Martin of Tours founds the monastery of Ligugé

Martin was born in 316 or 336 at Savaria in Pannonia and served in the Roman cavalry in Gaul; the best-known story of his life tells how at Samarobriva (Amiens) he cut his military cloak in two to give half to a beggar. After leaving the army he became a disciple of Hilary of Poitiers. When Hilary returned from exile in 361, Martin joined him and set up a hermitage at Ligugé, south of Poitiers, on an estate given by the bishop where a Gallo-Roman villa had stood, and followers soon gathered around him. Beneath the avenue leading to the present abbey church, excavators have found the remains of the first 4th-century building, perhaps a martyrium of the end of the century; despite several interruptions, Ligugé counts as the oldest monastic house in the West still in use.

In 371 Martin was lured from Ligugé to Tours by a ruse — a townsman begged him to come to his wife, pretending that she was ill — and was consecrated bishop against his will. He did not settle in the city: in 372 he founded Marmoutier (Majus Monasterium, the “Greater Monastery”) a short distance upstream, on the opposite bank of the Loire, where, according to his biographer Sulpicius Severus, eighty disciples lived, most of them in caves hollowed out of the overhanging cliff. As bishop, Martin had pagan temples, altars and images destroyed, introduced a rudimentary parish system in his diocese and went on founding monastic communities; in 385 he joined Ambrose of Milan and Pope Siricius in protesting against the execution of Priscillian at Trier. He died at Candes on 8 November 397. His tomb at Tours became a great place of pilgrimage, and the priest who kept his cloak (cappa) in its reliquary was called cappellanus — the origin of the words “chaplain” and, through the capella that sheltered the relic, “chapel”.