§ 19. The order of Prémontré originally made some provision for houses of nuns side by side with those of canons. The experiment languished, and although a body of nuns or canonesses followed the Premonstratensian rule, they had few houses. Only two are known in England, and neither of these was connected with any house of canons. But in the second quarter of the twelfth century Gilbert, rector of Sempringham in Lincolnshire, with the advice of the abbot of Rievaulx, founded a house of seven nuns following the Cistercian rule. The Cistercian order refused to take charge of the community, and Gilbert, possibly following the example of Prémontré, provided for its spiritual needs by associating with the nuns a body of canons under the rule of St Augustine. Gilbertine houses were thus at first regarded as nunneries in which the Sacraments were administered by an auxiliary community of at least seven canons. Minutely composed statutes provided for the seclusion of the two bodies from each other in two adjacent cloisters. In such double houses the maximum number of nuns ordained by statute was generally double that of canons: thus at Watton in Yorkshire, the largest house of the order, nominal provision was made for 140 nuns and 70 canons. The order, which was exempt from episcopal control, was placed under a general, known as the master of Sempringham. Sempringham was the mother house of a number of priories: new houses were founded on the Cistercian plan of the migration of twelve canons and a prior from one of the existing houses. _Conversi_ and _conversae_ formed a part of each establishment. The total number of Gilbertine houses was some 27, of which eleven were in Lincolnshire: with the exception of two houses in Wiltshire, one in Devonshire and one in Durham, the monasteries of the order were all within the four eastern dioceses of Lincoln, York, Ely and Norwich. The order never spread beyond England.