Halesowen Abbey began as a gift from King John. In 1214 the king granted the manor of Hales to Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, with permission to found a religious house of any order he chose. Peter chose the Premonstratensians, known as the White Canons for their unbleached woollen habits. The order had been founded in the early 12th century at Premontre in northern France by Saint Norbert, a German nobleman who wanted to combine the contemplative life of monks with the active pastoral work of priests. The official foundation year for Halesowen is 1218, although canons were probably resident at the site by 1215. Peter received a royal grant of seventeen pounds three shillings and four pence to help with the building work, and Henry III confirmed the abbey's possessions in a 1227 charter.

Halesowen quickly became a parent itself. Peter des Roches founded Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire in 1231, colonised with canons from Halesowen and sharing the same Marian dedication. In 1414 the abbot of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire formally handed over the paternity of distant Talley Abbey in Carmarthenshire to Halesowen, because Talley's previous mother house, St John the Baptist's in Amiens, was simply too far to reach for visitations. Wales was difficult enough. In 1410 Antipope John XXIII issued an indult forbidding visitors from making the canons of Talley travel more than a day's journey for chapter meetings; previously they had been riding about eighty miles. In 1464 King Edward IV granted the impoverished Augustinian Dodford Priory to Halesowen by letters patent. By the late 15th century Halesowen was head of a small Midlands network of houses with one foot in South Wales.

Almost from the beginning, the abbey and its tenants fought over land, mill rights, and water. In 1278 the tenants petitioned the king on the claim that Halesowen had once been royal demesne, which would have given them special legal protections. Edward I, scenting a chance to recover royal land, issued a quo warranto writ forcing the abbot to prove his title. The abbot produced King John's charter and won, but the dispute spread. Tenants poached trout from the abbot's pools and dammed the streams to feed their families. Nine men were charged together in 1280 with grinding their corn outside the manor, suggesting an organised boycott of the abbey mill. Roger Ketel and his friend William Ulf made their law by compurgation, a procedure in which a defendant cleared himself by oath alongside supportive neighbours. In 1387, decades after the Peasants' Revolt, a royal commission of oyer and terminer was sent to investigate bondmen at Romsley who had refused their services and confederated by oath to resist the abbot. The friction never fully went away.

The Premonstratensian order policed itself through regular visitations. Bishop Richard Redman, abbot of Shap Abbey in Cumbria, conducted these inspections across England and Wales for nearly a quarter of a century. His reports on Halesowen are unusually detailed. In 1478 the canons complained that the abbey bread was made from inferior grains rather than wheat; Redman ordered improvements and the abbey was soon baking with about a hundred and eighty litres of wheat each week. He repeatedly reminded the canons not to eat in secular houses within three miles of the abbey and not to harbour women on the premises. In 1497 he reported that he had discovered enormities. Brother Richard Walsall was accused of advising the killing of an unborn child and of leading an insurrection of younger canons against the abbot. He was imprisoned for ten years at Croxton Abbey in Leicestershire. Four other canons were sentenced to severe penance and transferred to distant houses. The victims of these abuses, women who lived as tenants and servants on the abbey estate, are not named in Redman's report, but they were the people the abbey had pastoral and feudal authority over, and the scandal made plain how that authority had been misused.

Halesowen was a moderately prosperous house and survived the first wave of monastic suppressions in 1536. Two years later, on 9 June 1538, it surrendered to Henry VIII's commissioners and was dissolved. The estates were granted to Sir John Dudley, later Duke of Northumberland, and the buildings were quarried for stone and slowly fell into ruin. Today fragments of the abbey church and the south transept still stand on a private farm at Manor Abbey Road, looked after by English Heritage. The ruins are open to the public on selected days each year. The medieval manorial court records that survive in such detail, painting a portrait of a chafing tenant community, sit in the archives of the Birmingham Reference Library and the National Archives, and have made Halesowen one of the most-studied English abbeys for the social history of its tenants.