Saint George and the Dragon Giclee Print
Raphael
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The patron saint of England since about the time of the institution of the Order of the Garter (ca. 1348), when he was "adopted" by Edward III. He is commemorated on April 23. St. George had been popular in England from the time of the early Crusades, for he was said to have come to the assistance of the Crusaders at Antioch ( 1089), and many of the Normans (under Robert, son of William the Conqueror) then took him as their patron.
St. George was probably a Cappadocian who suffered martyrdom under Diocletian in 303. There are various versions of his Acta, one saying that he was a tribune and that he was asked to come and subdue a dragon that infested a pond at Silene, Libya, and fed on the dwellers in the neighborhood. St. George came, rescued a princess ( Sabra) whom the dragon was about to make its prey, and slew the monster after he had wounded it and the princess had led it home in triumph by her girdle.
That St. George is an historical character is beyond all reasonable doubt; but the somewhat hesitant assertion of Gibbon ( Decline and Fall, Ch. xxiii) that the patron saint of England was George of Cappadocia, the turbulent Arian bishop of Alexandria, who was torn to pieces by the populace in 360 and revered as a saint by the opponents of Athanasius, has been fully disproved by the Jesuit Papebroch, Milner, and others. He is now believed to have been an official in Diocletian's army, martyred April 23, A. D. 304.
The legend of St. George and the dragon is simply an allegorical expression of the triumph of the Christian hero over evil, which St. John the Divine beheld under the image of a dragon. Similarly, St. Michael, St. Margaret, St. Sylvester, and St. Martha are all depicted as slaying dragons; the Savior and the Virgin as treading them under their feet; St. John the Evangelist as charming a winged dragon from a poisoned chalice given him to drink. Bunyan avails himself of the same figure when he makes Christian prevail against Apolyon.
The legend forms the subject of an old ballad given Percy Reliques. Spenser introduces St. George into his Faërie Queene as the Red Cross Knight.
St. George's cross
Red on a white field. when St. George goes on horseback, St. Yves goes on foot. In times of war it was supposed that lawyers have nothing to do. St. George is the patron of soldiers, and St. Yves or Yvo, an early French judge and lawyer noted for his incorruptibility and just decrees (d. 1303, canonized 1347), of lawyers.
St. George Killing the Dragon Giclee Print
Vittore Carpaccio
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