Vita Communis or separate houses? Where did canons live in the 10th and 11th centuries?

There is a common assumption that canons of cathedral and collegiate churches living according to a rule (e.g. Institutio Canonicorum, Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang, or, in Upper Lotharingia, the Rule of Chrodegang itself) tended to live communally down to the late 11th and sometimes down to the middle of the 12th cent., with shared dormitories and refectories. However, the rules mentioned above allowed exceptions to this, giving permission to individual canons to own their own houses, preferably in the church precinct. Charter evidence, though its survival in this period is patchy, suggests that the use of individual houses may have been widespread from early on in France, while Domesday Book provides evidence for individual houses for numerous canons in England in the later 11th cent. The aim of this paper, which ranges geographically across northern France, England and Germany, is to comment on the living conditions for canons in cathedrals and collegiate churches, and to outline the consequences of the choices they made.