8 



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By C. H. Talbot, President of the Society. 

 [Head at the Amesbury Meeting of the Society, July 4th, 1899.] 

 N giving the title of my paper, for the programme of this 



meeting, I inadvertently used the word " Abbey," instead 

 " 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 1 which Tanner gives to a Patent of the 



1 Notiiia Monastica, edition of 1744, page 590. 



