The Premonstratensian Order
This text is adapted from the introduction to the DoE Bayham Abbey guide booklet (1974) by Stuart Rigold. The map is from The White Canons by Howard Colvin (1951)
The Premonstratensian order was founded by St Norbert of Xanten (d.1134) in 1121. Norbert chose a lonely, valley in Prémontré, near Laon in north-eastern France, as the site of the first abbey.
Premonstratensian canons regular were ordained priests who followed a rule of life ascribed to St Augustine of Hippo, less exacting than the rule of St Benedict and followed by monks in the narrower sense. They belonged to the most important of several Orders devoted to keeping the Augustinian rule in its purity — that named from Prémontré, near Laon, in north-eastern France. Canons regular enjoyed a certain freedom of movement, since their rule envisaged times when they were not strictly ‘on duty’, but the requirements of their buildings were essentially the same as those of Benedictines.
The Augustinian rule was the instrument whereby many loosely constituted religious bodies were reshaped in the organisation-minded eleventh and twelfth centuries. When the chapter of Xanten on the Rhine rejected the attempts of Norbert, a high-minded and highly connected member of their body, thus to reform them, Norbert resigned and attempted to form a congregation of wandering preachers. Here too he had no success; he was trying to do what the founders of the Friars were to accomplish a century later. Bartholomew Bishop of Laon then encouraged him to reform another body of canons, of St Martin’s in Laon; again he failed and took up a solitary life at Prémontré in a forest near-by where, by the end of 1121, a community of disciples had gathered round him.
Other communities arose, spontaneously or even in rebellion, against existing establishments, seeking a more vigorous religious life under Norbert’s influence. There would have been room for such communities in the Cistercian Order, the greatest manifestation of such ideals in this age; Fountains, the richest Cistercian abbey in England had originated in just such a ‘walk-out’. When St Martin’s of Laon thought better and submitted to Norbert it became imperative to decide whether they were making Augustinians of seculars or planting new Cistercians. The answer was something of both, as Norbert’s followers showed when they framed the statutes of the Premonstratensian Order after their master had left them in 1126 to find new scope for his zeal as Archbishop of Magdeburg on the wild frontier of Germany. They combined the experiences of their forceful and sometimes wasteful generation in a form that suited the needs of the second half of the twelfth century, strengthening the tolerant Augustinian rule with methodical Cistercian practices. Called White Canons from the colour of their habit, they stood to the ordinary, black, Augustinians as the Cistercians to the Benedictine Black Monks. Like the Cistercians, they preferred to settle in secluded spots, for which reason the buildings of both Orders have stood a better chance than most of preservation. The plans, particularly of their churches, are a smaller version of those favoured by the Cistercians.
The Premonstratensians formed a tightly organised order, but with an adult attitude to delegation of responsibility, rather than one of excessive subordination. Though quite small – seldom much exceeding the notional minimum of an abbot and twelve canons – nearly every convent was an independent abbey. The abbots were rated as equals in handling provincial affairs and close enough to their canons to retire with dignity among them if their duties became too burdensome. Each house acknowledged the mother-house which had colonised or, occasionally, adopted it; but Prémontré, the mother of all, at first exercised a real and direct authority, with the abbots regularly attending general chapters. Like all international organisations theirs was ultimately starved by the greed of national exactions, beginning, as far as England was concerned, with those of Edward I’s war-chest. Prémontré continued to demand, but seldom to receive, the dues required to sustain it. Yet something of their original quiet professionalism, learned perhaps from the military orders, remained. They were always exempt from visitation by the local bishop and the three ‘circaries’ into which Britain was divided laid a pattern of regular supervision by delegated abbots. The distribution of the Order had a north-central European bias, strong in northern and eastern France, the Netherlands, Germany and the parts of England looking to the North Sea. The southern circary stretched front Norfolk to Titchfield, near Portsmouth, with one outlier, Torre, in Devon. The first settlement in England was at Newhouse in Lincolnshire and most of the others derived from it and were founded in the second half of the twelfth century after the impetus of the Cistercians was almost spent, indeed after they had nominally forbidden new foundations in 1152. Undeveloped land was getting scarce and, though the Premonstratensians required less of it, many of their houses were under-endowed. The final tally included thirty monasteries in England, one in Wales and a few on the Scottish borders; this was after several failures and unions of inadequately provided foundations.
