Guillaume (Saint) De Malaval

Guillaume (Saint) De Malaval founder of the Guillemites, is supposed to have been a French nobleman who had chosen a soldier's life, and lived in dissipation. Being anxious to do penance, he went to Rome, where pope Eugenius III, in 1145, ordered him to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After his return to Tuscany, in 1153, he settled in a lonely valley of the Sienna territory, in the diocese of Grosseto, where he spent his life in work and prayer. He died February 10, 1157. Some time later some of his followers erected a hermitage with a chapel on the tomb of Guillaume, and from that time it became the shrine of the order of the Guillemites, who multiplied in Germany, Flanders, and France. See Hoefer, Nouv. Biog. Generale, s.v.