Hugh was born around 1093 to a noble Lotharingian family at Fosses (modern Fosses-la-Ville in Walloon Belgium, near Liège). Educated at the cathedral school of Liège, he became a chaplain to Bishop Burchard of Cambrai.
Around 1119, on the pilgrimage circuit, Hugh first met St. Norbert of Xanten (1080–1134, the charismatic preacher who would found the Premonstratensian Order in 1120). Captivated by Norbert's charismatic preaching and reforming-zeal, Hugh abandoned his Liège-chaplaincy and joined Norbert's itinerant preaching mission across the late-1110s Lotharingia.
When Norbert founded the Premonstratensian Order at the valley of Prémontré in Picardy on Christmas Day 1120 — establishing the Order of Canons Regular of Prémontré under the Augustinian Rule with the specifically Norbertine-reform discipline of strict monastic enclosure, poverty, and the distinctive white-habit — Hugh became the first disciple-companion at the mother-abbey.
In 1126, when Norbert was appointed Archbishop of Magdeburg (the principal missionary archdiocese of eastern Germany, directed at the evangelization of the Wendish-Slavic frontier), Hugh of Fosses was appointed by Norbert as his successor in the governance of the Premonstratensian Order — taking up the mother-abbacy of Prémontré.
Hugh's thirty-eight-year abbacy at Prémontré (1126–1164) — the institutional-organizational successor period that transformed Norbert's charismatic founding into the durable medieval religious-order institutional structure — produced the characteristic Premonstratensian organizational architecture: the annual general chapter at Prémontré (institutionally pre-figuring the Dominican and Franciscan general-chapter tradition), the visitation-system between mother-houses and daughter-houses, the Norbertine liturgical-disciplinary codifications.
Under Hugh's governance, the Premonstratensian Order grew from the original mother-house at Prémontré to over a hundred daughter abbeys across France, the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, and Scotland — producing the principal Augustinian-canons-regular reform order of the High Medieval Catholic period.
He died at Prémontré on February 10, 1164. His beatification on February 7, 1927 by Pope Pius XI confirmed the immemorial Premonstratensian Order veneration of the institutional-organizational successor to Norbert.