Confessor Gilbert

Gilbert of Sempringham, commemorated in the Roman Martyrology as priest and confessor, was a twelfth-century English churchman and the founder of the Gilbertine Order, the only religious order of medieval origin that was wholly English in foundation. He was born at Sempringham in Lincolnshire, the son of Jocelin, a Norman knight who held the manor there, and of an English mother. Near-contemporary accounts describe him as physically ungainly or disabled, which led his father to send him to France for schooling rather than train him for knighthood. After studies on the Continent he returned to England as a clerk, taught locally, and in time received from his father the churches of Sempringham and West Torrington.

Ordained to the priesthood by the bishop of Lincoln, Gilbert served for a period in the episcopal household before taking up pastoral work in his native parish. In the early 1130s he enclosed seven local women beside the church of St Andrew at Sempringham under a rule he composed for them. Lay sisters were later added to serve the nuns, and lay brothers to work the estates. When Gilbert sought Cistercian affiliation for the growing community and was refused, he added a fourth element: canons regular living under the Rule of St Augustine to provide priestly ministry. The resulting double monasteries, with nuns and canons in adjacent but strictly separated houses, became the distinctive mark of the Gilbertine Order. Sempringham remained the mother house, and Gilbert governed the order as its master. By the later twelfth century it comprised a number of houses, almost all in England.

Gilbert was known for personal austerity, administrative energy, and loyalty to the English Church. He supported Thomas Becket during the archbishop’s conflict with King Henry II and was at one point accused of sending funds to the exiled primate; he was examined and cleared. In old age he faced a serious revolt among some of the order’s lay brothers, a crisis that required papal and royal intervention. He continued to govern until shortly before his death. Gilbert died at Sempringham on 4 February 1189, at a very advanced age, and was buried in the priory church there.

A cult developed quickly at his tomb. Formal papal canonization followed in 1202 under Pope Innocent III, after an inquiry into miracles attributed to his intercession; the process is among the better-documented early papal canonizations. His feast is kept on 4 February. The Gilbertine Order did not survive the English Reformation, and Sempringham Priory was dissolved in the sixteenth century, but Gilbert remains the principal saint associated with that unique English experiment in mixed religious life.