Conclusion: From Cessation to Dissolution

Summary

With the passing of Richard Redman in 1505 came the end of an era for the English white canons. For over forty years, Redman visited and governed the Premonstratensian abbeys. As a group of medieval religious, the white canons exhibited many of the frailties common to humanity, some more than others, but they were not, as a body, wholly depraved or completely devoid of spiritual motivation: back-sliding and mediocrity, of varying degrees, were more prevalent tendencies. The English Premonstratensians were not in a state of terminal decline. ‘Ora, labora, vita communis’ are evident in the pages of Redman's visitation register, in greater measure in some abbeys (about a third of them) and much less so in several others. Generally speaking, the ideal for which each canon was supposedly striving, namely the praise of God on earth and the ‘premium gloriae’ in Heaven, was no easy task, even for those who may have possessed deeper spiritual resources and greater will-power to perform the daily monastic observances, than others. There were undoubtedly canons who perhaps had no genuine vocation to religious life, as evidenced by their misdemeanours. Yet their behaviour may not only be indicative of disdain for the religious state (acidia), or even boredom, but also deep unhappiness and personal tragedy in individual cases, which should evoke sympathy.

The society in which the late medieval English Premonstratensians lived contrasts markedly, in many respects, with that of their twelfth- and thirteenth-century predecessors. Though the white canons were bound to observe the 1290 statutes with supplementary legislation in the later Middle Ages, mitigations and, perhaps, necessary adaptations to the age were prevalent, though not all-pervading. Redman sought to disallow these if he thought they militated against the ethos and statutes of the order, as we have seen in his prohibition of secular clothing.