St George's Day - April 23rd
The red cross on a white background is an instantly recognisable emblem of England. During international football and rugby tournaments, the flag hangs from pub ceilings, flutters from taxi bonnets, and is painted on the faces of fanatical supporters. It is waved at the Last Night of the Proms, and flown from church towers on St George’s Day (April 23rd) and seen flying on some flag poles within the local community .

Its use goes back to the Hundred Years War, when George was adopted as England’s national saint, and his name used as the English war cry. He has also since given his name to two awards for bravery, one of which – the George Cross – was famously awarded to the whole island of Malta for its people's bravery during the second world war.

We all recognise St George's cross as the symbol of England. But do you know how long it has been in use, or what it means?

St George's Flag
The national flag of England has the overriding virtue of utter simplicity – especially when compared to the Union flag. On the white background of spiritual purity is inscribed the blood-red martyr’s cross of St George. This makes it a pleasingly straightforward design to paint on your face when supporting English sports teams!

St George is one of the busiest among patron saints. He isn’t just ours, but also looks after the Catalans and the Lithuanians, among others, and is the protector of various groups, including butchers and people afflicted with bubonic plague. English troops have been carrying the red cross standard into battle at least since the 13th century, when it was borne alongside the banners of England’s other early martyrs - St Edmund and St Edward the Confessor.

George’s martyrdom is associated with conspicuous gallantry, as has been celebrated throughout our history. The chivalrous Order of the Garter, created in the 14th century, has George as its patron, while his namesake King George VI instituted the George Cross and the George Medal for outstanding acts of courage in the face of mortal danger. During the second world war, the whole population of Malta was awarded the George Cross for their courage in standing up to German bombardment.

The History of the Flag
St George has been the official patron saint of England since the reign of Edward III in the 14th century. However, we know that his banner – the martyr’s red cross on the white ground of purity – was being carried into battle by English forces a long time before that.

Word had it that he appeared at the head of a spectral column of white horses during the early Crusades, turning the Battle of Antioch in the Christians’ favour in 1098. The first known appearance of the red cross in English battle lines dates from 1277, when it was carried as a banner during Edward I’s war to capture Welsh territory.

It reappeared in 1300 at the siege of Caerlaverock Castle during Edward’s campaigns in Scotland, but the banners of St Edmund (three crowns) and St Edward (five birds around a cross) were also carried then. At this time, Edmund and Edward (known as the Confessor) were still the patron saints of England.

St George’s flag seems gradually to have assumed greater prominence in combat during the reigns of the first two Edwards, and by the middle of the 14th century, not only were English forces used to calling on his aid in battle, but he had become identified in the common mind as the nation’s presiding saint. When Edward III created the chivalric Order of the Garter in 1348, it was St George who was adopted as its patron. The medieval French chronicler Jean Froissart, who visited the British Isles extensively in the later 14th century, refers several times to English forces praying to St George before going into combat.

According to a historian writing two centuries later, Edward III “appointed his soldiers to wear white Coats or Jackets, with a red Crosse before and behind over their Armoure, that it was not only a comely, but a stately sight to behold the English Battles, like the rising Sunne, to glitter farre off in that pure hew; when the soldiers of other nations in their baser weedes would not be discerned.”

By the time English forces were engaged in France early in the next century, the emblem of St George was an indispensable item of battle regalia. The red cross was flown from the masts of ships at the siege of Harfleur in 1415. At the decisive Battle of Agincourt later the same year, a disease-ravaged English remnant at the point of exhaustion famously routed the cream of the French nobility in George’s name. As so often, Shakespeare supplies us with the words that resonate down the centuries, when he has Henry V shout to the troops before the crucial advance: “Follow your spirit; and upon this charge/ Cry God for Harry, England and St George!”

The use of the saint’s name as a war cry didn’t survive the Reformation, when praying to saints was frowned on as a specifically Catholic practice. The boy king Edward VI, who devoted much of his brief reign to shoring up the Church of England founded by his father, Henry VIII, decreed in 1552 that, while the saint’s name was no longer to be invoked during battle, the symbol of the Red Cross was to be retained. This indicates the degree to which the banner had become associated with English military might as much as with St George himself.

Three patron saints?
It could be (and has been) argued that England effectively has three patron saints, in Edmund, Edward and George. This is because there is no mechanism, under the auspices of either the Church or state, for electing a new saint or for standing one down.

George may have usurped the earlier pair as the focus of military allegiance, and then popular affection, but he has no greater claim than either of the other two to his official standing. His is the flag, however, that we all know and recognise as the symbol of the English nation. (It’s also a whole lot easier to paint on your face when you’re going to support an England team than a device with three crowns or five birds would be.)

The St George flag is also the official flag, or ensign, of the Royal Navy. Since a reorganisation of the service in 1864, the White Ensign, as it is known, is reserved exclusively for Royal Naval vessels (including submarines) and onshore buildings and, as such, has precedence over the Blue and Red Ensigns. The White Ensign is comprised of the red cross on its white field, with a Union flag in the upper left quadrant (the “canton”).

Why St George?
All we know of St George is that he was a Christian soldier in the Roman army, martyred in Palestine or Nicomedia (in what is now Turkey) in the early fourth century. So how did this obscure figure end up as our patron saint?

St George was killed during the last and most terrible of the Roman persecutions of Christians, under Emperor Diocletian, lasting from AD 302-5. Around ten years after his death, a Christian emperor, Constantine, came to power, and George was now one of many martyrs revered as a saint. He was a popular saint in the east, and a Church in his honour was built at the site of his grave, in Lydda, Palestine.

The cult of the saint was given a huge boost during the First Crusade, when he was said to have appeared to the crusading armies at the Battle of Dorylaeum, in 1097, and the Siege of Antioch, in 1198. Both were great crusading victories, and so St George came to be seen as a protector of Christian soldiery.

Dragon killer
The story of St George killing the dragon was first told, in the east, in the 11th century. It was popularised in Europe by the Italian writer, Jacobus de Voragine (1229-1281) in his collection of saints' lives, The Golden Legend. In the late 15th century, this was the most widely printed book in Europe. According to Jacobus, a town called Sylene in Libya was terrorised by a dragon. The local people had to provide the monster with a female victim every day, chosen by lot. When St George visited the town, he discovered that the king's daughter was the chosen victim. St George wounded the dragon, and then led it back to Sylene, where he told the people that he would kill the monster if they converted to Christianity. When they agreed, he chopped off its head.

A Saint for England
In the early Middle Ages, England had two patron saints who were both kings: St Edmund the Martyr, the ninth century king of East Anglia, and St Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042-66). Neither were military figures. Edmund was defeated and killed by the Vikings in 870, and Edward was a man of peace, who never fought a battle.

It was England's growth as a powerful military nation, from the late 14th century, that led to the adoption of the soldier saint as a patron. King Edward I (reigned 1272-1307), a great warrior, was the first monarch to display St George's cross on his royal banners, alongside the arms of Saints Edmund and Edward. It is not known how the red cross came to be identified with Saint George, though one theory is that it derives from the red cross worn by the crusading order of the Knights Templar.

Edward I's grandson, Edward III (reigned 1312-77), another soldier king, was even more devoted to St George. In 1348, following his great victory over the French at Crécy, he founded the chivalric Order of the Garter, whose main patron was St George. At his royal castle in Windsor, he founded the Chapel of St George to serve as the Order's ceremonial home. It had its own religious brotherhood of canons, to serve the saint.

King Henry V (reigned 1413-22) used the cult of St George to promote his own image as a soldier of Christ. When Henry invaded France, in 1415, he ordered his soldiers to wear a large red cross of St George on their chests and backs. His battle cry at Agincourt was, "Cry God for Harry England and St George!" On his return to England, Henry held a victory parade through London, marching through a triumphal arch topped with a statue of St George in armour, wearing a laurel wreath of victory.

In 1416, the German Emperor Sigismund gave Henry a prized relic, the supposed heart of St George. For safekeeping, Henry gave this to the Saint's Chapel at Windsor, where it joined other relics acquired by earlier kings - part of St George's arm, a piece of his head, and two of his fingers. The Saint now had a physical presence in England, and the canons of the Chapel proudly carried his relics in religious processions.

An English Saint
The Saint was also popular with ordinary people, and the story of his fight with the dragon was acted in mummers' plays, still performed on St George's Day. Many people came to believe that that Saint was an Englishman, and the ancient chalk figure of a White Horse at Uffington in Berkshire was reinterpreted as an image of the dragon. A hill nearby, called Dragon Hill, was believed to be the place where the Saint fought the monster. There is an area on top of the hill where grass never grows, supposedly because it was here that the dragon's poisonous blood was spilled.