The St Giles Procession in Edinburgh

St Giles was the patron of Edinburgh, and the town’s church kept an arm-bone of the saint, brought from France, which was carried in its processions. Every 1 September a wooden image of St Giles was paraded through the streets. In 1558 the crowd stole the image and burned it, and when the clergy tried to go ahead with a borrowed one the procession broke up in a riot. Chambers notes that nothing more is heard of St Giles’s rites in Scotland after that day, though the saint’s hind still supports the city’s arms.