AUGUSTINIAN CANONS, a religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, called also Austin Canons, Canons Regular, and in England Black Canons, because their cassock and mantle were black, though they wore a white surplice ; elsewhere the colour of the habit varied considerably. The Lateran Synod of IoS9 had urgently exhorted the clergy of every cathedral and collegiate church to live together and adopt some form of regularized com mon life.
The clergy of some cathedrals (in England, Carlisle), and of a great number of collegiate churches all over western Europe, responded to the appeal; and the need of a rule of life suited to the new regime produced, towards the end of the II th century, the so-called Rule of St. Augustine (see AUGUSTINIANS). This Rule was widely adopted by the Canons Regular, who also began to bind themselves by the vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. In the 12th century this discipline became universal among them; and so arose the order of Augustinian Canons as a religious order in the strict sense of the word. They resembled the monks in so far as they lived in community and took religious vows; but their state of life remained essentially clerical, and as clerics their duty was to undertake the pastoral care and serve the parish churches in their patronage. They were bound to the choral celebration of the divine office, and in its general tenor their manner of life differed little from that of monks.
During the later middle ages the houses of these various congre gations of Canons Regular spread all over Europe and became extraordinarily numerous. They underwent the natural and inevi table vicissitudes of all orders, having their periods of depression and degeneracy, and again of revival and reform. In the 15th century grave relaxation had crept into many monasteries of Augustinian Canons in north Germany, and the efforts at reform were only partially successful. The Reformation, the religious wars and the Revolution have swept away nearly all the Canons Regular, but some of their houses in Austria still exist in their mediaeval splendour. In England there were as many as 200 houses of Augustinian Canons, and 6o of them were among the "greater monasteries" suppressed in 1538-4o.
See the Catholic Encyclopaedia, art. "Austin Canons"; Gasquet, English Monastic Life; Heimbucher, Orden and Congregationen (18g6), vol. i., with references there given.