Richard Rolle of Hampole
20 January -- Commemoration
If celebrated as a Lesser Festival,
Common of Spiritual Writers, page 473
Richard Rolle was born in about the year 1300 in Thornton in
Yorkshire, where he first began to live the hermit life at
the age of eighteen, after breaking off his education at the
University of Oxford.
After moving his hermitage to several other sites, he
finally settled close to the Cistercian nuns at Hampole,
where he undertook much of his prolific writing on mysticism
and asceticism. He wrote in Latin but also produced many
texts directly in English and even in the Northumbrian
dialect. His writings were widely influential and he was
venerated for at least three hundred years after his death
on this day in the year 1349.