THE TWELFTH CENTURY was a time of reform and renewal: a renaissance, which some historians believe changed essential conceptions of a Christian life. For monasticism, it was a time of new reforms, new writings and a new challenging of old practices. In this desire for change, new religious orders, splintering away from main groupings, grew in number and variety. In this paper, I intend to consider a regional dimension of one of these new orders, the Augustinian canons regular, which flourished in the eastern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. This region is representative of Augustinian England in its mix of royal and local influences, its larger houses and tiny establishments, the houses’ sources of income and its setting within a European context. The region also has many unique features, containing over a quarter of all English houses under St Augustine's Rule, whilst houses of more ascetic orders, such as the Cistercians, were very thin on the ground; and being one of the most heavily populated areas of twelfth-century England with many settlements and towns, and numerous parish churches. I intend to show how the Augustinian canons of East Anglia led a full monastic life, combining the essentials of traditional Benedictine monasticism with new beliefs and ideas similar to those found in other new houses that flourished in the twelfth century. I wish further to suggest that the adoption of a contemplative apostolic life tended naturally to move the canons away from the original concept of pastoral care being central to their lives, and towards high monastic ideals.
To state that Augustinian canons led a full monastic life goes against a long history of opinion and tradition, for there is an underlying perception of canons somehow not being equal to those in monastic orders in their religious intentions. Erasmus provided a succinct view of Augustinian canons when writing of his pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1511, in that it was served by
a college of canons, but of those which the Church of Rome terms regular, a middle kind between the monks and those termed secular canons…. amphibious animals, such as the beaver.