Robert was born around 1100 in Gargrave, Yorkshire — an Anglo-Norman family of the North Riding of Yorkshire (the principal Cistercian region of medieval England).
Educated at the University of Paris (one of the earliest documented English Catholic students at the nascent University of Paris), he returned to England as a secular priest and served at the parish of Gargrave before entering the Benedictine Abbey of Whitby around 1132.
When the famous Fountains Abbey was founded in 1132 as a Cistercian-reformist breakaway from the Benedictine Abbey of St. Mary's at York, Robert joined the original Fountains community under Abbot Richard. He became one of the principal early English Cistercian fathers — a contemporary and close associate of St. Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167, the principal English Cistercian-spiritual writer).
In 1138 — when the community at Fountains was expanding through the foundation of daughter-houses — Robert was appointed founding abbot of the new Cistercian community at Newminster in Northumberland, one of the principal northern English Cistercian foundations of the period.
Robert's twenty-one-year abbacy at Newminster (1138–1159) was devoted to the establishment of the characteristic Cistercian discipline at the Anglo-Scottish border foundation. Under his governance, Newminster founded three daughter-houses: Pipewell (Northamptonshire, 1143), Sawley (Yorkshire, 1148), and Roche (Yorkshire, 1147) — producing the Newminster-Cistercian federation of the English North.
He maintained deep personal friendships with St. Aelred of Rievaulx and with St. Godric of Finchale (the famous Northumbrian hermit-saint, the famous composer of the earliest surviving Middle English lyric poems) — the twelfth-century English Cistercian-Northumbrian spiritual-friendship circle.
He died at Newminster on June 7, 1159, and was buried at his abbey-church. Per the hagiographical tradition, St. Godric of Finchale (then in his hermit-cell at Finchale Priory) beheld a vision of Robert's soul being carried to heaven at the moment of his death — the famous Cistercian-hermit spiritual-friendship vision.