by Kenneth Humphreys
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God for Harry! England and Saint George!" -- Shakespeare, Henry V act 3, sc. 1, l. 31
St George's links with England are decidedly tenuous. Needless to say, there is no evidence at all to link him to the killing of a dragon. Is there even any evidence that George himself existed?
Working backwards through the centuries of self-serving pious fable (the ‘knightly’ George was brought back to England by the crusaders in the twelfth/thirteenth centuries and was subsequently popularised by Caxton) we find that in the eighth century it was believed that George had visited Caerleon and Glastonbury while serving as a member of Emperor Constantine's staff! Yet when we reach the fifth century we find that neither the Syrian list of saints nor the so-called Hieronymian Martyrologium commemorate a St George at all. About this time, however, Pope Gelasius records that St. George was among those saints ‘whose names are justly reverenced among men but whose actions are only known to God’.
Not that a shortage of fact would have held back imaginative Christian scribes. Indeed, in keeping with the spirit of the times, a great many ‘apocryphal acts’ of Saint George were in circulation which presented at great length not a dragon-slayer but an early Christian martyr. The supposed passion of St George involved an endless variety of tortures which the saint had endured and had miraculously survived. These legendary ‘acts’ point back to an earlier mishmash of Ethiopic, Syriac and Coptic tradition, all derived from an unknown Greek original. The 4th or 5th century Coptic texts managed at one and the same time to relate George to the Governor of Cappadocia, to the Count of Lydda in Palestine and to Joseph of Arimathea! These utterly fantastic tales were condemned by the Catholic church not for their fantasy but because they were the work of heretics. All these early churches had been under the sway of Arians. Hence, the Acta Sancti Georgii were outlawed by Pope Gelasius in AD 496.
Subsequent Catholic attitude softened, and an approved legend rescued George from the heretics and placed him in the reign of Diocletian, a favourite villain of the Christians. George was given a noble birth, Christian parents, and a tenacious commitment to the faith. He is made a Roman cavalry officer, who bravely complains to the nasty Emperor of the harshness of his decrees. George refuses to carry out orders to persecute the Church and for his defiance is thrown into prison and tortured. But George doesn’t go quietly. In fact, he is brutally tortured to death, yet is raised to life again three times. Much of his passion was modelled on that of Christ himself, and it was for that reason that the Feast of St George was celebrated near to Easter (18 and 23 April).
What this ‘official’ legend symbolized was the victory of Christianity over paganism. Hence the image of St. George is of a brave warrior, defeating enemies of the faith by Christian forbearance. In many of the ‘traditions’ the climax of the story actually has George smashing idols. This is the clue to the true origin of our hero – not at the beginning of the fourth century but half a century later, when Christianity defeated the briefly resurgent paganism of Emperor Julian.
The ‘real' George was a rather different character from the paragon of fiction. As has been pointed out by Gibbon, Vetter, and others, ‘St. George’ is a legendary accretion around a notorious fourth century bishop, George of Cappadocia. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia concedes that it is ‘not improbable that the apocryphal Acts have borrowed some incidents from the story of the Arian bishop.’
The future archbishop of Alexandria began his career as a humble cloth worker in Cilicia (now southern Turkey). By ‘assiduous flattery’ or other means he acquired the contract to supply the Roman army with bacon. Says Gibbon:
‘His employment was mean; he rendered it infamous. He accumulated wealth by the basest arts of fraud and corruption; but his malversations were so notorious, that George was compelled to escape from the pursuits of justice.’
Making his way to Palestine, George set himself up in the religion business at Diospolis (Lydda), where he became a profane grandee of the ruling Arian Christians. As a wealthy and influential opponent of the Catholic Athanasius he was well-placed to take the bishop’s chair in Alexandria when Athanasius was driven into exile. In his new lofty station George gave free reign to his greed and cruelty, establishing several commercial monopolies and pillaging the ancient temples. ‘The tyrant…oppressed with an impartial hand the various inhabitants of his extensive diocese.’ (Gibbon). So incensed were the inhabitants that on at least one occasion he was expelled by a mob and it required troops to get him back into the bishop’s palace.
His end came with the elevation of Julian to the purple. The angry pagans of Alexandria (probably aided by Catholics) took their revenge on George by throttling the bishop and dumping his body in the sea. Emperor Julian himself sequestered the extensive library which George had acquired. Yet the notorious prelate was to achieve a nobility in death which had been denied to him in life. His family built a tomb and a church to house it at Lydda, and attracted a profitable traffic in pilgrims. The venality of his life was white-washed and, thanks to the creative scribblers for Christ two hundred years later, his name was attached to a colourful story of piety, fortitude, divine deliverance and – ultimately – a princess and a dragon. As Gibbon famously records:
‘This odious stranger disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the mask of a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero, and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England, the patron of arms, of chivalry, and of the Garter.’
The large red Saint George's cross on a white ground remains still the ‘white ensign’ of the British Navy and it is also one of the elements which go to make up the Union "Jack".
Quite a success story for an unmitigated rogue – and bacon salesman.