Richard was born around 1300 at Thornton Dale in Yorkshire to an English family. Educated at the University of Oxford, he departed the University without completing his degree — undertaking the hermit-life at age 19 (around 1319).
Richard's hermit-vocation is famous in the English medieval-mystical tradition for the dramatic circumstance of its adoption: he fashioned a hermit-habit for himself out of his sister's two dresses (one grey, one white — producing the hermit-habit that would establish the grey-white 'Rolle-hermit' iconography). He spent his 30 years (1319–1349) as a solitary itinerant English hermit — moving from patron to patron across Yorkshire, composing his vernacular English devotional writings.
Richard's literary legacy — one of the principal medieval English vernacular religious literary corpora — includes:
1. Incendium Amoris (Fire of Love) — Latin autobiographical-mystical treatise on the three degrees of contemplative love (fervour, song, sweetness); the famous 'fire of love' experience the classic English mystical-experiential theme.
2. Emendatio Vitae (Amendment of Life) — Latin treatise on the spiritual life.
3. The English Psalter — vernacular English translation and commentary on the Psalms.
4. The Form of Living — vernacular English treatise on the solitary religious life, addressed to the anchoress Margaret Kirkeby.
5. Ego Dormio (I Sleep) — vernacular English mystical treatise.
6. Multiple vernacular English lyrics and meditations.
Richard's English mystical vocabulary and distinctive 'fervour, song, sweetness' three-stages contemplative-love scheme established the English mystical school tradition that would extend through the Walter Hilton (Scale of Perfection), Cloud of Unknowing (c. 1370), Julian of Norwich (Revelations of Divine Love, 1373), and Margery Kempe (Book of Margery Kempe, c. 1436) — the 'four fathers of English mysticism' tradition of the late 14th and 15th centuries.
Richard died at Hampole on September 29, 1349 in the Black Death epidemic (1348–1350), at the Cistercian nunnery where he had been providing spiritual direction to the anchoress Margaret Kirkeby.