Saint Johnny Foreigner?

 

Well, for a start...yes, I can believe the Guardian published this. 

But the issue here for me is that I cannot quite work out whether the historical illiteracy is genuine or somehow put on.

And it's not just the name checks here for Turkey and Palestine. It's the failure to address why George was chosen as the patron saint of England c1350, effectively usurping card-carrying 'native' martyr and hero St Edmund (an East Anglian murdered by Danes, who probably had no real concept of England anyway.)

George was not picked because of any physical connection to the British Isles, but because he was then supposed to best represent a set of trans-civilisational values which on the domestic front went under the banner of 'Chivalric' and on the foreign policy plane as 'Crusading'.

He is thus the totem of an enduring us and them divide, Good vs Evil, but perhaps specifically Christian virtues perceived as the metric of good versus pagan and heathen ways perceived as the essence of all that is bad. (There was of course no GB News to get this message across back then.)

Mocking St George's modern adherents this way today, the Guardian either doesn't know this, or does not want to know it. They appear to be blocking their minds to the symbolism, as if that alone will be enough to make them appear more rational than the flag wavers.

Yet I suspect that the people who now march behind George's banner are, on some levels at least, aware of this ancient payload, and therefore the newspaper's attempt to paint them as ignorant and silly (which they may otherwise be, of course) is in this instance, some way off the mark and not really a winning gesture in the debate. It's all bit 'you hate foreigners, but your saint was himself a foreigner, haha'.

There's one more intriguing little component to the relationship of this outsider with his adopted nation, with perhaps a dollop or two of lasting relevance.

By 1350 the English had become used to having far flung foreign superheroes imposed upon them by the dominant culture across the channel, starting, one might say, with Jesus Himself.

After conquest and colonisation by a French-speaking version of continental civilisation in 1066, this process was amplified, as the local language and identity were actively suppressed, and alternative, more Anglo-Saxon legends, like that of Alfred, seriously underplayed.

King Arthur attained the status he did in the early Middle Ages precisely because he was NOT English.

So St George fit the pattern, but the pattern was in transition.

The Hundred Years War was in progress and for the first time many of the knights lining up against their French counterparts could speak English...and reportedly enjoyed doing so, especially when any Frenchies were nearby.

So as well as representing a set of Christian, chivalric ideals, St George also came to oversee a kind of cultural reunification of the ruling elites with the masses of England, in clear opposition to the other lot on the other side of the channel e.g. proper nationhood, with its own set of us and them narratives: "Cry God for Harry, England and St George!"