Canon

A canon is formally a member of a cathedral's or a collegiate church's chapter, the body of senior clergy responsible for its governance and worship alongside the dean, a role, residentiary canon in its fullest form, requiring the canon's actual presence and regular service at the cathedral; many cathedrals also appoint honorary canons, parish clergy elsewhere in the diocese recognized for distinguished service who hold the title and a nominal, non-residential connection to the cathedral chapter without the residentiary canon's day-to-day duties there.

The term derives from the Latin canon, a rule, reflecting the office's origin in clergy living under a common rule of life attached to a cathedral in the early medieval period, a communal arrangement that gradually loosened over the centuries into the more independent, individually beneficed canonries typical of English cathedrals by the later Middle Ages and still recognizable in the office's structure today, where a canon typically holds responsibility for a specific area of cathedral life, such as its music, its outreach ministry or a particular theological or pastoral portfolio, alongside shared participation in the chapter's collective governance.

Two quite different kinds of canon appear across church history, and the modern cathedral canon descends from only one of them. Canons regular are members of a religious order who live under a rule, most notably the Augustinian canons, combining communal religious life with active priestly ministry in a way that sits between monastic enclosure and ordinary diocesan clergy; they are still found today in orders such as the Premonstratensians. Secular canons, by contrast, are simply diocesan priests who hold a canonry, a place in a cathedral's or collegiate church's chapter, without belonging to any religious order or living under communal vows, and it is this secular sense the word carries in modern Anglican and Catholic usage when describing a cathedral's residentiary or honorary canons.

A cathedral chapter historically held real corporate authority over the cathedral's property, worship, and, during a vacancy, the diocese's temporary governance, electing the chapter's dean and, in some historical arrangements, even having a formal voice in choosing the new bishop. Most of that corporate governing power has since passed to diocesan bodies, leaving the chapter's remaining role centered on the cathedral's own worship, fabric, and administration.