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- [00:00]
A
Hi, I'm Darina, co founder of Quo. You might know us as openphone. My dad is a business owner and growing up, he always kept his ringtone super loud so he'd never miss a customer call. That stuck with me. When we started Quo, our mission was to help businesses not just stay in touch, but make every customer feel valued, no matter when they might call. Quo gives your team business phone numbers to call and text on your phone or computer. Your calls, messages and contacts live in one workspace so your team can stay fully aligned and reply faster. And with our AI agent answering 24. Seven, you'll really never miss a customer. Over 90,000 businesses use Quo. Get 20% off@quo.com tech that's Q U O.com tech and we can port your existing numbers over for free. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers.
- [00:58]
B
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I've got a question for you, Afra. What? When is St. George's Day? Do you know when St. George's Day is?
- [01:06]
C
Right, I do, but only because of the research I was doing for this episode. Peter, in the absence of that, if you'd have asked me a month ago, I would not have been able to tell you. I don't even know if I would have been able to tell you the month. And by the way, you might be out there judging me right now. But I am not a alone. A survey from 2021 found that only 40% of people in England know when St George's Day is.
- [01:30]
B
I don't believe that.
- [01:31]
C
And Another survey in 2023 found that a quarter of English people don't even know that St. George is their patron saint. And if they don't know who he is, then they're not going to know the date of the holiday are they.
- [01:44]
B
Don'T believe that 40% of people know when St. George's Day is, or Trafalgar Day, or any of the dates, or the King or the Queen's birthday.
- [01:53]
C
Next you're going to tell me about Empire Day.
- [01:56]
B
No clue. So I know the date of St. George's Day for not because I'm a big fan of Patron Saints day, but because it's used to date a very important expedition in the Balkans in the 1080s and it's one of the few fixed dates. So I had to learn about that a long time ago. So I will never forget. 23rd April is the day where everybody goes nuts.
- [02:17]
C
A survey in 2025 found that the number of people who know that St. George's Day is the day of an important event in the Balkans. Is is one. And that one person is Peter Francopet.
- [02:29]
B
I know for a fact that at least two other people read that thing that I wrote. So there are three of us. But what is interesting. Afraid you're quite right. If you were to say, not just in France, what's Bastille Day, which is the French national day. People in England know when that is. People know when. 12th of July, it's a bit of a clue. Independence Day in the United States. I was going to blurt out Fourth of July, but everyone knows that. St. Patrick's Day. Everybody knows. And then Ghana Independence Day. Just remind me after which date is Ghana Independence Day of March?
- [02:57]
C
That one I do know. And it's not just because I'm Ghanaian heritage. A lot of people like you take St. Patrick's Day. Actually, one of the things that really shocked me living in LA is that school kids all over LA get dressed up for St. Patrick's Day. I mean, totally irrespective of their heritage, they might never have even met an Irish person. It's practically a national holiday in the us. So it really got me thinking. All these other national days have kind of penetrated global culture, but St. George's Day, I wouldn't even say it's penetrated English culture, which is interesting given how much conversation there is about other symbols of Englishness and especially the St. George's flag right now.
- [03:42]
B
Okay, so tell us, Safa, what we're going to talk about today.
- [03:45]
C
Today we are going to discuss the legacy of St. George and we are going to look at the big difference between the story of St. George, the actual person who did exist, and the St. George's flag, a symbol of Englishness, what that means, what people think it means, and importantly, the difference in between.
- [04:16]
B
Welcome to Legacy. I'm Peter Frankopone. I'm AFWA Hash and this is Legacy, the show that looks at the most extraordinary people, places and ideas in history and asks how and why they matter. Today.
- [04:37]
C
This is England, the flag of St. George.
- [04:47]
B
So Afra, when we agreed to do this, you sent me that your ideas and you said we were going to do the flat of St. George. So I've spent a long time mugging up on residents property values and where he might have lived. So I hope I'm going to be well enough prepared for the flag of St. George.
- [05:02]
C
Why are you typo shaming me, Peter? Come on.
- [05:05]
B
Well, I don't want to reveal too many of our trade secrets, but why is it you Wanted to talk about the flag of St. George. Why does St. George, his flag, these. These symbols, these people? Why is it important today?
- [05:14]
C
All right, so we're recording this in the autumn of 2025, as we speak, there are England flags surfacing all over London, where I live in South London. I. Yesterday, I drove past my local hospital, St. Elias in Sutton, and what some people are calling DIY patriotism has seen people literally scaling lampposts at night and installing Union Jacks. But more frequently, England flags. And it's been dubbed not just London.
- [05:43]
B
By the way, even though all over the.
- [05:45]
C
I'm just talking about what I've seen in my own eyes. But if you look in the press all over the country, this is happening. It's being dubbed by the press, that Raising the Colors campaign, and it is undeniably a phenomenon. And I can't think of another time in my lifetime, except maybe when England reached the finals of the euros in the 90s, that there was this semi final.
- [06:07]
B
Father Zephyr. Don't. Don't bring that one up.
- [06:10]
C
Exposing my. But that was the last time, I think I thought England had a serious chance of winning an international football tournament. And suddenly there was this. Well, two things that always seem to go together. A resurgence in the England flag, accompanied by a very heated debate about what that flag means and who it includes.
- [06:32]
B
And it's very interesting because we live in a country of four nations, and I think that St. George and the flag has a very different resonance to, for example, the flag of St. David for our Welsh friends and cousins, and the flag of St. Andrews to the north of Scotland, where people do present flags and symbols, but they use them in very different ways. And that there is something that's conflating here. Afro. And I'm very interested to see what we think about, what we talk about when it comes to why there's a resurgence right now. But I'd also, as a historian, like to dig into who St. George was and how it's got something to do with England in the first place. I mean, you might be forgiven if. Well, your people who listen to our legacy podcast, incredibly well read, and they know everything already. So they'll all know that St. George wasn't English, but he really didn't come too close to these blessed isles, did he?
- [07:28]
C
I think it needs a moment just to acknowledge that the patron saint of Englishness was not English. Peter. I don't know how many people know that either. And he wasn't even close to English. In fact, he was born in A part of the world that I think is now often constructed as antithetical to English. You know, we have these ideas of the east and the west and Englishness as this very Western European identity. The person who would become St. George was probably born in Cappadocia, which is in modern day Turkey. And he wasn't Turkish, but his father was Greek and his mother was Palestinian. And the place that is most closely associated with him, it's a traditional site of his burial is Lydda, in what was mandatory palest and is now in Israel. So a very contested part of the world, but a part of the world that is pretty far from modern England.
- [08:18]
B
There's a problem, afo, is that this is your topic that you want to talk about, but I could go on for hours. So we've agreed that we're not going to do four episodes about people, but that part of the world, the southwestern asia Minor, where St. George come from, is kind of on the major trade routes of antiquity. People are moving around by boat. They're traveling from the Aegean, from the. In the eastern Mediterranean, connecting parts of the world that have hugely long legacies themselves, the ways in which metals, goods, crops, luxury objects are Transported. And so St. George is born in a kind of not, not quite version of London at the time, but he's growing up in a metropolitan society. Early accounts are that George is a member of the Roman army who has converted to Christianity. This is so before the Emperor Constantine makes Christianity legal and respectable in the Roman empire. So about 2,000 years ago. And George is challenged to abandon his Christianity, his faith, in favor of the Roman gods. And he instead throws down Roman idols and converts people by healing the sick, which is a particularly important process of evangelization. Doctors and medics and health are really important. He's brought before the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian is famous for three things. He's a very important Roman emperor at the end of the 200s, early 300s, he's a massive persecutor of Christians. If you're the Roman Emperor, you've either got to prove a new faith and make everybody think it's okay, or you've got to persecute it. And Diocletian throws lots of people to the lines, particularly the Christians.
- [09:56]
C
Like literally, this is the punishment for being a Christian.
- [09:59]
B
Literally, if you are being non Roman by doing things in a way that threatening established authorities, then you're a threat. And that's dealt with in a summary ways. He also is going through a massive recession at the Time. That's why religious animosities make people so anxious, because anything that destabilizes a tricky situation. There's a parallel today, a contracting economy. So Diocletian starts to produce edicts that set the prices of goods all around the empire. And the third thing, which is my favorite, is that Diocletian eventually just gets bored or tired and retires to Split in what's now Croatia, where he builds a massive palace and decides to grow prize winning vegetables, which is a good way for autocrats to spend their later years. I mean, I could see if that had been the option open for Saddam Hussein or Putin or others, the world would be a slightly different place. Very good for the Chelsea flower show. But St. George grows up in this world of economic challenge, of religious disputes, and of more people becoming Christians. And the two main adoptees of Christianity around the Roman world, around the Mediterranean, after the life of Jesus Christ, are first, women, particularly rich women, but also members of the army. And it's probably because the idea of spilling people's blood in vain, the sanctity of life is really important. So St. George, we don't know too much about him, we don't know how real he actually was. But he, in the Christian tradition, is not just a martyr, he's a megalomartist. So one of the most important of all martyrs because he comes to a.
- [11:29]
C
Sticky end and also because there were so many attempts to martyr him. I mean, I asked about throwing people to the lions, whether it was literal, because the attitude towards executing and torturing people in this era is quite creative, to say the least. So the list of torments that are reported to have been inflicted on George include having nails knocked into his head, being flayed with rakes or whips, broken on a wheel or a rack, sawn up, dismembered, boiled or roasted in a cauldron, shod with red hot iron shoes. And ultimately, after he was reported to have been resurrected two or three times to face further suffering, he was beheaded. That is the official demise, because I think it's quite hard to be resurrected once you've had your head chopped off. But the idea is that he suffered so much persecution because of his refusal to denounce Christianity. And this is one of the reasons he became such an important saint in the Christian tradition, because he withstood and stayed fast and true to his beliefs in the face of, by any measure, very extreme torture. And, you know, you said, peter, we don't know how real he is and we don't know how Real any of this is how can we make sense of the record that is left of him and the ways in which Christians revere him as a saint versus the unlikely elements of some of the alleged true life story?
- [12:53]
B
I think saints don't necessarily have to play the same role as historical figures. I mean, in a way, historical fiction is quite a good way of thinking about it. These are stories that are told as parables and as morality stories where the aim is to say, look, there are things that you can identify about your personal bravery, about the importance of standing up for your faith, about standing up in front of authority, and about the fact you're going to be rewarded. And those rewards in the case of St. George and the many stories about his life are that, you know, he keeps coming back and these things, they don't kill him or he gets resurrected, but they're there to try to say you're going to find redemption and salvation in heaven and that whatever trials and tribulations you have, you must be strong and brave. And that speaks to the kind of climate of what a revolutionary religion looks like that spreads in the first and second centuries right across the Roman Empire and of course deep into Asia too, where there are probably more Christians living in Asia, by the way, than in Europe until about 1400. But that cult of St. George, he becomes a poster boy partly because he's brave, he's a soldier. It's the age before the Roman Empire accepts Christianity. And we know that by about 5:30 there's a shrine at Lydda, or Lord in modern day Israel supposedly cons with his remains inside. There's still a sarcophagus there today that theoretically has the remains of some.
- [14:12]
C
Have you ever seen it, Peter?
- [14:14]
B
I have not. Not because I haven't wanted to. It's just I haven't been to the cathedral, but I know the building well because it's a building that has collapsed several times. The Cathedral of St. George is still a Greek Orthodox cathedral. And so it's been rebuilt many times. But the cult is already well established by then and starts to appear in other parts of the near east, like in southwestern Syria, Chaka and Ezra, quite soon after his supposed date of death. So he becomes famous, or the stories of George becomes famous and a sort of symbol early. He's a kind of influencer early on.
- [14:50]
C
And I think that's important because, you know, if we use the historical fiction analogy, this isn't a story that was invented, you know, a millennium later. This is a kind of contemporary mythology almost around the time of his life, he's already being venerated and the cult begins in a contemporaneous period. And you know, that in itself tells us something about what was happening at the time, about attitudes at the time, about experiences of Christians at the time, and about the culture of these Christian communities in what is now Syria and the Near East. We'd now call it the Middle East. So because we don't know the details of his actual life and because he has been an important figure almost since his lifetime, I think there's something of a blank slate to him, Peter, that he's become this kind of vessel into which different groups could project their values. And of course, way before English people were projecting anything onto St. George, it was people in the ancient Christian church who were projecting this idea of martyrdom onto him.
- [15:50]
B
And martyrdom is the sort of, you know, giving your life up for Christ or for your beliefs is obviously hugely significant as a sort of concept of the cornerstone of Christianity. So martyrdom, it means people who have through their lives been a witness to great suffering and they're examples for other people to follow. So St. George is hugely significant as a military saint. I mean, that's why people. I mean, we'll talk about that, about why he becomes so popular in England. But he also is a really exciting subject if you're an artist, because you could depict him in lots of different kinds of ways, particularly through gruesome images. And I suppose there's a flip side to it, which is that if you hear about St. George and his sufferings, whatever you're going through, it's not quite so bad. You know, most people don't get boiled in cauldrons. Most people don't have hot irons made into shoes and strapped your feet.
- [16:39]
C
It was the fact that he was boiled and roasted that really got me. Like usually it's one or the other, but the roasting, where you kind of put some oil and turn up that. I don't know, it's a very visceral idea.
- [16:51]
B
But I know you've also. We Talked about how St. George has a kind of context where you could read through notions of pagan sacrifice as well that far, don't you?
- [17:00]
C
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I'm fascinated about is how religions assimilate older forms of faith in the populations they convert. Because one of the best strategies for survival of any idea is to incorporate pre existing ideas to which people are already loyal because it makes the new idea more familiar, more accessible. It's like speaking to people in a language they understand. And there are loads of examples of how Christianity has taken ideas of pagan festivals. I mean, even pagan is such a loaded term. But, you know, older religions and their festivals of solstice or fertility and harvest, and in this case, there's this suggestion that the story of his constant torture and painful death and then reincarnation is also aligned to these older ideas about fertility and ritualized slaughter. You know, if you read the Old Testament, you'll see these ideas that the patriarchs were trying to fight with their idea of this one God. But this repeated cycle of death and renewal is very common. And this is a context where Roman ideas about the gods and the pantheon of gods and the figures that are revered in that culture are still very much alive. So it's not difficult to imagine that some of those ideas would have latched on to this Christian saint and that might have helped spread his popularity in a region that was used to older forms of pagan worship.
- [18:28]
B
And that goes further because George, the name comes from the Greek gyrgios, a tiller of soils, or a man who's connected to the land. And so, you know, we often, we don't tend to think about what people's names mean. I mean, I'm just Peter just means I'm a rock, which is not just don't be disturbed from a stone.
- [18:45]
C
That's a pretty sturdy, sturdy heritage you've got there.
- [18:48]
B
Don't get me wrong, there are not many of us anymore, not, not many Peters knocking around. But George also has a connection through being not just the patrons here to farming, but to the land. And that also has connections not just in other belief systems, but in kind of in paganism too. Right.
- [19:03]
C
Well, the name George is derived from geos, which means earth, as you'll know if, you know, think about the etymology of geology or geophysics or geography, and orge, which means work, hence one who works the earth. So these ideas are present in his name, somebody who is heavy with the weight of his virtues, somebody who's connected to the earth. Or there's another theory as well that the name comes from gerar holy and giyon struggle. So a holy fighter. And when we get a bit later in the story and the dragon enters the chat, we'll see how this idea of him as a warrior and as somebody fighting for a bigger cause also could have a resonance in the name itself.
- [19:47]
B
Did you say warrior or warrior?
- [19:49]
C
Warrior.
- [19:50]
B
Fighter, yeah. Not someone who's there worrying, did it make.
- [19:53]
C
How would you say warrior? Warrior.
- [19:55]
B
No, just very. No, it's Very elegant how you said it. I just sort of thought maybe he's also somebody who's got mental health.
- [20:00]
C
How would you say? Warrior, like with the A's.
- [20:03]
B
Exactly right. I mean, I just know. Just.
- [20:04]
C
Just double check worried that I was saying in a weird way.
- [20:07]
B
Worried.
- [20:07]
A
Worried, yes.
- [20:08]
C
And I don't know about the state of his mental health, and I don't think that record has been preserved. Although you'd think if you were being boiled and roasted alive, it would be challenged.
- [20:17]
B
Okay. Well, there's Also, you know, St. George in Europe sometimes has a connection with Green George. And I know that there are some discussions around what the role that George plays in other belief systems. So Al Khidr. In fact, there's a monument next to that St. George Cathedral in Lod, which is dedicated to Al Khidr. He's a man who appears in the Quran as a very righteous figure. And there are parallels between these two as being connected to improving your health and cures from diseases, mental illness. That's why I asked Afwa about warrior or warrior. But things like syphilis, leprosy, snake venom, plague, these things that come much later. But St. George is kind of always there in the background, defending against danger.
- [20:59]
C
I'll tell you, though, what he's not, as you said, he's a healer. He's a martyr. He's resurrected. He could have links to the earth and the Green man, but what he's not at this point in his story is somebody who's slaying dragons. And that is about to change.
- [21:24]
D
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- [21:27]
E
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- [21:34]
D
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- [21:38]
E
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- [21:42]
D
And the bras? Soft, supportive, and actually breathable.
- [21:46]
E
Yes. Lord knows the girls need to breathe. Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery, soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night. That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.
- [21:57]
D
Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.
- [22:00]
E
Put yourself on to Tommy John.
- [22:02]
D
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- [22:21]
C
So everybody who has heard of St. George knows basically one thing, and that is the dragon slaying part. Where does this come from Peter?
- [22:30]
B
Well, it's late. I mean St. George, we think he's, you know, around about year 300. That makes about. So that fits the kind of context when we start to hear about him. The first set of dragons that we have associated are not until the early Middle Ages, maybe about the year 950, 10 hundred, something like that. And it's interesting, I've got a sort of pet obsession about dragons appearing in European literatures.
- [22:53]
C
I thought you were going to say you had a pet dragon then. I was holding my breath for a second.
- [22:56]
B
I wasn't going to tell everybody about that. But now you've made me. So Rufus, come here. The connections, obviously dragons are to do with reptiles and snakes and there are lots of different cultures where there's a veneration or fear or both of saints in particular. And so I suspect that this is true connections with other parts of the world where there's things like snake worship in places like India, Central Asia and so on, where imageries of dragons and of exotic creatures speak about a world that's galvanizing and connecting to each other. But where do you first see the dragon popping up and do people believe the dragon story?
- [23:33]
C
Well, I think the dragon first appears on the arms of Moscow in the 9th and 10th centuries and in carvings in Prague. And even the early church is sceptical about this itself and deems the passio Giorgi apocryphal, saying that it's misleading people with feigned miracles and strange lies and that this skepticism of the church, this disapproval of the idea that there's a dragon linked with George has left a constant shadow around his cult. But actually dragons have already embedded themselves at this point in the popular imagination and they were unknown I think in England, but arrived with the Roman Empire in ancient times. The inhabitants of the British Isles so before the Romans invaded and before the Vikings came, were not known for having flags and banners and standards Peter in some instead they had. And this is something I'm actually personally very interested in a lot of tattoos, body art. In fact Britons literally means people of the designs and is derived from the Celtic preteni, which means basically decorated people. And that's because the inhabitants of the British Isles in that period, that's how they express themselves and how they adorn themselves on their actual bodies. So if you imagine into that these invaders coming, the Romans and the Vikings who had these standards and flags and images not on their bodies, but actually, you know, that they're holding that's on their armor and as a part of their paraphernalia. And one of the images on this very visually stimulating garb that these people have is dragons. And you can imagine how much of an impact that would have had on people who'd never seen anything like that before. Before.
- [25:16]
B
And the Vikings play a really important part in that. And dragons start to be imported to England by the Vikings. And I think that those connections that the Vikings have with river systems running south eventually connected to Central Asia and the Silk Roads are critical in all of this. I think that, that I'd love to do a. A legacy on the legacies of the Vikings and particularly Vikings going eastwards. But all of these kind of images start to transform ideas about art, about the mythological, about the afterlife. And they start to become really exciting in England because they're new. And so connecting St. George to this exotic, brave, deadly animal that no one's ever seen before, because amazingly, dragons don't exist. It is one that ruined that spoil as well.
- [26:03]
C
Poor Rudolph, whatever he's called. What did you call your pet dragon?
- [26:07]
B
Rufus. Rufus. Rufus, yeah. I don't know why that name sprung to my head. But anyway, we then start to see St. George become more popular anyway in the British Isles from the late 7th century. This is a time when Christians start to become more numerous in Britain and in Ireland, and ideas about famous saints, about relics, about the Bible start to disseminate. And so stories about bravery and about militarism and people standing up against adversity obviously falls on quite fertile ground. So because of that, St. George starts to become famous. And then the Crusades, the Hundred Years War, are what really transformed him into a key part of English identities. But tell me about the Crusades. Afwa. I mean, I say that because I know that I can tell you about the Crusades, but I don't want to hear my own voice anymore.
- [26:54]
C
And I want you to tell me about the Crusades. But I mean, the Crusades obviously are a massive and complex and quite long period in history. I think they often get flattened into like one phenomenon where there were many Crusades and they had complex causes and outcomes, but they certainly played a huge role in transforming St. George from this saint that had a cult around him, into this figure attached to royalty, to military victory, to this zeal for defending Christianity against so called infidels, and to this kind of magic, because there were these reports of miraculous apparitions, of St. George reporting in battles, for example, at Antioch in 1098, apparently a countless host of men on white horses with white banners appeared to aid the Crusaders. And actually, I'd like you to tell us a bit about the Crusades and how much this kind of. I don't know whether you call it mythology propaganda, but these narratives about there being some divine mission here was crucial to justifying what was essentially an incredibly violent expedition to murder and conquer in the Holy Land.
- [28:03]
B
Well, I'll take a quick step back, which is that the idea of St. George and his fame becomes completely properly established in the Christian Roman Empire, we call it now the East Roman or the Byzantine Empire. St. George is one of the three great military saints, along with St. Demetrius and St. Theodore. One of the reasons these three saints become so important is that in the 600s, you have a massive war between the Christian world and the Persian world, or the East Roman and the Persian empires, that sees the Persian armies reach the walls of Constantinople, the capital city where a sequence of saints helps save from the guaranteed disaster, including the Virgin Mary. But those saints as then the next wave comes through, the Persian Empire falls to the forces of the Arabs, who then build their own new empire. That religious confrontation between Islam and Christianity that starts in Asia Minor and the East Mediterranean from the 630s becomes the kind of key feature of the ways in which societies take different positions. And so military saints are incredibly important to explain military service, martyrdom, suffering, death. So that when you're fighting for Rome against your enemies, you're fighting for Christ and you're fighting for your faith as well. That makes them super famous. And St. George of the three is the one that catches fire back home.
- [29:21]
C
Can you help us, Peter, understand the link between that military symbolism of St. George as one of these three saints of the Crusaders with Englishness, and how he then evolves into becoming this very patriotic national saint? Because the Crusades obviously are an international endeavor. It's knights from all across Western Europe going on this mission. But St. George ends up at the end of this period, becoming a very English figure, at least in the English imagination. Obviously, other cultures still have their own relationship with him, and that's. Maybe something will come to.
- [29:57]
B
So there's a lot of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the holy places before the Crusades, so in the kind of ten hundreds in particular. And pilgrims quite often will mark their tunic with a red cross to show that they are going on a journey to the East. And so pilgrims are marking themselves to distinguish themselves.
- [30:13]
C
This is to distinguish themselves from regular.
- [30:16]
B
Joes who are on the way to go and buy and sell things in the shops or to go and, you know, whatever they might be up to. So. But when, when Pope Urban II calls for the First Crusade in 1095, he tells those who are going to go and fight to restore Christian sites to Christian hands to go and help the beleaguered Byzantine or Christian empire in the East. He tells the knights that they should sew the Cross of St. George into their tunics so that they can be seen to wear the cross on their sleeve or their heart on their sleeves, or the cross on their sleeves. I should say it's to mark that you are not just fighting, but you're fighting for your faith. And so the Crusaders, they use the symbolism incredibly carefully. Throughout the Crusades, when they get to the places where St. George came from and they get to Antioch, it's no coincidence that's the nearest big city to where St. George lived. They have the apparitions of St. George saving them from near disasters. In fact, not just Antioch, but several times during the expedition, those who then come back home start to propagate and start to talk about the importance of St. George as a figure. And they do that in lots of parts of Europe. It just so happens that the English get a kind of crusade bug. Our most famous crusader in England was a pretty useless one, Richard the Lionheart. And I know there are lots of Richard the Lionheart fans out there, so I mean it in the kind of context insofar as he didn't get what he really wanted to achieve, but he did have a cucumber sandwiches or something similar that he shared with Saladin to show how gentlemen should behave in battle. But that connection that England and the British Isles had with the Crusades was incredibly important. So it crystallizes interest in St. George, crystallizes that Red Cross, and crystallizes that England has a connection with the idea of crusading as we come later on in the story. It's no coincidence that as Britain, as it then is, becomes the greatest one of the great colonial powers of history, that that flag is saying at the image of St. George, it's that it's not just we're giving you English values, we're giving you Christian values and ones that we've learned from the source of early Christianity.
- [32:08]
C
And I, I don't know if this was intentional, but if you think of it like that, it's also saying, and by the way, this English evangelizing mission is potentially violent and regards those who don't conform to our ideas of Christian virtue as the enemy and potential targets for death.
- [32:26]
B
So, yeah, that's, that's, that's true, but it's, it's. This is. These are mounted. I mean, we find that. We might find that hard to agree with or understand, but these are mounted defensive wars because Christianity is on the back foot, and the pressures on the holy sites and the holy lands means that an intervention is required. So the Crusades happen because of a collapse of Christianity in the east at a point where extinction looks like a possibility, if not a probability. So the people who head east, they're not just going there to go and chop people's heads off because they can't stand them. There's a lot of respect between Islamic and Christian traditions and Islamic and Christian fighters. In fact, with the case of Saladin and Richard the Lionheart is a very good example on the fact that there can be mutual understanding. But definitely there's an existential crisis that goes on. And St. George acts as the kind of the shield of those who are going. So it's no surprise, I guess, that people are going out to evangelize, even the colonial era Afron. And I know that we're going to talk about that. They think that they're going there to save people. They think they're going there to help. And violence doesn't always accompany the process of evangelization, but it does often.
- [33:30]
C
So St. George goes from being this figure of the Crusades to now becoming more domesticated in the English landscape. And we start to hear The Cry for St. George and Merry England being cried out in battle, especially at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 and against the French at the Battle of Sluys in 1340. And then we get to Edward III.
- [33:51]
B
Peter, love Edward III.
- [33:53]
C
I knew you would.
- [33:54]
B
He's my favorite, Edward, partly because he founds the Order of the Garter, which is the oldest heraldic and chivalric order in Europe. And the reason why I'm very keen on Edward is that he insists that the sashes that the Knights of the Garter are still a very important order today is made from Mongol silk, and I guess where that comes from my beloved silk roads. So St. George becomes something that's connected to the Royal crown here. It's patronized and protected and been forced or opened up by the King, I should say, as a way of rewarding your closest followers. At the same time as the Order of the Guard being founded, the chapel at Windsor is rededicated to St. George and the Virgin Mary. And recently we've had President Trump here and he got to stay in Windsor Castle because the security in London was going to be too tight or there were going to be too many protesters, either which way. But he was shown the Chapel of St George in Windsor, which is the kind of the place where royals have their funerals, too. So it's an incredibly important elision between royal power and St. George and a man who lived a couple of thousand years ago in Cappadocia.
- [35:03]
C
By the end of the Middle Ages, St. George has undeniably become the patron saint of England. His cross is its Standard, and nearly 200 parish churches in England are dedicated to him. The province of Canterbury even elevates St. George's Day to a major double feast in 1415, making it equal to Christmas in its solemnity, requiring abstinence from manual labor and mandatory church attendance. And the province of York followed suit in 1421. It's funny, Peter, because we recently did a series on Martin Luther, and I suspect this is the kind of thing he was railing against, the idea that you could put a feast for a saint on a par with marking the birth of Jesus.
- [35:44]
B
But he had no idea, that guy. I would take a major double feast. Can you imagine a double bank holiday? Mandatory church attendance. You know, you've got to choose your church carefully because you can get. You can step into it with an extremely long sermon. Our local church here is fantastic. So, you know, I'd pop in there and then abstinence from manual labor, no problem at all. I'd take that like a shot. I suspect most of the country would. But the fact that it's St. George is important in the middle ages doesn't mean that there's an unbroken line, does it? Afro? So tell us about what happens as Martin Luther and his adherents, followers and the Protestant reformers take root.
- [36:18]
C
The Reformation, which is inspired by Martin Luther, but not necessarily directly part of his legacy, because Henry viii had his whole own agenda, as we dealt with in our last season. But the Reformation is a big blow to St. George. I mean, it's a blow to all of these ancient traditions of saints and religious holidays. And then in England, you have Protestant reformers like John Calvin. You have the impact of enlightenment thinkers in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries who are actively attacking his existence. These are people who take a very rational approach to history, to ideas, and they're very, very skeptical of these miracles. You know, they describe them as feigned miracles and strange lies. And I think their perspective is probably quite familiar to us because we also live in an age where the idea of, you know, someone being killed and then being born again and boiled alive and Coming back again, you know, it's difficult to see square with our understanding of how science, biology works. But of course, the idea is that this is symbolism, it's not necessarily literal. But the Reformation is the time when these ideas become separated, you know, the literal and the metaphysical. And it has a real impact on St. George. He kind of like falls out of favor.
- [37:33]
B
Well, it doesn't help that, you know, the dragon, no one's really seen one of those two recently. So it all looks like it's all set for Rufus, except for my pet dragon. But then, you know, Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII, goes further. He takes away St. George's name and the red cross from the garter badge and replaces it with a nameless, armed knight on horseback. So that sort of sense of humour failure that comes with the Reformers. If you heard us on Martin Luther, you'll know exactly what we mean. But that's not the end aphorism. That doesn't mean that it's all bad news for St. George.
- [38:04]
C
Well, no, he does make a bit of a comeback, and even in this era, he's still kind of lurking in the background. You know, we've got Edmund Spenser's the Fairy Queen in 1590 and Richard Johnson, who writes Seven Champions of Christendom in 1596. And these works recast St. George. They acknowledge that it's maybe not a story of literal historical fact, but they're reframing it as mythical part of the English imagination. The knight that Spenser imagines, for example, is born in England, not the Middle East. Clearly a massive departure from historical fact. And this story focuses entirely on the dragon slaying and the knightly romance. So now we're into this chivalric, literary, post Chaucerian world where there's a more romantic relationship with figures like this. And so, you know, the geopolitical facts, the experience of Rome and the specific battles he fought in are no longer the main event. The main event now is the. The storytelling and what that means and.
- [39:07]
B
What'S interesting, that recasting of Christian stories, you know, you start to get the idea of Joseph of Arimathea, that he must have visited Somerset, you know, where people. When, you know, occasionally, I think I mentioned before, I quite enjoy cricket. But, you know, when you hear Jerusalem being sung at a cricket ground or at a kind of special occasion in a church, you know, the lie that always sticks out is, we'll build Jerusalem here in these green and pleasant lands. Because, you know, quite frankly, it's a lot easier to get to Surrey than it is to.
- [39:31]
C
Sorry, Peter, but are you saying that Jesus didn't come to Glastonbury? Because I'm not ready for that.
- [39:36]
B
I'll leave that open for a separate episode. But, you know, that recasting and of making somebody become a local hero with local roots is a way of repackaging that, you know, has its own interesting, own story. And so in the case of St. George, you know, we have Richard Johnson, you mentioned, says that St. George came slightly, improbably, from Coventry, and that he's the father of Guy Warwick, a famous knight who has birthmarks of dragons, bloody crosses and and so on, and doesn't even mention martyrdom, because that's more complicated in the Elizabethan era. And the idea about saints anyway. But that kind of rebranding and remoulding of St. George, I think, is a really quite an interesting one. And it gets complicated by the act of union, doesn't it?
- [40:19]
C
In 1707, Great Britain is created out of a union between England and Scotland, introducing the union flag. And that means that St. George's flag has to have a new life as part of this combined flag, with the St. Andrew's flag later adding St. Patrick's flag due to the colonization of Ireland. So now you've got a kind of reframing of the role of St. George. Instead of being the sole patron of England, he's incorporated into a broader British identity. And, you know, we could do a whole episode on the construction of identities and the construction of Britishness, subject very close to my heart, because I wrote British, which is really about how Britishness has been constructed through imperialism and how it applies to racialized identities. But here what we've got is St. George becoming part of a bigger idea about Englishness and its role in Britishness.
- [41:17]
B
And I think that starts to become quite interesting because as Britain's horizons start to expand, it's not just the act of union that is geopolitically significant. It's the fact that British people are starting to find themselves in different parts of the world in different kinds of capacities. And so having a connection back to early Christian figures is really important. So St. George is going to play very interesting roles in the way that English people, British people, both at home and abroad and overseas, see themselves. And we're going to look at that on our next episode of Legacy.
- [42:01]
D
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E
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