Saint Eligius (Éloi)

Eligius, Éloi in French, was born about 588 at Chaptelat, near Limoges, into a Gallo-Roman family. His father sent him to learn the goldsmith’s craft from Abbo, master of the mint at Limoges. He then entered the service of Babo, treasurer of the Frankish king, and King Clothar II ordered from him a throne of gold set with precious stones. According to the story of his life, Eligius made two thrones from the gold given for one, and the king, trusting his honesty, took him into his household and made him master of the mint at Marseille. Gold coins bearing his name as moneyer, struck at Paris and Marseille, have been found.

Under Dagobert I, who came to the throne in 629, Eligius was the king’s chief counselor, and in 636 or 637 he helped bring Judicael, king of the Bretons, to terms with the Franks. He spent his wealth on the poor and on ransoming captives, many of them sold as slaves in the market of Marseille. As a goldsmith he decorated the tombs of Saint Genevieve and Saint Denis and made reliquaries for Saint Germain, Saint Severinus and Saint Martin, among others. In 632 he founded the monastery of Solignac, south of Limoges, whose monks followed the rules of Saint Benedict and Saint Columbanus, and in Paris he gave his house on the Île de la Cité for a convent of some three hundred nuns under Saint Aurea.

After Dagobert’s death in 639 Eligius left the court with his friend Audoin. Both were ordained priests and consecrated bishops on the same day, Audoin for Rouen and Eligius for Noyon and Tournai; Vatican News gives the date as May 13, 641, while other sources give 640 or 642. His diocese reached into Flanders, and he preached to the people of Ghent, Courtrai and Antwerp and to the Frisians, many of whom were still pagan. He founded a monastery for women at Noyon, and at Saint-Quentin, after finding the body of the martyr Quentin, he built a church and a monastery. A sermon of his against pagan customs survives.

Eligius died at Noyon on December 1, 660; some sources give 659. Queen Bathilde set out to see him and arrived too late. A Life of the saint is attributed to his friend Audoin, bishop of Rouen.

He was buried at Noyon, and his cult spread through northern Gaul and Flanders, to Tournai, Ghent, Bruges, Courtrai and Douai. His relics were moved into the town in 881 for fear of the Normans and into the cathedral in 1066, where they were set above the high altar. After a vow made during a plague, the Paris goldsmith René de La Haye made a silver-gilt shrine for them, into which they were moved in August 1626. That shrine was lost in November 1793, but the remains were kept, and since 1830 they have rested in a gilded oak copy of it, carved by Jean Louis Médard Poisson of Noyon, at the high altar of the former cathedral.

At Béthune, according to tradition, Saint Éloi asked two farriers, Gauthier de Béthune and Germon de Beuvry, to found a brotherhood to bury the dead during an epidemic of plague in 1188; the Charitables of Béthune still carry the coffins at almost every funeral in the town. At Chaptelat his relics are shown every seven years in the ostensions of the Limousin.

Eligius is shown as a bishop with his crosier, often holding a small golden church in his hand, or with the anvil and hammer of his first trade at his feet. A legend tells that he took off the leg of a horse that would not let itself be shod, shod the hoof and put the leg back; the scene appears in a woven hanging at the Hospices de Beaune and in a fourteenth-century painting attributed to Niccolò di Pietro Gerini. In the church of Chaptelat a large canvas by Antoine Rivoulon, commissioned by the State in 1856, shows him beside a lectern with his miter and crosier, and a hammer and pincers on the ground.

Patron of goldsmiths, blacksmiths and metalworkers, and by tradition of those who work with horses.

• ChaptelatHis birthplace near Limoges, whose twelfth-century church of Saint-Éloi stands, by tradition, where he was born.
• SolignacThe abbey church of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, on the site of the monastery he founded in 632.
• NoyonThe former cathedral of Notre-Dame, where his remains rest in a gilded shrine of 1830 at the high altar.
• ParisThe parish church of Saint-Éloi, rebuilt in 1967 in the old district of the metalworkers and cabinetmakers.