For these he framed a Rule, ‘dedit . . . eis praecepta vitae et disciplinae,’ and provided servants ‘puellas aliquas pauperculas in habitu seculari servientes.’ When, after a long visit to S. Bernard, he returned to England with his Institutiones confirmed by Eugenius III, his order was regularly founded, with himself as Master. The Rule of his nuns was framed on Cistercian lines, but with modifications from many sources. While it differs of necessity from regulations suitable to the life of the recluse, it shows the same extraordinary attention to details (‘non solum magna et maxime necessaria, verum etiam minima quaedam et abiecta . . . non omisit,’ Dugdale, *xiii) which is displayed in the Ancren Riwle. And the two Rules often agree in these details, as will be seen in the notes; the most remarkable example is the similarity of the devotions of the lay brethren of the order to which the writer belonged, as described in the AR (Morton, 24), to the rule for the Hours of the Fratres in the Sempringham Order (Dugdale, *lx). There are numerical differences in the number of Paternosters and Psalms, but the Gilbertine Rule, as we have it, is a revision, probably a relaxation, of Gilbert’s, and the principle is the same. This method of saying the Hours is given by the writer to the recluses as an alternative use to the more elaborate one already prescribed, and he adds, ‘Gif ei of ou wule don þus heo voleweð her, ase in oþre obseruances, muchel of ure ordre.’ Gilbert was intimate with Ailred of Rievaulx, and sought his advice in the case of the nun at Watton (Twysden, Decem Scriptores, i. col. 420). Unfortunately, no authenticated writing of his, save a formal letter addressed in his last days to the Canons of his Order (MS. Digby 36, f. 189 b), has come down to us. But the first of his biographers tells us that, when in the course of his constant visitations of his houses he rested for a time anywhere, he did not eat the bread of idleness, but among other occupations wrote books, ‘scripsit quandoque libros’ (Dugdale, *xv), and the writer of the Nova Legenda Anglie, i. 471, says ‘libros multos scripsit; verba eius nichil aliud quam sapientiam et scientiam sonuerunt.’ The first members of his Order would surely multiply copies of the works of their founder, and it is not likely that all of these have disappeared. The Ancren Riwle was probably one of them. But there is besides a group of writings which are seen in their true setting when regarded as a product of the Gilbertine movement; the table on p. 356 gives the contents of three manuscripts which are in my opinion collections of the works of S. Gilbert. Among them is that ‘Englische boc of Seinte Margarete’ (M. 244/20) possessed by the recluses, as the writer of the AR knew.