Who Was St. Giles?
In representations of St. Giles he is accompanied by a deer that
had fled to him for protection from a royal huntsman. By a
strange turn of circumstances the saint then became the patron
saint of the beggars and lepers that haunted the market square
and town gate.
Little is known of St. Giles, Aegidus in Latin records, except
that he may have been an aristocratic Greek who came to the South
of France and established himself as a hermit in about A.D. 683
in the deep forests at the mouth of the River Rhone, where his
reputation for sanctity led the Benedictines later to build the
great Monastery of St. Giles du Gard (at the end of the 11th
century) on the pilgrimage route from Arles to St. James of
Compostela in the north of Spain.
