Canons Rather Than Monks, and What That Difference Did

Norbert of Xanten deliberately built his new community at Premontre in 1120 around a different legal category than the monastic orders already flourishing around it: his canons were ordained priests bound to communal life under Augustine's rule, but their vocation was defined by pastoral and sacramental ministry to the surrounding population, not by the monk's withdrawal from parish work. That distinction let Premonstratensian houses take on pastoral responsibilities, staffing parishes and hearing confessions, in ways a purely monastic house of the period generally did not, and it let the order expand rapidly across France, the Low Countries, Germany and beyond within a few generations of its founding, eventually counting several hundred houses at its medieval height, including a substantial number of communities for women following the same rule under Norbertine direction in the order's early history.

The order's later centuries brought the familiar cycle of decline and reform common to most medieval religious families, with numbers falling sharply after the disruptions of the Reformation and the French Revolution before a series of nineteenth and twentieth century revivals restored Premonstratensian houses in several countries, continuing a canonical, pastoral model of religious life distinct from the stricter monastic withdrawal practiced by their Cistercian contemporaries founded only decades earlier.