Amesbury is a town in southern Wiltshire on the River Avon, about eight miles north of Salisbury and about about 3.2 kilometres (2.0 mi) east of Stonehenge.
It is referred to by Wace in his Roman de Brut and by Lawman in his Brut where Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae writes of the Cloister of Ambrius and Mount Ambrius and is the location of an abbey with a nearby cemetery in which the bodies are buried of the Britons who were treacherously slain by Hengist and his Saxons.
Amesbury is also uniquely indicated in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (l. 3569) and by Sir Thomas Malory in his Le Morte d'Arthur (XXI.7) as the home of an abbey where Queen Guenevere lived after the disappearance of her husband King Arthur. Earlier stories which identify the abbey place it in Caerleon or near to London. Malory mentions that Guenevere, after she had become a nun, wore white clothes and black, which was the custom of the Fontevist nuns who lived in Amesbury Abbey during Malory's lifetime. See Carnan (p. 125).
References[]
- Carman, J. Neale (1973), A Study of the Pseudo-Map Cycle of Arthurian Romancce, Lawrence/Manhattan/Wichita, University Press of Kansas
Some Name Variations[]
FRENCH: Ambresbère; ENGLISH: Amberes-buri, Ambresburi(e), Ambures-buri, Ambresburi, Amberesbury, Avmysbery; MALORY: Almysbury(e), Almesburye, Amysbyry.