The Premonstratensians, or Norbertines, are an order of canons regular founded in the twelfth-century wave of reform, and they occupy a particular place between the monk and the parish priest.
Canons, not monks
The order was founded by Norbert of Xanten at Premontre near Laon in 1120, and its members are canons regular rather than monks: they live in community under the Rule of Augustine and the vows, as monks do, but they are ordained and undertake the active pastoral care of parishes, preaching and administering the sacraments in the world around their abbeys. This combination of a disciplined common life with an outward pastoral mission is the defining character of the order, distinguishing it from the enclosed monastic bodies on one side and the wholly active clergy on the other.
Spread and survival
Norbert, later archbishop of Magdeburg, launched the order into the reforming energy of his age, and it spread rapidly across the German lands, the Low Countries and beyond, its white-habited canons serving abbeys that doubled as centres of pastoral care. The order suffered heavily in the dissolutions of the Reformation and the French Revolution, which swept away many of its houses, and it was rebuilt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It continues as a body of canons serving parishes and schools from their abbeys, keeping the founding pattern of contemplative community joined to active ministry.