As is widely appreciated, St George owes much of his popularity in England to the enthusiasm of Edward III. In 1348, when the king established the Order of the Garter, his super-select chivalric club, he picked George as its special patron, at the same time designating his birthplace, Windsor Castle, as the order’s spiritual headquarters, and rededicating the chapel there (formerly devoted to St Edward) in the saint’s honour. Just three years later the king was pleased to refer to St George in his letters as ‘the most invincible athlete of Christ, whose name and protection the English nation invoke as that of their patron, especially in war’.
This was, it seems, a considerable exaggeration. Recent historical writing, while still giving Edward III full credit for establishing George’s cult on the firmest of royal footings, has questioned the saint’s popularity with the English people as a whole. George may have been beloved of Edward and his knights, but it was not until the fifteenth century, in the wake of the victories of Henry V, that his cult really began to assume a truly national status. Moreover, while it is clear that Edward was particularly devoted to St George from an early age, it is also apparent that interest in the saint’s cult had been intensifying in royal and aristocratic circles for some time before the king’s accession.
The cult of St George, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century, transferred to England in two phases. He was known to the Anglo-Saxons, but only in his original manifestation as an early Christian martyr. To judge from the minimal number of references to him, he was never very popular in this guise, and some authorities – Bede, for example – clearly considered him to be a dubious addition to the saintly canon. By the time of the Norman Conquest, however, George had been reinvented as a Byzantine soldier-saint, and his new-found military prowess made him irresistibly popular with the knights of western Christendom, many of whom went east themselves in the course of the First Crusade. Indeed, a quantum leap for George’s popularity in the West was his reported appearance in aid of the First Crusaders during their successful siege of Antioch in 1098; soon thereafter we find some of the earliest images of St George as a knight on tombs and church doorways in England.
When did he move from the margins to the mainstream? One thing is now certain – the shift had nothing to do with Richard the Lionheart. Until very recently, any book on the subject of St George would invariably assert that his first flush of popularity in England, if not his introduction to these shores, was due to the devotion of the famous crusader king. Richard, it was confidently reported, had beheld a vision of George during the siege of Acre, rebuilt a church in his honour at Lydda, and, most significantly, had adopted the saint’s emblem – the red cross on a white ground – as England’s arms. This tradition, however, was completely discredited fifteen years ago by Oliver de Laborderie, who showed Richard’s connection with St George to be entirely spurious, a legend invented for political purposes at the Tudor court and unquestioningly accepted and embellished thereafter. Contemporary sources for Richard’s reign mention neither visions nor church-building, and inform us that the king and his crusaders wore white crosses, not red ones. Apart from the incidental fact that he was married in a church dedicated to St George, Richard has no demonstrable connection with him at all.
As far as can be determined, the earliest interest in St George in royal and aristocratic circles in England was expressed two generations after Richard’s death, in the middle decades of the thirteenth century. In 1245, for example, King Henry III paid a certain Henry the Versemaker for writing an account of George’s life, and a decade later he ordered an image of the saint to be installed over the entrance to the hall at Winchester Castle. Similarly, at some point before his death in 1251, Paulin Piper, one of the king’s closest courtiers, composed some lines of poetry (now sadly lost) in George’s honour, while in 1251 itself, William de Cantilupe, a baron with strong court connections, decided to call his firstborn son George – the earliest person mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to bear that name after the saint himself.
Possibly this early English interest in St George had something to do with crusading – it is interesting to note that each of the above men – Henry III, Piper and Cantilupe – had taken the cross. At the same time, none of them actually went on crusade; their interest in George equally likely to have been stirred by the growing enthusiasm that his cult was attracting elsewhere in Europe. In England itself that enthusiasm remained muted. These are the only two references to connect Henry III with George in a 56 year reign, compared with the thousands that link the king to his favourite saint, Edward the Confessor, in whose honour he rebuilt Westminster Abbey. Likewise, young George de Cantilupe may have been the first of that name, but for a long time he was also the last. Of the 1550 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography for the thirteenth century, he is the only George.
If there was significant interest in St George at Henry’s court, it is less likely to have been driven by the king, whose model was the peaceable and pious Confessor, than by the more martial and mettlesome members of his family circle. Henry’s queen, for instance, Eleanor of Provence, was an avid reader of romance literature and an enthusiastic devotee of the cult of chivalry. A romance work written for her after Henry’s death contains only a passing reference to St George, but its very terseness shows that by this date (1270s) the saint had become a byword for knightly prowess.
More likely still to have been an advocate for St George was Henry’s son, the Lord Edward, later to reign as the formidable Edward I. Henry may have had no need for a military role model, but that was not true of Edward and his contemporaries, who hungered for glory on the tournament field, and who yearned to go on crusade. For these young men George would have been an ideal patron, and it is therefore probably significant that, when Henry’s reign collapsed into civil war, they rode into battle against Simon de Montfort wearing red crosses on a white ground – the earliest recorded use of the saint’s device in England, although not identified as such in the sources.
Unequivocal evidence of Edward’s identification with St George, and the biggest advance for his standing in England before the founding of the Garter, came in the course of the English conquest of Wales. In both his campaigns against the Welsh (1276–77 and 1282–83) Edward led armies that marched behind St George’s banner, and his infantry were issued with St George’s cross armbands, now explicitly described as such in royal financial accounts. The association of George with the conquest was further underlined on the king’s return to England in 1285, when he gave thanks for his victory by presenting four gold figures at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral: St Edward and St John, the favourites of his father, were now joined by St George and his horse.
Edward I was clearly not as singularly devoted to St George as his namesake grandson. Indeed, when it came to the heavenly host, he preferred to recruit as widely as possible. In later campaigns against the Scots his troops still carried George’s banner, but they also bore the arms of St Edward, St Edmund, St Cuthbert and St John of Beverley. Nor does Edward appear to have had any marked personal interest in George’s cult. He regularly gave alms St George’s day (23 April), but did the same for scores of other saints. More tellingly, in the inventory of royal relics taken after the king’s death in 1307, George finds no mention.
In this respect, therefore, the prominence given to St George during the conquest of Wales seems peculiar and precocious, and one naturally wonders what lay behind it. Edward, unlike his father, had not only taken the cross but had also been on crusade (1270–72); as an experienced holy warrior, it was perhaps unsurprising that his struggle against the Welsh should assume the aspect of a holy war. More tentatively, one cannot help but wonder, given the longstanding association of the Celtic peoples with the image of the dragon, whether George was invoked because of his special skills in the slaying department. Certainly the dragon legend, which had formed no part of George’s earliest lives, was known in England by this date.
Whatever the case, Edward I’s decision to invoke St George as his special patron during the conquest of Wales – the earliest recorded occasion on which English armies marched under St George’s banner – was a seemingly unique experiment, and George had to wait another two generations before he his pre-eminent status was assured.
Would he have had to wait so long, however, had events in 1284 taken a slightly different turn? In the wake of his conquest of Wales, Edward returned to Snowdonia for a series of carefully contrived victory celebrations, and on 25 April, his queen, Eleanor of Castile, gave birth at Caernarfon Castle to a son who would eventually become his father’s successor. But would Edward II have borne that name had he arrived just 48 hours earlier? Might the fourteenth century, rather than the eighteenth century, have seen our first King George?