Gibrian

Saint Gibrian (Gybrian, Gobrian) was an Irish priest who lived as a hermit near the River Marne in France and reposed in 509 by our calendar; Alban Butler has him dying very old, in the eighth century. He is commemorated on 8 May. The Orthodox calendar styles him hierarch, but the sources show him as a priest.

His story is in the fourth book of the History of the Church of Reims, written in the tenth century by Flodoard. Gibrian was one of a group of siblings from Ireland received by Saint Remigius at Reims and settled in the Marne region; the brothers are counted as seven, Gibrian, Helan, Tressan, German, Veran, Abran and Petran, and the sisters as three, Francla, Portia and Promptia. Gibrian chose a spot near Châlons-⁠sur-⁠Marne, now the commune of Saint-⁠Gibrien, which took his name. According to Butler he lived many years in a poor cell near the Marne, where he gathered a small community of monks and, at some distance, one of virgins.

A small chapel was built over his grave. Flodoard writes that the Normans destroyed it in the ninth century but that the body was left intact, and after a series of miracles his relics were taken to an altar at Reims, by order of Archbishop Fulk, around 890, in the church of the abbey of Saint Remigius. His cult at Reims grew only around the middle of the twelfth century.