St. George’s Day
Reflections on Englishness
23 April is not only St. George’s Day, but the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death. So, it seems a very appropriate day for me to reflect on that strange condition: being English.
Like most national identities, it is a mass of contradictions. St. George embodies this well; precisely because what we know about him for certain is that he was not English. He was born in Cappadocia, which would be in modern-day Turkey. He died in Lydda in Palestine, having never come near the British Isles. Since his life was at the end of the third century CE, he was not the knight that he is commonly depicted to be, and the dragon story was tacked on much later; at least 500 years later. So, he’s an amalgam. Put it together, and George symbolises the reality that England created its national culture largely by appropriating the creations of others. George himself has an international following. He is also the patron saint of Ethiopia, Catalonia, and Genoa. There’s a good chance that English merchant ships flew the flag of St. George initially as an attempt to pass as Genoese since at the time they had a bigger and more formidable navy.
