Amesbury, United Kingdom

It is possible that an order of monks established a monastery in the area, that was destroyed by the Saxons before they settled the area in the 7th century.

King Alfred the Great left Amesbury in his will, a copy of which is in the British Library, to his youngest son Aethelweard (c. 880–922). In 1086, Domesday Book recorded a settlement named Amblesberie or Ambresberie with 111 households and eight mills. The largest estate was held by Wilton Abbey, and other land was held by Edward of Salisbury.

In 979 AD, a Benedictine abbey, the Abbey of St Mary and St Melor, was founded on what may have been the site of a previous monastery, by Dowager Queen Ælfthryth. In 1177 the abbey was dissolved by Henry II and replaced with Amesbury Priory, with nuns and monks of the Fontevraud order. Henry III visited the priory several times, and his widow Eleanor of Provence retired there in 1286, leading to visits by her son, Edward I; his daughter Mary of Woodstock and niece Eleanor of Brittany had already entered the convent when young. The priory continued until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, after which its buildings – including the church with its lead-covered spire – were demolished.

Amesbury is also associated with the Arthurian legend: the convent to which Guinevere retired was said to have been the one at Amesbury. This legend has its origins in the world of Middle English Arthurian romance: the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1350–1400) is the earliest text to claim that Guinevere retired to Amesbury, rather than to Caerleon, as had previously been claimed by the historian Geoffrey of Monmouth. The claim was repeated in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In 1542, the antiquarian John Leland took things further, stating that Guinevere had actually been buried at Amesbury before being disinterred and translated to Glastonbury Abbey to lie beside her husband, King Arthur. The tradition of Guinevere's Amesbury burial came to a head in the early 1600s, when an ancient noblewoman's grave was discovered during renovation work at the old Abbey site, then in the hands of the Earls of Hertford. Inigo Jones, the lead architect, was convinced that the grave was Guinevere's, and in the decades after the discovery visitors flocked to Amesbury to see the grave for themselves, where a plaque had apparently been erected to mark the location.

On John Speed's map of Wiltshire (1611), the town's name is spelt both Amesbury (for the hundred) and Ambersbury (for the town itself).

After the dissolution, Amesbury became a secular estate and was given to Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford by the Crown; the Seymour family held the estate until 1675. A new mansion which took the name Amesbury Abbey was completed in 1661, designed for William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset (d. 1660) by John Webb in neo-classical style.

The estate subsequently passed to the Bruce family, and then to Lord Carleton, who bequeathed it to his nephew Charles Douglas, 3rd Duke of Queensberry. The grounds feature a Chinese summerhouse commissioned by the Duke from Sir William Chambers. The estate remained in the Queensberry family until 1824. It is believed that at some point in the early 19th century, William Douglas, 4th Duke of Queensberry planted the Nile Clumps to commemorate Admiral Nelson, and had the hillfort landscaped as part of the grounds around the mansion.

In 1824, Sir Edmund Antrobus acquired the estate and, finding the mansion in poor repair, had it rebuilt in 1834–1840 to designs of Thomas Hopper. In 1915, Lord Antrobus sold the grounds – including Stonehenge – to private bidders, although the mansion remained in Antrobus family hands until 1979. The house is now operated as a nursing home.

In 1677, John Rose, gentleman, founded two schools at Amesbury, a grammar school for teaching grammar, writing, and ciphering to twenty children born in the parish, and an "English school" to prepare twenty children of poor parents for the grammar school. By a decree in Chancery of 1831, the freedom of the grammar school was extended to children of "mechanics, artisans, and small tradesmen". The grammar school was closed in 1899, and the children were transferred to a National School.