Canons Regular and England’s Only Homegrown Order
Not every medieval religious community fit neatly into the four great monastic orders — a whole separate category, the Canons Regular, blurred the line between cloistered monk and working parish priest, and England even produced its own entirely homegrown version of the concept.
Canons Regular were priests who lived communally, like monks, while also carrying out genuine pastoral duties in the outside world — following a considerably less prescriptive rulebook, based on short letters by the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo, than the detailed daily instructions of St Benedict’s Regula. The Augustinians, arriving in England around 1106, grew into the largest such group, eventually running over two hundred houses including fifteen nunneries — the present-day cathedrals of Bristol, Oxford, Portsmouth and Southwark all began life as Augustinian foundations. A related, French-founded offshoot, the Arrouaisian Canons, adopted white habits in deliberate imitation of the Cistercians they admired, while the Trinitarian Canons pursued a genuinely distinctive charitable mission: raising ransom money specifically to free Christians kidnapped by pirates.
England’s own unique contribution was the Gilbertine order, founded by St Gilbert at Sempringham in Lincolnshire specifically to house canons and nuns together in “double” monasteries — a model the French Cistercians themselves declined to formally admit into their own order when Gilbert originally offered to hand his houses over to them. After Gilbert’s death in 1189, only two further nunneries were founded under his order’s rule, and the remaining new foundations shifted to canons alone — a genuinely rare case of an entirely English-invented monastic model that never quite achieved the wider international reach of its continental counterparts.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.