Born probably at Tournai and educated in the humanities and theology at the noted cathedral school there, Guerric visited the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux as a seasoned scholar, with no intention whatever of abandoning academic life for the cloister. Urged to stay by the always persuasive Abbot Bernard, however, ‘without delay or looking back, the cleric became a monk, the master a schoolboy’. He was elected abbot of Igny, near Rheims, in 1138.