Introduction
St George, the fourth-century Roman martyr, has been the unofficial Patron Saint of England for centuries. There were, naturally, home-grown saints who might have had this honour, such as another Clay Lane favourite, St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne; but the Reformers decided the issue for us in the sixteenth century.
ON February 24th, 303, Emperor Galerius, one of four Roman Emperors sharing power at the time, gave the order that Christians must sacrifice to the state-approved gods of Rome or face being rounded up by the army and executed. The edict was posted in Nicomedia (now Izmit in Turkey) where one high-ranking member of the Roman Army, named George, read it with disgust. He ripped down the order from its place and shredded in the street. George was arrested, but he refused to recant and after long imprisonment and a series of painful tortures he was put to death. His body was later returned to his birthplace in Lod, which is now in Israel.
As he was a soldier, George became a popular patron of soldiers (as St Nicholas is of sailors) and twelfth-century English crusaders in the Holy Land learnt to value his prayers. In the fourteenth century, after he was believed to have favoured the English at Poitiers and Crécy in the Hundred Years’ War against France, George became a favourite of the English royal family. Consequently, when the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers banned prayers to the saints and even the display of their banners, royal patronage meant that St George lingered in the public memory when other ‘national saints’ such as Thomas Becket, King Edmund the Martyr and Cuthbert of Lindisfarne were all but forgotten. No official pronouncement has ever been made, but St George is now the undisputed Patron Saint of England, and his feast day on April 23rd sometimes even gets a mention in the secular press.
The legend of the dragon is just that of course, a legend. But St George was a real person who did something truly valiant for the sake of others. The legend symbolises the courage that standing up for conscience requires, because the temptation to conform, to ‘go along to get along’, is every bit as mesmerising as the dragon-stare, and every bit as consuming as the dragon-fire.
See posts tagged St George the Triumphant Martyr.