Introduction

Summary

A predominant feature of the English landscape in the Middle Ages were the monasteries of the religious orders, which were located in practically every city and town, as well as the countryside, with its secluded valleys. The medieval proverb that ‘A fly and a friar will fall in every dish’ is a graphic illustration that to people of the Middle Ages, the regular clergy were as familiar as the earth they walked upon. Much has been written on the religious orders in England, and much will undoubtedly be written in the future. The largest communities among them, and the most influential, rightfully command the main focus of attention. Barbara Harvey's recent book on the Benedictines of Westminster and the voluminous work produced on the Carthusian charterhouses of England in the Analecta Cartusiana, testifies to this. One group of English religious who were just as much a constituent part of the regular clergy, were the Premonstratensian canons. Despite this, research on them has been more sporadic and somewhat neglected in the past. One historian poignantly remarked in the early 1950s, that as far as ecclesiastical historians were concerned, the ‘obscurity’ of Premonstratensian history ‘at many vital points has often led to tactful omission, or at best to embarrassed brevity’.

Interest in the order's history was apparent among the Premonstratensians hemselves when Charles Hugo, O.Praem., compiled his Sacri et Canonici Ordinis Praemonstratensis Annales in the first decades of the eighteenth century.