Augustinian canons, also known as Austin canons, or canons regular of St Augustine, are an order of priests living the full common life, as distinct from secular canons supported by prebends. The ideal of the canons regular was to imitate the ‘apostolic life’ of the first Christians. The most celebrated early attempt to follow this ideal was the community life established by Augustine of Hippo and his clergy.
It was not until the mid-11th century that the order emerged as an organized body, its rapid expansion being intimately connected with the Gregorian reform. Officially recognized by the Lateran Synods of 1059 and 1063, the revitalized order spread quickly over the whole of western Europe. In England it increased rapidly under the patronage of Henry I (1100–35). A century later it was the most numerous order in England, counting some 228 houses. Most were small priories, but the order also possessed some famous abbeys, including Waltham and Osney.
The tautological title ‘Canonici regulares’ was in common use by the early 12th century, by which time most houses of the order had adopted the Rule of St Augustine. This rule’s complex historical and textual problems are being gradually elucidated. Existing in two versions, one for men and one for women, it is built up of several elements, notably St Augustine’s Letter 211 to his sister. The rule’s characteristic qualities are its fundamental sanity, flexibility and insistence on brotherly love, making it suitable for widely differing forms of apostolic or contemplative life. Besides their normal pastoral duties, the canons have undertaken the care of travellers (Great St Bernard) and of the sick (St Bartholomew’s and St Thomas’s hospitals in London) and the promotion of learning (Abbey of St Victor, Paris). The celebrated Hugh of St Victor contributed his Didascalion to the study of music in his day.
A fully developed liturgical life characterizes the order. St Chrodegang (d 766) strove to introduce the Roman chant and liturgy. Some independent congregations (Victorines, Premonstratensians) had their own Use. Augustinian canons have also contributed to the development of the liturgy, one of the most celebrated sequence writers being the poet Adam of St Victor. After a lapse of centuries, the Consilium ad Exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia recommended the adoption into the new Roman Breviary of five poems ascribed to him, among them the famous Salve mater Salvatoris.
Some houses appear to have had a strong tradition of polyphonic music. St Andrew’s Priory in Scotland possessed the rich collection of 13th-century music now in D-W 677. It includes a large proportion of the Notre Dame repertory but none of the motets. The Abbey of St Victor owned the equally famous collection F-Pn lat.15139 and the anonymous French Tractatus de discantu. It is known from archival documents that the choir of Notre Dame in later centuries paid regular annual visits to the abbey and that polyphony was sung.
Although Wolsey’s Statutes of 1519 forbade the use of polyphony and excluded secular singers from conventual choirs, polyphony was undoubtedly practised in English houses of the order. Wolsey himself made provision for polyphony and organ playing by seculars during the Lady Mass and the Mass of the Name of Jesus. Thomas Tallis probably took charge of the 12 ‘singing-men’ and five choristers employed by Waltham Abbey. Finally, at least three Augustinian canons were themselves composers of polyphony: T. Preston and W. Charite of St Mary de Pratis, Leicester, and Robert Carver of Scone Abbey in Scotland.
HarrisonMMB
C. Dereine: ‘Vie commune, Règle de St Augustin et chanoines réguliers au XIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, xli (1946), 365–406
J.C. Dickinson: The Origins of the Austin Canons and their Introduction into England (London, 1950)
P. Brown: Augustine of Hippo: a Biography (London, 1967/R)
L. Verheijen: La Règle de Saint-Augustin (Paris, 1967)
Hymni instaurandi Breviarii romani (Rome, 1968)
L. Verheijen: ‘Eléments d’un commentaire de la Règle de Saint Augustin’, Augustiniana, xxi (1971), 5–23, 357–404
L. Verheijen: Nouvelle approche de la Regule de Saint Augustin, i (Begrolles-en-Mauges, 1980); ii (Leuven, 1988)
J. Harper: The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1991)
MARY BERRY