Tironensian Order

Saint Adelelmus
Statue of St. Adelelmus in the Monastery of Etival-en-Charnie
Born	Flanders, Belgium
Died	1152
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Feast	27 April

The Tironensian Order or the Order of Tiron was a Roman Catholic monastic order named after the location of the mother abbey (Tiron Abbey, French: Abbaye de la Sainte-Trinité de Tiron, established in 1109) in the woods of Tiron (sometimes Thiron) in Perche, some 35 miles west of Chartres in France). They were nicknamed "Grey Monks" because of their grey robes, which their spiritual cousins, the monks of Savigny, also wore.

The order, or congregation, of Tiron was founded in about 1106 by the Benedictine Bernard de Ponthieu, also known as Bernard d'Abbeville (1046–1117), born in a small village near Abbeville, Ponthieu.

Tonsured at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Cyprien in Poitiers around the year 1070, Bernard left the order in 1101 when his nomination as abbot of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe was disapproved by Cluny and Pope Paschal II. From then on Bernard lived first as a hermit on the island of Chausey, between Jersey and Saint-Malo, then in the woods of Craon, near Angers, with two other rigorist monks: Robert d'Arbrissel, future founder of the controversial Abbey of Fontevraud, and Vitalis de Mortain, later the founder of the Congregation of Savigny in 1113. Following the example of the Desert Fathers, all three men and their followers (men and women) lived detached from the world, in great poverty and strict penance.