The Story of Brother Giles

It seems that there was a Gaelic monk named Giles who was a brother of the priory at Lindisfarne.  Giles took his final vows in the year 745, and soon afterward, in a fit of holy inspiration, took up residence in a small wooden box.  An ascetic among ascetics, Giles spent his days in silent, cramped meditation, leaving his box only for the Palm Sunday precession.

Brother Giles continued his life as an enclosed anchorite until June 8, 793, the day of the famous Viking raid on Lindisfarne.  When the Northern raiders found Brother Giles in his box, they demanded that he come out of his box to be killed.  When he refused, two of the stoutest warriors carried the box to the top of the bell tower and cast it to the green.  The Vikings descended to inspect the ruins of the box, but Brother Giles' body was nowhere to be found.

Because of his controversial lifestyle, Brother Giles was never canonized, but the sad story of the miraculous monk soon spread through the flock of the faithful.  An idiom grew among the merchants of Europe: boxes containing precious cargo were to be treated "as it were Brother Giles' own box".  As greater literacy arose in the 15th century, traders began marking such cargo with the now-shortened form of the idiom, simply "Brother Giles", or in Latin: "Fra Gile".