Sigh:
Is it any wonder that St Patrick enjoys such popularity in comparison? He\’s a local boy made good, a saint the Irish can really take to their collective bosom.
Paddy wasn\’t in fact Irish. A Romano-Brit, almost certainly Welsh, who was carried off by Irish slavers. Came home again, then got the bug to go convert the slavers.
A more modern example might be someone enslaved perhaps on the Amistad, sent back to Liberia, who then returns to American to convert them all to Akan.
” almost certainly Welsh”: eh? No-one knows. He could have come from anywhere from, say, Cornwall to the Solway.
That’s not all.
<emSt George, on the other hand, was a Syrian-born Roman who almost certainly never sampled a jellied eel or relaxed with a gin and tonic after a hard day's gardening. For all the connection he has to the English people we may as well have appointed Tutankhamun our national figurehead.
It was the values St. George supposedly embodied which was the reason he was adopted as the English patron saint, not the nationality of the man himself. In fact, most countries celebrated him, and the English adopted him as their own largely to piss off the French, by implying his values were chiefly English.
That’s not all.
St George, on the other hand, was a Syrian-born Roman who almost certainly never sampled a jellied eel or relaxed with a gin and tonic after a hard day’s gardening. For all the connection he has to the English people we may as well have appointed Tutankhamun our national figurehead.
It was the values St. George supposedly embodied which was the reason he was adopted as the English patron saint, not the nationality of the man himself. In fact, most countries celebrated him, and the English adopted him as their own largely to piss off the French, by implying his values were chiefly English.
Oh, and can you imagine what kind of must-tick-all-the-diversity-boxes candidate England would have to choose from were they to replace St. George?
Blah, blah, blah. Our betters and masters in the MSM are lazy and indolent sods, so they maintain a number of article templates upon which they can draw annually. Each year we have the same predictable articles: on St. George’s day, twice per year on the adoption or otherwise of British Summer Time, the release of A-level results, and the release GCSE results.
It’s all really rather predictable and more than a little boring.
What was wrong with St Edward, King & Martyr (not that feeble Edward the Confessor), as patron saint of England?
At least he died while having a drink!
Tim,
Alistair Moffat’s ‘The Sea Kingdoms’, places him as a native of what’s now Cumbria, but the book has a lot of other flaws.
My own chauvinism prefers the local legend of him hailing from Dumbarton; and at that time and in that place, of course, he would have been a Welsh speaker.