St George: Patron Saint of England
Christopher Stace Triangle, 99pp, £7.99
ISBN 0281054150
The Scots, Welsh and Irish all seem to know who they are, but who the hell are the English? Obscured for three centuries by the imperial trappings of Great Britain plc, England's national symbols now feel awfully vague, and no national symbol feels vaguer than England's patron saint. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, just spent £100,000 of public money toasting St Patrick's Day, but he won't be handing over any cash at all to celebrate St George's Day on 23 April because, until the Tories complained, nobody had so much as bothered to ask for any. Even the Daily Telegraph called this indifference to St George's Day a distinctive English characteristic. Yet it has been a national holiday in the past, and in 1997 it was restored as a major feast in the Anglican calendar, making this learned little book a very timely read indeed.
Livingstone called St George "a bureaucrat involved in some pretty corrupt practices", but even this much detail is hard to come by. A Roman soldier, St George was tortured to death in the Holy Land around 300AD for refusing to renounce his faith, and although most historians agree that he was a real person, virtually everything else about him is a matter of speculation, if not downright myth. Even his nationality is a mystery. He was probably Turkish, possibly Palestinian, maybe even Nubian - which makes him a good deal darker than most of the knights in shining armour you see on stained-glass windows. One thing is for sure: he certainly wasn't English, any more than St Patrick was Irish or St Andrew was a Scot. In fact, the only English thing about him is probably the dragon, a relatively recent addition to his CV which didn't appear until a thousand years after he died.
Indeed, George's biography was so sketchy that, within a century of his death, the Catholic Church itself called his martyrdom apocryphal. Yet he soon became more revered than many authenticated saints, and by the time Caxton turned his life story into a medieval bestseller, he had already been rooted in English folklore for 700 years, and his cross had become the flag of London, Durham, Lincoln, Rochester and York - as well as England itself. So how on earth did this obscure Middle Eastern martyr become an Anglican icon? After all, there was no shortage of more familiar candidates far nearer home.
For early English nationalists, George's anonymity was not a weakness, but a great strength. His yarn was so fuzzy that it could be adapted to suit almost any interpretation, and so he made a far more comfortable patron for England's warlike kings than many of his fellow saints, whose pacifism was too specific to reflect the violent regal lifestyles of the Middle Ages.
It was the Crusades that really cemented George's English status. He was the ideal mascot for western Christendom's bloody attempt to conquer Jerusalem, and in 1191, Richard the Lionheart claimed to have discovered his tomb at Lod, now in Israel. He reputedly appeared to the crusaders at the Siege of Jerusalem, and 800 years later, in the First World War, British troops reported sighting him on the western front. Clearly, the fact or fiction of St George touches something very deep and potent in the English psyche, and the less religious you are, the more intriguing he appears.
Now that Britain is growing increasingly ragged around the edges, as Wales and Scotland both exert their own exclusive nationhood, England is forced, for the first time in 300 years, to rediscover, or even reinvent, its individual identity, and St George is enjoying a secular revival. In 1996, England fans started waving his crusader's flag at international football matches, and in 1997, a St George's Day greetings card sold 50,000 copies.
Christopher Stace is a classicist rather than a theologian, and he scrutinises this erratic evidence with an involved but objective eye. A conscientious historian, he is quite prepared to point out inconsistencies, even when they trip up his cheerful narrative. Although he is suitably suspicious of embellishments, he shows that these inventions have their own significance for what they reveal about our ancestors' hopes and fears. There is some fascinating stuff about the dragon as a metaphor - for lust, heresy, even Wales - but despite his academic caution, Stace never quite dismisses George as outright allegory, and his intellectual neutrality is ultimately far more persuasive than any wide-eyed, evangelical survey. By the end of this dense but conversational account, you are left with a strong suspicion that, even though most of this tale is surely legend, something incredible really did happen in Palestine 1,700 years ago - well worth a round of drinks on 23 April.
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