The first Carthusian saint to be formally canonized by the Holy See was not their founder St Bruno but our own St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln from 1186 till 1200. His achievements as a bishop and the historical importance of his resistance to kings have sometimes led writers to underemphasize the fact that he owed to his monastery the training which made him what he was—a saint whose austere and fearless strength was tempered by a gentleness which is one of the finest fruits of charity. The life written shortly after his death by his chaplain, the Benedictine work Adam of Eynsham, does justice to this fact, and, in spite of its omissions, it is one of the most accurate and detail portraits in existence of a medieval saint.

Born in 1140 of a noble family at Avalon near Grenoble, Hugh was neither an Englishman nor a Frenchman by birth, but Empire man. He was brought up from childhood after his mother's death in a neighbouring house of canons at Villarbenoit, where his father had retired to dedicate his last years to Religious Life.