Amesbury Priory was a Benedictine monastery at Amesbury in Wiltshire, England, belonging to the Order of Fontevraud. It was founded in 1177 to replace the earlier Amesbury Abbey, a Saxon foundation established about the year 979. The Anglo-Norman Amesbury Priory was disbanded at the Dissolution of the monasteries and ceased to exist as a monastic house in 1539.Cf. David M. Smith (ed.), The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, III. 1377–1540, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 622.
While the earlier Amesbury Abbey had been exclusively a nunnery or house of women, its successor, Amesbury Priory, following the particular structures of its parent Order of Fontevraud, was both a convent of nuns and a corresponding monastery of men. Both were governed locally by a prioress and ultimately by the Abbess of Fontevraud, in Anjou, part of the territories in what is now France that were then ruled by the English royal house.
Nothing remains of the priory above ground, its site having been used for a mansion which re-uses the name Amesbury Abbey.
Foundation In 1177 Henry II resolved upon suppressing Queen Ælfthryth (Elfrida)'s Saxon foundation known as Amesbury Abbey,Elizabeth Norton, Elfrida, The First Crowned Queen of England, Amberley, Stroud 2014, p. 47. a Benedictine nunnery then almost two centuries old. He founded in its place a house of the Order of Fontevraud,Berenice M. Kerr, Religious life for women, c. 1100 – c. 1350: Fontevraud in England, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999. a Benedictine reform. Henry's plan was confirmed by a bull of Pope Alexander III dated 15 September 1176, which ordered that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of London, Exeter and Worcester formally notify in person the nuns of the intended change and offer them the possibility of remaining in the new institution. In the event, none did.Adrian Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, Bishop and Canonist: A Study in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1937.
The initiative to re-found at Amesbury was presented officially as part of a general movement to reform monasteries in England, and an inspection was carried out at the existing Abbey which claimed to have uncovered a situation of laxity and immoral conduct. The abbess was reported to have had three children.Eileen E. Power, Medieval English Nunneries c 1275 to 1535, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1922, p. 455. Though it was said that some of the existing nuns were willing to mend their ways and so received the offer to remain, in fact the entire community of some 30 nuns vacated the house, including the last incumbent Abbess, Beatrice, who was dismissed with a pension.The pension was still being paid in 1182, cf. Amanda M. Martinson, The Monastic Patronage of King Henry II in England, 1154–1189, PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2008 [accessed 12 October 2017: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/470], p. 29.
Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), no admirer of Henry II, narrates that in 1174 the King had vowed to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem but three years later he successfully asked the Pope to be released from it, on condition that he instead found three monasteries. The takeover of Amesbury Abbey was, Gerald alleges, an inexpensive way of founding at least one. However, contrary to this accusation, the records show that in fact Henry spend heavily on his foundation,Cf. Amanda M. Martinson, The Monastic Patronage of King Henry II in England, 1154–1189, PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2008 [accessed 12 October 2017: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/470], pp. 25, 28, 252. even though the endowments of the existing monastery were carried over. The manor of Winterbourne was owned by the monastery according to the Domesday Book of 1086, and was still among its possessions at the Dissolution.Jenni Butterworth, Monastic Sites and Monastic Estates in Somerset and Wiltshire in the Middle Ages: A Regional Approach, PhD thesis, Bristol, 1999, vol II, p. 352.
Once the abbey had been liquidated, Henry II then had a new founding group come from Fontevraud, amounting to 21 or 24 nuns, led by a former subprioress. In addition some nuns were also brought from Westwood Priory in Worcestershire, likewise a Fontevraud house.For the interest of Henry in other Fontevraud houses, cf. Sharon Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1989, pp. 146–148. The ceremony on 22 May 1177 to install the new community could scarcely have been grander, being led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, assisted by several other bishops, and in the presence of the King.
Henry subsequently spent some £880 on the monastery building over several years.Austin Lane Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087–1216, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1951, p. 229. When the works were completed, another solemn ceremony was held on 30 November 1186 in the presence of the Abbess of Fontevraud and once again of the King.Robert William Eyton, Court, Household, and Itinerary of King Henry II, Taylor, London, 1888, p. 274.
Order of Fontevraud
This act of favour of Henry II towards the Order of Fontevraud was not an isolated one in the course of his long reign (1133–1189). Before revamping the foundation at Amesbury, Henry had already established, roughly between 1133 and 1164, three other Fontevraud houses in England:Cf. David Knowles & R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, England and Wales, Longman Greens, London 1953, p. 94. Westwood Priory (Worcestershire),Marjorie Chibnall, L'Ordre de Fontevraud en Angleterre au XIIe siècle, in Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 29 (1986) 43. http://www.persee.fr/doc/ccmed_0007-9731_1986_num_29_113_2313[accessed 30 September 2017]; Houses of Benedictine nuns: Priory of Westwood, in J.W. Willis-Bund & William Page (edd.), A History of the County of Worcester, vol. 2, London, 1971, pp. 148–151. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/worcs/vol2/pp148-151 [accessed 29 September 2017]. Eaton or Nuneaton Priory (Warwickshire)Marjorie Chibnall, L'Ordre de Fontevraud en Angleterre au XIIe siècle, in Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 29 (1986) 43. http://www.persee.fr/doc/ccmed_0007-9731_1986_num_29_113_2313 [accessed 30 September 2017]; Houses of Benedictine nuns: Priory of Nuneaton, in William Page (ed.), A History of the County of Warwick. vol. 2, London, 1908, pp. 66–70. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol2/pp66-70 [accessed 29 September 2017]. and Grovebury Priory (Bedfordshire),Marjorie Chibnall, L'Ordre de Fontevraud en Angleterre au XIIe siècle, in Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 29 (1986) 43, 46. http://www.persee.fr/doc/ccmed_0007-9731_1986_num_29_113_2313 [accessed 30 September 2017] Henry's actions at Amesbury, therefore, brought the total of Fontevraud houses in England to four, after which no others were ever established.
It is known that the Plantagenets were great benefactors of the mother abbey at Fontevraud in its early years and Henry II's widow, Eleanor of Aquitaine, took up residence there. More generally, that monastery, founded in 1101,Cf. Jean Dalarun, Robert d’Arbrissel, fondateur de Fontevraud, Albin Michel, Paris 1986; Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985, p. 104; Janet Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 97; Gabrielle Esperdy, The Royal Abbey of Fontevrault: Religious Women and the Shaping of Gendered Space, in Journal of International Women's Studies 6: 2 (2006) 59–80. http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol6/iss2/5 [accessed 29 September 2017]; Fiona J. Griffiths, The Cross and the Cura monialium: Robert of Arbrissel, John the Evangelist, and the Pastoral Care of Women in the Age of Reform, in Speculum 83 (2008) 303–330. became the chosen mausoleum of the Angevin dynasty and the centre of a new monastic Order, the Order of Fontevraud.
The Fontevraud monastic reform had two notable distinguishing features. Firstly, it followed in part the model established by the highly influential and prestigious Cluny Abbey, which by the 12th century numbered more than a thousand monasteries.Mortimer Chambers, The Western Experience, Knopf, pp. 269–283) in adopting a centralized form of government. While most Benedictine monasteries remained autonomous and associated with each other only loosely, Cluny created a federated order in which the superiors of subsidiary houses were deputies of the Abbot of Cluny, the Order's head. These subsidiary houses were hence usually styled priories, not abbeys, governed therefore not by abbots but by priors, or more technically obedientiary priors.Michael Ott, Priory, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911; George Cyprian Alston, Congregation of Cluny, in The Catholic Encyclopedia. vol. 4, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. [Accessed 29 September 2017] The head of the Order of Fontevraud was the Abbess of Fontevraud. At the death in about 1117 of the founder, Robert of Arbrissel, she already had under her rule 35 priories, and by the end of that century about 100, in France, Spain and England.Jean Favier, Les Plantagenêts: Origine et destin d'un empire, Fayard, Poitiers, 2004, p. 152.
The second characteristic feature of Fontevraud was that its houses were double monasteries, with separately housed convents of both men and women, under a common superior, a prioress. The men had their own male superior, but he was subject to the prioress. Local circumstances seem, however, to have modified this formula in some locations. For example, Grovebury Priory, a Fontevraud monastery in Bedfordshire, was a small house of men that never had any nuns. In many locations there was in effect a house of women to which was attached a small house of chaplains that had little to distinguish it from many others that had no links with Fontevraud, such as the Augustinian canonesses house Campsey Priory in Suffolk. At Amesbury Priory the ordained men are referred to in the historical records as "canons" or "chaplains" not "monks". They should in theory have been monks. This calls to mind the usages of an English reform movement, the Gilbertine Order, which also had double monasteries. In each of the latter, the key component was a nunnery run on almost Cistercian lines, and hence ultimately following the Rule of St Benedict, while the annexed male house were canons regular, living according to a variant of the Rule of St Augustine.Houses of the Gilbertine order: The priory of Sempringham, in William Page (ed.), A History of the County of Lincoln, vol. 2, London, 1906, pp. 179–187. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/lincs/vol2/pp179-187 [accessed 2 October 2017]. It would appear that at Fontevraud there was a degree of evolution of Rule and structures, even in the choice of Rule of the men,Nicole Bouter (ed.) Les Religieuses dans le cloître et dans le monde des origines à nos jours, Centre européen de recherches sur les congrégations et ordres religieux, Université Jean Monet, Saint-Étienne, 1994, pp. 336ff.; Jean-Marc Bienvenu, Les premiers temps de Fontevraud (1101–1189). Naissance et évolution d'un Ordre, thèse, Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne), 1981. which later became that of St Benedict.