Amesbury Church. Reasons for thinking that. 
it was not the Church of the Priory. 
By C. H. Tatsot, PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY. 
[Read at the Amesbury Meeting of the Society, July 4th, 1899.] 
WGN giving the title of my paper, for the programme of this 
yf meeting, I inadvertently used the word “ Abbey,” instead 
of “Priory.” A British monastery is said to have existed at 
Amesbury, about which I suppose not much is known, but Amesbury 
appears to have been certainly a place of some importance in very 
early times. Dugdale says that St. Melorius is buried there. 
An Abbey of Benedictine nuns was founded at Amesbury, about 
the year 980, by Queen Elfrida, to expiate the murder of her step- 
son Edward, at Corfe. Bishop Tanner, in his “‘ Notitia Monastica,”’ 
says she “commended it to the patronage of St. Mary and St. 
Melorius, a Cornish saint, whose relics were preserved here, &c.” 
This Abbey of nuns existed at the time of the Norman conquest 
and continued to the time of Henry II., who, in 1177, expelled 
the nuns of Amesbury, in number about thirty, for their alleged 
ill lives, and re-founded the house as a Priory, a cell to the 
French Abbey of Fontevraud, from whence he introduced a prioress 
and twenty-four nuns. That is the number stated by Canon 
Jackson, but he does not give his authority. Dugdale prints a 
charter of King John, dated 30th August in the first year of his 
reign (1199), confirmatory of the gifts of his father, in which the 
number of nuns is stated to be much greater than it had been. 
The word ‘‘ Abbey” continued to be occasionally applied to this 
later foundation, and Tanner says that, at length, the house was 
‘made denizen and became again an Abbey.” It may be that the 
convent of Amesbury ultimately became independent of the Abbey of 
Fontevraud. A reference! which Tanner gives to a Patent of the 
1 Notitia Monastica, edition of 1744, page 590. 
