OUR PATRON SAINT
TAKEN FROM A GUIDE BY LESLIE WOOD
Many churches dedicated to
St. Giles, the gentle
saint, stand outside the walls of busy mediaeval cities, as though seeking the
silence that he found in his hermitage, but all too often, as in the case of
Oxford, the rapid growth of our towns has engulfed them and our St. Giles' today
is poised between new suburbs and the city itself.
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 Rhône, where his reputation for sanctity
led the Benedictines later to build the great Monastery of
St. Gilles 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.
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