Martyr, patron of
England, suffered at or near
Lydda, also known as Diospolis, in Palestine, probably before the
time of Constantine. According to the very careful investigation of the whole question recently instituted by Father Delehaye, the
Bollandist, in the light of modern sources of information, the above statement sums up all that can safely be
affirmed about St. George, despite his early cultus and pre-eminent renown both in East and West (see Delehaye, "Saints Militaires", 1909, pp.45-76).
Earlier studies of the subject have generally been based upon an attempt to determine which of the various sets of legendary "Acts" was most likely to preserve traces of a primitive and
authentic record. Delehaye rightly points out that the earliest narrative known to us, even though fragments of it may be read in a palimpsest of the fifth century, is full beyond
belief of extravagances and of quite incredible marvels. Three times is George put to death-chopped into small pieces,
buried deep in the earth and consumed by fire-but each
time he is resuscitated by the power of
God. Besides this we have dead men brought to life to be
baptized, wholesale conversions, including that of "the Empress Alexandra", armies and idols destroyed instantaneously, beams of timber suddenly bursting into leaf, and finally milk flowing instead of blood from the
martyr's severed head. There is, it is
true, a mitigated form of the story, which the older
Bollandists have in a measure taken under their protection (see Act. SS., 23 Ap., no. 159). But even this abounds both in marvels and in historical contradictions, while modern critics, like Amelineau and Delehaye, though approaching the question from very different standpoints, are agreed in thinking that this mitigated version has been derived from the more extravagant by a process of elimination and rationalization, not vice versa. Remembering the unscrupulous freedom with which any wild story, even when
pagan in origin, was appropriated by the early
hagiographers to the
honour of a popular saint (see, for example, the case of St. Procopius as detailed in Delehaye, "Legends", ch. v) we are fairly safe in assuming that the Acts of St. George, though ancient in
date and preserved to us (with endless variations) in many different languages, afford absolutely no indication at all for arriving at the
saint's authentic history. This, however, by no means implies that the
martyr St. George never existed. An ancient cultus, going back to a very early epoch and connected with a definite locality, in itself constitutes a strong historical argument. Such we have in the case of St. George. The narratives of the early
pilgrims, Theodosius, Antoninus, and Arculphus, from the sixth to the eighth century, all speak of
Lydda or Diospolis as the seat of the veneration of St. George, and as the resting-place of his remains (Geyer, "Itinera Hierosol.", 139, 176, 288). The early
date of the dedications to the
saint is attested by existing inscriptions of ruined churches in
Syria, Mesopotamia, and
Egypt, and the church of St. George at
Thessalonica is also considered by some authorities to belong to the fourth century. Further the famous
decree "De Libris recipiendis", attributed to
Pope Gelasius in 495, attests that certain
apocryphal Acts of St. George were already in
existence, but includes him among those
saints "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are only known to
God".
There seems, therefore, no ground for
doubting the historical
existence of St. George, even though he is not commemorated in the
Syrian, or in the primitive Hieronymian Martyrologium, but no
faith can be placed in the attempts that have been made to fill up any of the details of his history. For example, it is now generally admitted that St. George cannot safely be identified by the nameless
martyr spoken of by
Eusebius (Hist. Eccles., VIII, v), who tore down
Diocletian's edict of
persecution at
Nicomedia. The version of the legend in which
Diocletian appears as persecutor is not primitive.
Diocletian is only a rationalized form of the name Dadianus. Moreover, the connection of the
saint's name with
Nicomedia is inconsistent with the early cultus at Diospolis.
Still less is St. George to be considered, as suggested by Gibbon, Vetter, and others, a legendary double of the disreputable
bishop, George of Cappadocia, the
Arian opponent of
St. Athanasius. "This odious stranger", says Gibbon, in a famous passage, "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." "But this theory,says Professor Bury, Gibbon's latest editor, "has nothing to be said for it." The cultus of St. George is too ancient to allow of such an identification, though it is not improbable that the
apocryphal Acts have borrowed some incidents from the story of the
Arian bishop. Again, as Bury points out, "the connection of St. George with a dragon-slaying legend does not relegate him to the region of the myth, for over against the fabulous
Christian dragon-slayer Theodore of the Bithynian Heraclaea, we can set Agapetus of
Synnada and Arsacius, who though celebrated as dragon-slayers, were historical
persons". This episode of the dragon is in fact a very late development, which cannot be traced further back than the twelfth or thirteenth century. It is found in the Golden Legend (Historia Lombardic of James de Voragine and to this circumstance it probably owes its wide diffusion. It may have been derived from an allegorization of the tyrant
Diocletian or Dadianus, who is sometimes called a dragon (ho bythios drakon) in the older text, but despite the researches of Vetter (Reinbot von Durne, pp.lxxv-cix) the origin of the dragon story remains very obscure. In any case the late occurrence of this development refutes the attempts made to derive it from
pagan sources. Hence it is certainly not
true, as stated by Hartland, that in George's
person "the
Church has
converted and
baptized the
pagan hero Perseus" (The Legend of Perseus, iii, 38). In the East, St. George (ho megalomartyr), has from the beginning been classed among the greatest of the
martyrs. In the West also his cultus is very early. Apart from the ancient origin of St. George in Velabro at
Rome,
Clovis (c. 512) built a
monastery at Baralle in his
honour (Kurth,
Clovis, II, 177). Arculphus and
Adamnan probably made him well known in Britain early in the eighth century. His Acts were translated into Anglo-Saxon, and English churches were
dedicated to him before the Norman Conquest, for example one at Doncaster, in 1061. The
crusades no
doubt added to his popularity.
William of Malmesbury tells us that Saints George and
Demetrius, "the martyr knights", were seen assisting the
Franks at the battle of Antioch, 1098 (Gesta Regum, II, 420). It is conjectured, but not
proved, that the "arms of St. George" (argent, a cross, gules) were introduced about the
time of
Richard Coeur de Lion. What is certain is that in 1284 in the official
seal of Lyme Regis a ship is represented with a plain flag bearing a cross. The large red St. 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. Anyway, in the fourteenth century, "St. George's arms" became a sort of uniform for English soldiers and sailors. We find, for example, in the wardrobe accounts of 1345-49, at the time of the battle of Crecy, that a charge is made for 86 penoncells of the arms of St. George intended for the king's ship, and for 800 others for the men-at-arms (Archaeologia, XXXI, 119). A little later, in the Ordinances of Richard II to the English army invading
Scotland, every
man is ordered to wear "a signe of the arms of St. George" both before and behind, while the pain of death is threatened against any of the enemy's soldiers "who do bear the same crosse or token of Saint George, even if they be
prisoners". Somewhat earlier than this
Edward III had founded (c. 1347) the Order of the Garter, an
order of knighthood of which St. George was the principal patron. The
chapel dedicated to St. George in
Windsor Caste was built to be the official
sanctuary of the order, and a badge or jewel of St. George slaying the dragon was adopted as part of the insignia. In this way the cross of St. George has in a manner become identified with the
idea of knighthood, and even in Elizabeth's days, Spenser, at the beginning of his Faerie Queene, tells us of his hero, the Red Cross Knight:
But on his breast a bloody Cross he bore, The dear remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweet sake that
glorious badge we wore And dead (as living) ever he
adored.
We are told also that the hero thought continually of wreaking vengeance:
Upon his foe, a dragon horrible and stern.
Ecclesiastically speaking, St. George's day, 23 April, was ordered to be kept as a lesser holiday as early as 1222, in the
national synod of Oxford. In 1415, the Constitution of
Archbishop Chichele raised St. George's day to the rank of one of the greatest
feasts and ordered it to be observed like
Christmas day. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries St. George's day remained a holiday of
obligation for
English Catholics. Since 1778, it has been kept, like many of these older holidays, as a simple
feast of devotion, though it ranks liturgically as a double of the first class with an octave.
