Gustan of Rhuys

Tradition has him born around 980 in British Cornwall. As an adolescent he was seized by pirates who scoured insular Brittany and served them as a ship’s boy, before being abandoned wounded on an island. Felix, a hermit of Ushant, took him in, tended him and converted him; when Felix came to restore the abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys in 1008, Gustan joined him as a lay brother, then took the monastic habit there. He spent the greater part of his life there, charged with hospitality and provisioning, which often obliged him to cross the gulf: the sailors and fishermen of the Morbihan took him as their patron because of those crossings. With Felix’s leave he kept a hermitage for a time on the island of Hoëdic. He died around 1040 at the priory of Beauvoir-sur-Mer, in Poitou, which Rhuys had founded there. His cult never passed beyond the Rhuys peninsula, where his pardon is still kept.