The monk Robert is thought to have been a member of the Pennant family of Downing, a few miles north-west of Holywell, the fountain of Saint Winifred.

During the reign of Henry I one of the brothers fell prey to a mental illness and the sub-prior Ralph had a dream in which a beautiful virgin told him the sick man would recover if they went to celebrate Mass at the fountain of St Winifred.

According to Robert's account, he and Richard, another monk, were sent on a mission by Abbot Herebert (also rendered simply as Herbert)[8] to negotiate the translation of St Winifred's relics, taking advantage of a temporary improvement in political conditions in 1137, during the Anarchy that followed the seizure of power by Stephen.

[9] After approaching the Bishop of Bangor, David the Scot,[10] and the local prince, either Gruffudd ap Cynan or his son Owain Gwynedd,[11] they organised a party of seven, which included the prior of Chester, to collect the body of the saint.

The expectation of an episcopal blessing ensured it was witnessed by "an incredible concourse of devout people"[15] as it was taken to be placed on the altar of the Abbey church, where further miracles were reported.

Herebert, the abbot who had sent Robert into Wales, was deposed by a Legatine council at Westminster in 1138, but the reasons are not known: irregularities in his election have been suspected, although he had been consecrated in his position by William de Corbeil, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Robert is generally accepted as strengthening the cult of Winifred, who had hitherto been an obscure Welsh saint, so that she became the focus of pilgrimages from Shrewsbury and other centres from the 14th century to the present.

[1] Prior Robert's mission to Wales was outlined during the 14th century in the sermon for St Winifred's day by the Shropshire Augustinian John Mirk, part of his much-copied and printed Festial.

[26][1] This was the basis of Philip Leigh's Life and Miracles of S. Wenefride; Virgin, Martyr and Abbess; Patroness of Wales, published in 1712[27] and still widely available – usually in a 19th-century edition signed by an anonymous editor Soli Deo Gloria.

In these tales he is the main antagonist of the eponymous hero within the Abbey: officious and ambitious, he feels existentially threatened by Cadfael, whose "gnarled, guileless-eyed self-sufficiency caused him discomfort without a word amiss or a glance out of place, as though his dignity were somehow under siege.

The Carlton Television adaptation, in which Prior Robert is played by Michael Culver, dislocates the chronology, placing at the beginning One Corpse Too Many.