kintbury and the church at Letcombe Regis. It seems that for most of its existence Amesbury Abbey was probably not of particular importance and its overall income was not especially high. It was, like all women's houses in particular, liable to harassment, rustling and other incursions by powerful neighbours, as well

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