In the fifth century St. Augustine of Hippo had sought to establish a ‘monastery of clerks in the bishop’s household.’ In the days of the Carolingian reformation, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz had, in the spirit of the great African father, set up a rule of life, by which canons of a cathedral should live in common along with their bishops. In Hildebrand’s days Peter Damiani appealed to the example of St. Augustine as the ideal pattern for the cathedral clergy. Many chapters were reformed, and from the twelfth century onwards a sharp distinction was drawn between ‘regular canons,’ subject to a rule of life, and ‘secular canons’ of the old-fashioned sort. The great property and the political influence of the cathedral chapters made it hard to keep out of them members of the great territorial families, who looked on their prebends as sources of income, and who soon found a regular life too austere, so that few cathedrals became permanently served by them. But new churches of Regular Canons, where there were no secular traditions to interfere with the strictness of their rule, began to rise up all over Christendom. The general name of ‘Austin Canons’ suggested that the whole of the class strove to realise the old ideal of St. Augustine. Various congregations of Regular Canons were now set up, conspicuous among which was that of the Victorines, whose abbey of St. Victor in Paris became, as we shall see, a prominent centre of conservative theology. But it was the establishment of the Premonstratensian congregation by Norbert of Xanten which gave the Austin Canons so great a position in Christendom that they almost rivalled the Cistercians in popularity. [Sidenote: Norbert and the Premonstratensians.] Norbert was a man of high family, who, after having held canonries of the old-fashioned sort at his native town and at Cologne, gave up the world and wandered as a preacher of penitence throughout Gaul, carefully avoiding intercourse with clerks or monks. In 1120 he settled in a desert place in the forest of Coucy, not far from Laon, where the bishop was his friend, and established there a house of Canons Regular, calling the spot Prémontré [Pratum Monstratum], in the belief that the site had been pointed out to him by an angel. The rule of Prémontré soon became famous, and its canons, clad in the white garment of the Cistercians, showed, by their energy and zeal, that clerks bound by a rule could live lives as holy as monks and do as much pastoral work as seculars. As an ‘order of clerks’ they exercised cure of souls, preached, taught, and heard confessions, and where possible made their churches parochial. In 1126 Norbert became Archbishop of Magdeburg. Finding the secular chapter utterly opposed to his policy, he planted a new colony of Premonstratensians hard by in the collegiate church of St. Mary (1129). Through his influence the Premonstratensians took the leading share in the civilising and Christianising of the Slavonic lands beyond the Elbe.