A doctor at the Sorbonne and a preacher, he became abbot of the abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys in 1681 and attended the Paris salon of the marquise de Lambert.
It has the distinction of being regarded by some scholars as the very first word in the English language recorded in writing, having been recorded by Gildas in his 6th century Latin work De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, under the spelling cyulae (he was referring to the three ships that the Saxons first arrived in).
In 1125 he was elected by the monks of the Abbey at Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, near Vannes, Brittany, to be their abbot, so he turned the Paraclete over to Heloise, his wife, who had been in a convent in Argenteuil since taking the veil.
The first book by the Irish writer Julia Kavanagh, Saint-Gildas, or, The Three Paths (1847) is largely set in the village in the eighteenth century.
The album was recorded at the Théâtre du Cratère d'Alès by Eric Van de Hel and Gildas Lointier, assisted by Renaud Van Welden.
The message is recorded by Gildas in his De Excidio Britanniae, written in the second quarter of the sixth century, and much later repeated by Bede.
St Gildas, the Welsh author of the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, is also credited with the Lorica, or Breastplate, an apotropaic charm against evil that is written in a curiously learned vocabulary; this too probably relates to an education in the Irish styles of Latin.
Asked whether Touhey's recordings had influenced his own playing, Gildas replied, "No, I was learning the pipes at the time." However generally pipers were in awe of Touhey's playing; Séamus Ennis, writing in the liner notes of Dublin fiddler Tommy Potts's Liffey Banks LP, said that he and his father considered Touhey's playing "hyper-phenomenal," and that he considered Touhey "the best of the men who came before my father."