Church of St Mary and St Melor, Amesbury

The Church of St Mary and St Melor is the parish church of Amesbury in Wiltshire, a Grade I listed building of the twelfth century standing close to the River Avon on the western edge of the modern town — and the subject of one of English church history's more enduring puzzles, for its relationship with the tenth-century Amesbury Priory and its twelfth-century successor, Amesbury Abbey, has been argued over by antiquaries for a century and a half.

The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded no church or priest at Amesbury, yet the nave of the present building dates from the second quarter of the twelfth century, retaining its original height and width though it may have been shortened at some point. The church is built of flint rubble and limestone ashlar, with a nave with clerestory and south aisle, central tower, north transept with east chapel, south transept and chancel; the south transept once had an east chapel of its own, later removed. The crossing, transepts and chancel all belong to a mid-thirteenth-century rebuilding — and sit, curiously, about five degrees out of alignment with the nave. Two windows were inserted in the chancel in the early fourteenth century; the late fifteenth century brought the south aisle, larger east and west windows, and a complete re-roofing; and in 1721 the south front of the south transept was given new round-headed windows.

The Victorian restoration of 1852–53 was the work of William Butterfield, who reworked the west end, replaced the east window, and swept away most fittings and monuments newer than about 1400. He made the chancel roof more steeply pitched — though in 2020 it was discovered that the fifteenth-century roof still survives in place beneath the nineteenth-century work — and replaced the internal tower stairs with an external stair-turret in the north-east angle of the crossing, a feature described as unsightly in 1900 and condemned by Pevsner as "one of his most violent designs". One source states that Butterfield also rebuilt the tower. Early in the twentieth century the diocesan architect C. E. Ponting and Detmar Blow carried out structural repairs, including the rebuilding of the crossing piers and the aisle; the church was listed Grade I in 1958.

The monastery question hangs over everything. Some 300 metres north of the church is the presumed site of the priory and abbey, and the only archaeological evidence of the monasteries came from construction work in 1859–60, when extensive medieval foundations — including a richly tiled floor — were found immediately north of the mansion built on the abbey's land (itself now also called Amesbury Abbey). Canon Jackson, writing in 1867, considered the present building to be the priory church, reading the traces of structures formerly attached to its north side as the remains of a cloister. C. H. Talbot disagreed in his 1900 paper for the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, marshalling records of the priory church's destruction after the Dissolution and the thin evidence for any parish church continuing afterwards: he concluded the priory church was a separate building, while speculating that the male members of the order may have shared the parish church with the townsfolk. The Victoria County History (1956) supported the existence of two churches, describing the convent's church with its lead-covered spire — yet the Historic England listing of 1958 states without reservation that this is the "Abbey church of the Order of Fontevrault". Pevsner, in 1975, sat on the fence: the church is distant from the mansion site, he observed, but too large to be merely the parish church. In 1979 John Chandler reviewed the evidence and backed the two-church theory, postulating that the prioress and nuns who arrived in 1177 at first occupied existing buildings north of the church, moving by 1186 to a new church and convent on the site of the future mansion; soon after, the prior and his brethren took over the older site, sharing the church with the town — the male community dwindling away during the fifteenth century. The demolished former vicarage to the north-east is thought to have been part of the monastic buildings, and the absence of graves north of the church may be telling. The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England weighed in last, in 1987, after consulting papers in the Longleat archive concerning Edward Seymour's acquisition of the abbey's land and his agents' reports on demolishing its buildings. They too concluded there were two churches: the present building was either always simply the parish church, its generous size explained by Amesbury's importance as a royal manor, or its crossing and chancel were rebuilt in the thirteenth century to house the male brethren — and since the recorded dimensions of the priory church almost exactly match the present building, they suggested the thirteenth-century design was copied from the nuns' church.

The church's unusual dedication preserves another strand of early medieval devotion. A cult of St Melor — Méloir or Mélar in French — developed in Brittany and Cornwall in the tenth century around a boy who, according to legend, was maimed in childhood and murdered in his youth. Some of his relics were brought to Amesbury, either before or after the founding of the nunnery, and the town's church has carried his name beside St Mary's ever since. Parts of a Saxon wheel-cross, found under the chancel floor in 1907, hint at the depth of Christian worship on the site.

Inside, the north-west window of the chancel holds glass of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The twelfth-century Purbeck marble font stands on a fifteenth-century limestone base, with a second medieval font at the west end, and the south transept preserves a fifteenth-century clock mechanism that remained in use until the early twentieth century. The fifteenth-century oak chancel screen, removed by Butterfield, was reinstated in 1907; most of Butterfield's own furnishings survive, including his pulpit, though his marble and polychrome tile decoration of the east wall has been hidden behind a curtain since at least 1979. Three galleries were removed during the nineteenth-century restoration. Wall memorials range from 1683 to the twentieth century, among them several in marble and gilt to the Antrobus family, and a brass in the nave commemorates Sir Edmund Antrobus, 2nd Baronet (1792–1870). The organ, with its elaborate case, came in 1983 from the redundant St Edmund's Church in Salisbury, replacing an 1888 instrument that had fallen into disrepair. The tower holds eight bells: the oldest two were cast by John Wallis in 1619, two more were added by John Taylor & Co in 1946, and the ring was retuned and rehung in 1999.

In the churchyard — closed to new graves in 1860 when a town cemetery opened to the south-west — stand several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chest tombs and the town's war memorial, a tall Latin cross on a four-stepped pedestal designed by C. E. Ponting. Erected in 1920 at a central road junction and rededicated in 1948, it was moved into the churchyard in the 1960s to make way for road improvements. The ecclesiastical parish of Amesbury has kept its separate identity, and since 1630 the right to appoint the incumbent — at first a curate, from 1868 a vicar — has belonged to St George's Chapel, Windsor. Today the church describes itself as a Church of England church in the liberal-Catholic tradition; the Reverend Darren A'Court, vicar since 2015, is styled Father Darren. Whether abbey church or royal manor's parish church — or thirteen centuries of both entangled — St Mary and St Melor remains one of the most rewarding medieval buildings in south Wiltshire, a short walk from Stonehenge and a standing argument in flint and stone.