St. Gilbert of Sempringham, Founder of the Gilbertines

Who was St. Gilbert of Sempringham?

St. Gilbert of Sempringham was a parish priest from the Lincolnshire fens who founded the Gilbertines, the only religious order to be born in medieval England. He was born at Sempringham between 1083 and 1089, the son of Jocelin, a wealthy Norman knight, and an English mother of humble rank whose name is lost. He died in the same village on February 4, 1189, at an age tradition puts at 106, and Pope Innocent III canonized him in 1202.

His order was unusual: each Gilbertine priory joined a community of nuns and a community of canons under one roof, with lay sisters and lay brothers to work the land. It lasted four hundred years, until Henry VIII dissolved it.

Let us ask St. Gilbert, who gave the best of his table to the poor, to pray for us and for every parish priest.

The life of St. Gilbert

The knight's son who could not be a knight

The Catholic Encyclopedia says Gilbert was "ill-favoured and deformed," so his father did not raise him for war. He was sent to France to study and came home a scholar. Butler says he kept "a free-school" in Lincolnshire, teaching children their prayers and their letters, and his father presented him to the parishes of Sempringham and Tirington, which the family controlled.

He then served in the household of the bishops of Lincoln, first Robert Bloet and then Alexander, who ordained him priest "much against his will." Offered the post of archdeacon of Lincoln, he turned it down, saying "he knew no surer way to perdition." He kept little for himself and gave the revenues of his second parish to the poor.

Seven young women of Sempringham

In 1131, after his father's death, Gilbert became lord of Sempringham. That year he gave a rule of life to seven young women he had taught as children, and with Bishop Alexander's help built them an enclosed house against the north wall of St. Andrew's, his parish church. On the advice of the Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx, he added lay sisters to serve them and lay brothers, recruited from the poorest serfs on his lands, to work the fields.

Turned away at Cîteaux

The houses grew, and Gilbert felt unequal to governing them. In 1147 he traveled to Cîteaux to ask the Cistercians to take over. There he met Pope Eugene III, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Malachy of Armagh. The Cistercian abbots declined to govern women. So Gilbert went home and added canons living under the Rule of St. Augustine to serve as chaplains to his nuns. Thirteen houses were founded in his lifetime.

Loyal to St. Thomas Becket

In 1165 Gilbert was summoned before Henry II's justices, accused of sending help to the exiled archbishop St. Thomas Becket. The charge was false, and he could have cleared himself with an oath. He refused, because, as the Catholic Encyclopedia explains, such an oath "might make him appear an enemy to the archbishop." He was ready for exile until the king ordered the judges to wait. In the 1170s some of his lay brothers rebelled and slandered him, and Pope Alexander III cleared his name.

The plate of the Lord Jesus

Butler records a custom Gilbert kept at every meal. He had "a dish which he called, The plate of the Lord Jesus, in which he put all that was best of what was served up, and this was for the poor." He ate little himself, wore a hair shirt and slept sitting up.

A religious at the very end

Old and nearly blind, Gilbert handed the government of the order to Roger, prior of Malton. Only then did he make his own religious profession; he had founded and ruled an order for decades without ever taking its vows. He died at Sempringham on February 4, 1189.

The miracles of St. Gilbert

According to the Victoria County History, "many miracles of healing were reported" at his tomb in the years after his death. In 1200 Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, set about obtaining his canonization, and after an inquiry into the truth of those miracles, Pope Innocent III canonized him. The tomb miracles were examined by the archbishop and the pope's commissioners, so we can call them approved by the standards of 1202, an early example of a papal canonization that followed a formal inquiry. His relics were solemnly moved to a new shrine on October 13, 1202, before great crowds.

Symbols of St. Gilbert in art

Few images of Gilbert survived the English Reformation, so his symbols are simple.

• The Gilbertine habit: a black tunic under a white cloak and hood lined with lamb's wool for the canons; the nuns wore white.
• A staff: the old founder, nearly blind at the end.
• Children, a book or a rule: the schoolmaster priest, and the rule he gave his seven first nuns.
• A plate: the "plate of the Lord Jesus" for the poor.

Sempringham today

The great priory church where Gilbert was buried, with his tomb visible from both the nuns' side and the canons' side of the dividing wall, is gone. After the Dissolution its stones were carried off, and the fate of his relics is unknown. Only earthworks in the grass mark the site, beside St. Andrew's Church, which Gilbert served as a young priest and which still stands.

The priory has one more sad and moving story. In 1283, after the death of her father, Llywelyn, prince of Wales, King Edward I sent the baby princess Gwenllian to Sempringham. She lived there as a nun and died in the house fifty-four years later.

Feast day and prayer

We keep his feast on February 4. See the feast day calendar. Schools and churches in Lincolnshire still bear his name.

There is no widely used traditional prayer to St. Gilbert. We can pray in his spirit by setting aside something of the best we have for the poor, and asking: St. Gilbert of Sempringham, pray for us.