Come on, admit it. It gives you too much pleasure. It’s become the same every year. Springtime comes round and the days lengthen, and whilst you should be waiting joyfully for the first swallow of the season, the apple trees to spring into bud, the return of the call of the cuckoo, all you can do is sit with eyes glued to social media, desperate to catch before anyone else that great annual refrain not of the peewit nor the godwit, but the midwit: “Actually, St George was a Turkish Palestinian…”
The first of these cries this time round came not, one might have expected, from pop historian Otto English, but the Green Party peer Jenny Jones, who, perhaps hoping to get ahead of the dawn chorus, put out her own textbook tweet at 5.37 am on 23 April: “Happy St George’s Day! England’s national day, when we celebrate our patron saint, a Turkish officer in the Roman army who died in Palestine and never visited Britain. And, he didn’t kill a dragon.”
Oh how you army of internet twitchers all rejoiced with your GIFs of champagne corks popping and the dejected Bart Simpson being asked to “say the line again.” But the obsession isn’t healthy. If the main enjoyment of what should be a day of national celebration has become a formulaic slanging match over the complete absence of Turks from fourth-century Cappadocia, then something has gone very wrong.
The more terrible thing is that, despite their geographical and historical illiteracy, the midwits do have a bit of a point about St George. It’s not his dragon-slaying (an activity of which any right-thinking person would approve, even though he acquired that legend only around the eleventh century). It’s not even particularly that he has no known connection to English shores. The real problem is that he is, to be frank, a bit of a cypher.
He is, of course, a figure that is great in myth and story. Quite aside from the dragon, antique hagiographies narrate that he was equal to the most hideous tortures of the pagans: thrown into a pit of quicklime, made to run in red-hot iron shoes, boiled in molten lead, etc. The emperor (some say the Roman, some the Persian) was hoovered up in a whirlwind of fire in the wake of his martyrdom, and 40,000 were converted to the Christian faith, some of whom had initially been raised from the dead. Indeed, Islamic legend claims him as well, some stories in that tradition relating he was resurrected from the dead at least three times over.
But the earliest evidence knows almost nothing of him save that he was likely an army officer martyred for his Christian faith around 303. At the end of the fifth century, Pope Gelasius said of him that his actions were “known only to God.”
In our current state, we are crying out for signs and guidance about English national identity
Herein lies the problem. In our current state, we are crying out for signs and guidance about English national identity. Yet, our patron saint offers little but a vacancy on which the midwit tendency is free to project the most miscellaneous collection of contemporary grievances — immigration issues, animal cruelty, how dare we culturally appropriate a saint from Turkey. Would it not be better to consider a patron saint who is a little more hard-edged, one who might resist modish co-option by the omnicause, one who could even tell us something concrete about England and Englishness itself?
The man we need is the Venerable Bede. Granted, he has some drawbacks in comparison with St George. He slew no dragons. For nearly the whole course of his life (673-735), he barely stirred from the confines of his double-monastery at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. And his name is admittedly a little unprepossessing. “God for Harry, England, and St Bede!” might have not quite stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood if that had been the battle cry at Agincourt. And yes, we did refer to him as “the Venerable Button” when we learned about him at school.
But despite his name, he was no wet. He passed his whole existence on the banks of the Tyne, without central heating. As a boy, he survived an attack of the plague which wiped out nearly everyone else in his monastery. He went without luxury or comfort. On his deathbed, the only physical treasurers he had to bequeath were small quantities of spices, incense, and a few napkins: already, he is a poster boy for dealing with modern austerity. Although a scholar, his was also a life of manual toil — for in his time of rare and heavy tomes painstakingly handwritten on parchment and vellum, all scholarship was necessarily hard labour. It takes just a glance at one of the surviving bibles from his monastery, the Codex Amiantius, which is the size of a microwave and weighs the same as a small sofa, to know that Anglo-Saxon book work wasn’t for weeds. And he kept writing and teaching up until the hour of his death.
Though it is not for the rippling pectoral muscles which Bede would have undoubtedly accumulated through a lifetime of academic and literary endeavour that he deserves to be England’s patron saint. It is for his ideas and his vision. He was one of the first thinkers, and certainly the most brilliant, to conceive of the idea of England.
In Bede’s time, the land that is now England was a welter of jostling fiefdoms, peopled by a mix of Germanic invaders and settlers above a downtrodden remnant of Romano-British. Bede looked beyond this chaos and fluidity to see everyone in the land as one people, a Gens Anglorum, united under a single church. He envisaged a single English nation modelled after the Old Testament nation of Israel, under one God and one king who was responsible to God for the morals and welfare of his people.
Bede set the tenor for many ideas of Englishness that we take for granted as part of the national character
Bede was even partly responsible for helping to popularise the very name “England”. He recorded the story of a joke from Pope Gregory that some slaves he saw in a Roman market brought from these islands were “not Angles but angels” — a bad pun which marked Gregory’s resolution to send missionaries under St Augustine of Canterbury to re-evangelise the British isles. The joke, indeed, was providential, signalling that the name England, from “Angles”, should be preferred to anything like “Saxonia” or “Juteland.”
Bede set the tenor for many ideas of Englishness that we take for granted as part of the national character. If we look for the origins of England’s law-abiding tendency, we might find it expressed early in Bede’s injunction that a king “who sees himself as exalted to rule over the people must remember that he himself is to be ruled and subject to divine laws.” Kings in England could not be absolute monarchs, but were under God and the law, a maxim which has echoed down through the centuries in English history to the Magna Carta, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution and beyond. Kings, governments, and all people are bound to obey the law.
As for ideas of charity, fair play and concern for the downtrodden, Bede delineates these in his accounts of various kings, offering examples not just for the mighty but everyone to follow. Inspired by the lead of scripture, the paradigms are those like Oswald, the Christian king of Northumbria, who gave up his Easter Sunday feast for beggars in the streets, and who even divided up his silver platters between them, or Edwin, another Northumbrian king, who put up wooden posts with copper drinking vessels on the roads by springs so that travellers would not go thirsty. Best was to be like Oswald, “always humble, kind, and generous to the poor and to strangers.”
It wasn’t enough for Bede to leave his mark by conjuring up the idea of nationhood, the country’s name and a national character. As a pièce de résistance, he also left his stamp on the calendar. The fact that the year is 2025 is down to Bede’s genius. He did not invent the AD dating system for the year (it had been invented in the previous generation by a monk on the Black Sea coast, primarily as a technical aid to finding the date of Easter), but it was Bede who recognised its potential. Bede saw the incarnation and birth of Christ as the most important event in history. He therefore decided to frame his history writing around the AD dating system. He worked through the chaotic non-standardised morass of other annual dating systems in which he found other history written (years from the Foundation of Rome, from the foundation of the world (by Jewish reckoning), years of the Greek Olympiad, years in the old Roman tax cycle, years from the reign of Augustus, Tiberius, Cleopatra, or Diocletian) and wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and People putting all significant events in these islands — the Roman conquest of Claudius (AD 46), the Roman departure (AD 409), the mission of St Augustine (AD 597) — in terms of the AD system.
From here, its popularity took off. It wasn’t just the system’s clarity and ease of use. The sudden connection of the events in England’s history with the actual coming of Christ offered a sense of direction and cosmic importance, as if one could now suddenly see that the things which happened here were part of a grand overarching plan for Christian salvation. The new calendar offered a new sense of national psychology: England was no longer a distant island, but was linked to the events in Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the very workings of providence. It gave the nation a new sense of significance.
Is this not the person we now need in our state of confusion as our patron saint — a man who not only can tell us about our national character and story, but is even responsible for bringing much of it into being? Who not only envisaged the idea of Englishness, but also spoke simply of the beauty and richness of the landscape, as if it were another Eden, abounding in “grains and trees . . . cattle and beasts of burden”, vines, game birds, fish, rivers, hot springs, precious metals… And who, as a patron saint from these very shores, could cause us to concentrate again on that very beauty of the land at the return of every spring, simply by putting an end to those midwit tweets which so needlessly distract us: “Actually, our patron saint was Turkish…”
