St Gilbert of Sempringham in glass

Last year on this day I posted St Gilbert of Sempringham about the life of this centenarian Lincolnshire saint and monastic founder with various weblinks.

To those I would definitely add Brian Golding's life of St Gilbert in the Oxford DNB which can be read here.

St Gilbert is depicted at bottom left in modern stained glass in this window:

Stained glass on the north side of Selwyn College chapel, Cambridge.
The figures at the bottom are (left to right) St. Gilbert of Sempringham, St. Francis of Assisi, and St Etheldreda, Abbess of Ely

Image:TheRevSteve on Flickr

St Gilbert of Sempringham

Today is the feast of St Gilbert of Sempringham (c 1085 - 1189). 

This long-lived Lincolnshire priest was the only Englishman to found a monastic order in the high middle ages.

There is a biography of him here,  There is another one here from the Friends of Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire. Another site about St Katherine's Priory in Lincoln has an illustrated account of St Gilbert, his Order and the priory. It can be found here.

The Gilbertine Order has double houses for the nuns and the canons who were their spiritual directors, as well as houses just comprised of canons. They were nearly all in the dioceses of Lincoln and York, and particularly concentrated in Lincolnshire and the East Riding. 

As an Order it represented a response to the increased demand for spiritual direction and structures in the twelfth century, and one which is recorded in the Vita of St Gilbert as the response of a parish priest to particular local circumstances.