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.