He was said to have been noble-born at Athens (probably an
embellishment of his early hagiographers)
and came to France in about 715
(or 683;
sources differ), having given his patrimony to charity. Giles lived
for two years with Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, and became a hermit,
and so continued till he became abbot at Nîmes
in the south of France.
The legend of Giles and the hind
As we saw on August
31 with St Aidan, and have discussed at the page on horned
animals, the horned god and Christian saints, in the
Scriptorium, many saints have a close association with the deer.
Giles is no exception, although his deer is of the female variety, a
pet hind,
or female red deer. The Giles tradition has the following story:
While hunting, the king (by legend an anachronistic Visigoth
but who must have been a Frank given the period; some sources say it
was Childeric
III, who died about 751)
shot an arrow
into a thorn bush, hoping to hit a deer, but instead wounded the
hermit in the knee. Giles remained crippled for life, refusing to be
healed so that he could better mortify his flesh.
As he was wounded while protecting his pet hind, it is his symbol in
art, together with an arrow in Giles’s leg, crippling him (some
sources say his hand, which doesn't really suit Giles's patronage of
the lame). The animal went daily to the hermit’s cave to give him
milk, and protected him by causing thick bushes to grow up around
the convalescing eremite. (Some versions of the tale say that even
before Giles was injured, the hind provided milk for his
nourishment.)
The King of
France sent doctors to care for saint's wound, and though Giles
begged to be left alone, the king came often to see him. He was so
grateful and admired Giles so much that he ordered to be built the monastery
of Saint Gilles- du- Gard for the saint’s followers, and Giles
became its first abbot,
establishing his own discipline there. A small town
of the same name grew up around the monastery.
There are more intriguing stories about this saint. Once, he raised
the son of a prince to life, and made a lame man walk. On another
occasion, he cast two doors of cypress into the Tiber River, Rome,
and “recommended them to heavenly guidance”, as the 19th-century
folklorist William
Hone put it (The
Every-Day Book, or a Guide to the Year, William Tegg and
Co., London, 1878; 1825-26
edition online). On Giles’s return to France he found those
doors at the gates of his monastery, and used them as the portals to
his church.
Hospitals for the disabled and poor
Because of the
miracle of the lame man, St Giles is the patron saint of those who
can’t walk. Churches, hospitals and safe houses dedicated to St
Giles, which were for disabled people, people with leprosy, paupers
and beggars, were generally situated outside the walls of the city,
as these ‘cripples, as they were then known, were not permitted
within the walls, but these were built so that they could be easily
reached by the needy. Sometimes the name of St Giles came to be
associated with a slum area because of these associations.
When they were taken to Tyburn
in London for execution, convicts were allowed to stop at Saint
Giles’s Hospital where they were given a bowl of ale, called Saint
Giles’s Bowl, “thereof to drink at their pleasure, as their last
refreshing in this life”.
The saint died around the years 710
- 724
(once again, sources differ) in France. “Many wytnisse that they
herde the company of aungelles berynge the soule of hym into heven”,
says Jacobus
de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa in Aurea Legenda (The
Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, 1275). Upon his death,
Giles’s grave became a shrine and place of pilgrimage, the
monastery later becoming a Benedictine
house, one of about 40,000 that flourished in the Middle Ages.
Round his tomb in the Abbey at Nîmes sprang up the town of
St-Gilles-du-Gard. His cult spread rapidly far and wide throughout
Medieval Europe – note the vast number of towns, churches and
monasteries named after him or dedicated to him in France, Germany,
Poland, Hungary, and Great Britain. Apart from the St-Gilles
mentioned, there is St-Gilles, Toulouse, and many French cities. Relics
of Giles may be found at Antwerp,
Brussels,
and Tournai
in Belgium, Cologne
and Bamberg,
in Germany, Prague,
Rome
and Bologna
in Italy. Many are the manuscripts in prose and verse commemorating
the virtues and miracles of St Giles.
When the time for the annual procession of St Giles came round in 1558,
the populace was found to have stolen the wooden image of the saint,
usually carried on those occasions, and to have ignominiously burnt
it. An attempt was made to carry on the procession as usual with a
borrowed image, but the proceedings were interrupted by a riot. In 1562
the relics of the saint were secretly transferred to Toulouse to
save them from the anger of the Huguenots.
From around this time, the then-famous pilgrimage to St Giles’s in
Edinburgh steadily declined, but with the restoration of a great
part of the saint's relics to the church in 1862,
and the publicized rediscovery of his former tomb there in 1865,
the pilgrimages recommenced.
It might be that his patronage of animals and forests suggest his
mythos may also have Pagan origins.
Giles and another horned beast
In Spain,
shepherds consider St Giles the protector of rams,
and it used to be the custom to wash the rams and colour their wool
a bright shade on Giles’s feast day. They would tie lighted
candles to their horns, and bring the animals down the mountain
paths to the chapels and churches to have them blessed. In the Basque
country, the shepherds come down from the Pyrenees
on this day, dressed in their full traditional costume, sheepskin
coats, staves, and crooks, to attend Mass with their best rams. This
event marks the beginning of autumn festivals, and features
processions and dancing in the fields.
St Giles and Charles Martel
The Frankish
leader, Charles
Martel (Charles the Hammer; 676
- 741)
once found himself unable to confess a sin, so he asked St Giles to
pray for him. While the churchman was celebrating Mass, an angel
placed on the altar a paper on which was written the king’s sin
and his pardon, dependent upon his repentance. The incident,
pictured here,
is said to have taken place in Orléans in 719. (It is Charlemagne,
not his grandfather Martel in some versions of this legend.)
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