Saint Gall

One of the twelve who left Ireland

Gall was born in Ireland around 550 and became one of twelve monks who joined Columban's mission to the European continent — a group of Irish peregrini, monks who left their homeland permanently as a deliberate act of exile undertaken for Christ, with no plan of returning. The group crossed into Merovingian Gaul together and later moved into the region around Lake Constance, in what is now northeastern Switzerland, preaching among the Alemanni, a Germanic people who had not yet been converted to Christianity in any settled way. Gall is remembered as fluent enough in the local language to preach directly to them himself, a detail that set him apart even within Columban's own circle of companions.

Left behind by a lake

When local hostility and political pressure eventually forced Columban to leave the Lake Constance region for Italy around 612, Gall did not go with him. The traditional account holds that he was too sick to travel, and stayed behind rather than continue on to what would become Columban's final monastery at Bobbio. Whatever the precise reason, Gall settled into a hermit's life in the forest near the lake, living alone in a hut by the Steinach stream and drawing a small community of disciples to him over the years that followed. He never held any formal office in the Church and, according to tradition, twice declined the offer of a bishopric, preferring the hermitage he had built to any position of authority.

A bear, a fire, and a fair amount of legend

The best-known story about Gall involves a bear. According to the traditional account — pious legend rather than documented history, and worth naming as such — Gall was warming himself by a fire in the forest when a bear charged out of the trees toward him. Instead of fleeing, Gall rebuked the animal, and it stopped short; he then offered it bread, and the bear, in gratitude, brought him firewood for his fire. It's the kind of story that circulated widely about desert and forest hermits across the early medieval Church, and it isn't treated as verified history even by sympathetic modern accounts. But it took firm enough hold in local memory that the bear became a lasting emblem of the community that grew up around Gall's hermitage — it still appears on the coat of arms of the city of St. Gallen today, walking upright on its hind legs exactly as the old story describes.

From a hermit's hut to a monastery

Gall died around 646, having spent decades as a hermit rather than the founder of any formal institution. It was his followers, not Gall himself, who built a monastery on the site of his hermitage after his death, and the community that grew up there took his name: the Abbey of St. Gallen. Over the following centuries, that abbey became one of the most significant centers of learning, manuscript copying, and monastic scholarship anywhere in early medieval Europe, at a time when relatively few institutions on the continent were doing that work at all.

A library that survived the centuries

The Abbey Library of St. Gallen still exists today, and it remains one of the most important surviving collections of medieval manuscripts in the world — recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and open, in part, to visitors who can walk through the same rooms that held these books centuries ago. It's a rare case among early medieval monastic foundations: not a ruin, not a story preserved only in later chronicles, but a working library that has held onto its own history in physical form since long before anyone thought to write it down as legend. Gall's feast is kept on October 16. He is honored today as the patron of the Swiss city and canton that carry his name, and, through the old folk tradition tied to his years in the forest, as a patron of birds as well.