St Norbert.

*He was brought up in the household of the Archbishop of Koln, a canon of Xanten, and went to Rome with the expedition of Emperor Henry V (BARNES).
*A native of Xanten on the Lower Rhine (CLAPHAM),  he was converted when thrown from his horse during a thunderstorm.

He lived in the Benedictine Abbey of Siegburg, emerging in 1115 fired with the desire to reform his fellow canons.  He was ordained deacon and priest on the same day.  He returned to Xanten where his new austerity and evangelism offended everyone.  At the Council of Fritzlar was accused of ‘usurping the office of preaching, abandoning the rich clothes which were the privilege of his rank  and of assuming the religious habit without having taken monastic vows.’  He therefore resigned his office, sold all his possessions and gave the proceeds to the poor.  He obtained the necessary papal protection from Gelasius II and his successor Calixtus II (Gelasius died in January 1119 while Norbert was on an evangelistic expedition in which 3 of his companions died as a result of the extreme rigour of their life).  He went to live at St Martin, Laon, where he failed again, then to live near a deserted chapel in the forest of Coucy.  He had a dream of a chapel with a procession of white-clad figures singing psalms and carrying lights and crosses (BARNES).  Bartholomew bishop of Laon offered him sites and he chose Premontre 9 miles west of Laon, the place ‘pointed out’ in his dream (C/WC).

He founded the Premonstratensian Order as a reformed branch of the Canons Regular of St Augustine, in the 1120s (CLARK), in spite of being pressurized to join the Cistercians (C/WC).
The first statues were written between 1131 and 1134, largely borrowed from the Cistercians and partly on the customs of Cluny.  Cistercians were basically Benedictines.  Yet most evidence shows that the canons were not peripatetic evangelists, but austerely ‘cut off in life, dress and habitation from the multitude’ (C/WC).

He made preaching journeys (BARNES).  

He was made bishop of Magdeburg (C/WC) in 1126 at the Diet of Spire (BARNES) and founded the Abbey of Our Lady there.  ‘At Magdeburg he found himself an archbishop in a land where the church was secularized and degraded to a degree unknown in France, and on  the borders of a heathendom which challenged all his evangelical instincts’ (C/WC).

His biography is given in Colvin's White Canons in England, 1951.