Bernard was born around 1046 in Abbeville, Ponthieu, to a noble Norman-Picard family. Educated at the cathedral school of Saint-Cyprien at Poitiers, he became a secular cleric and was tonsured a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Cyprien of Poitiers around 1068.
He became prior of the Saint-Sauveur of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, then undertook the hermit life with St. Robert of Arbrissel (the future founder of the double-monastic Order of Fontevraud) and the influential late-11th-century French hermit-reform movement.
After years of hermit-itinerant preaching across western France and a period as abbot of the Abbey of Saint-Cyprien of Poitiers (1100–1109, a tumultuous tenure interrupted by disputes with the Cluniac authorities over the independence of the Saint-Cyprien community), Bernard founded in 1109 the Abbey of the Holy Trinity at Tiron in the Perche region of France.
The Tironensian Order — under Bernard's governance from 1109 to 1117 — established a distinctive Benedictine reform combining the strict Benedictine Rule with the emphasis on manual craftsmanship: Tironensian monks trained as carpenters, stonemasons, blacksmiths, illuminators, and weavers — producing the distinctive Tironensian craftsman-monastic culture that would extend through the High Medieval centuries.
The Tironensian Order spread rapidly through the Anglo-Norman world, producing dozens of daughter houses across northern France, England (Kelso Abbey chief in Scotland), Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Bernard died at Tiron on April 14, 1117, and was canonized by Pope Alexander III in 1163.