For thou emongst
those Saints, whom thou doest see,
Shalt be a Saint,
and thine owne nations frend
And Patrone: thou
Saint George shalt called bee,
Saint George of
mery England, the signe of victoree.
- The Faerie
Queene, Edmund Spenser (book 1, canto X)
April 23 was the
feastday of St. George and the medieval section of twitter was all
ablaze on this occasion, which is only natural since George occupies
a very interesting role in the religious life of the Middle Ages,
particularly the later centuries. Despite his enduring popularity,
the historicity of St. George is highly dubious. He is reported to
have died a martyr c.303 in Palestine - i.e. about the time of the
persecutions of Diocletian - and he was allegedly a soldier of the
Roman army who turned his back on soldiery once he converted to
Christianity. This is a common trope in early Christian hagiography,
and saints who committed this renuciation were very popular since the
Roman army at that time was the ultimate symbol of Roman paganry.
This was also the case with saints Christopher and Sebastian, saints
whose historicity is as dubious as that of George and who retained a
widespread popularity throughout the medieval centuries.
Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)
There are already
many interesting blogposts on the subject of St.George on the
Internet - in particular by A Clerk of Oxford which can be found here
and here,
and the British Library manuscript blog - and the topic is too complex and rich for me to go into great
detail. Consequently, in this blogpost I aim to compare the standing
in England of a knight and a virgin, namely St. George and St. Edward
the Confessor.
The Beginning: the 12th Century
Saint
George
The
story of Saint George taming a dragon to save a virgin is well known
and needs no elaborate retelling here. It is an old story and it
became widely disseminated through Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda
Aurea
from the mid-13th-century, a compilation of saints' legends which
engendered many localised adaptations both in England and France
throughout the Later Middle Ages.
George had been a part of
the religious consciousness of England since the 7th and 8th
centuries through martyrologies - such as Bede's - and Ælfric of
Eynsham's Old English prose rendition. It was, however, not until the
12th century the popularity of George really flourished in England,
and the reason for this was the Crusades.
In the 12th
century, as a consequence of the Crusade Movement, there was a shift
in the saint paradigm of Western Europe. While the preceding
centuries had seen the genesis of several royal martyr cults
throughout Europe - Edmund in England, Olaf in Norway and Ladislas in
Hungary, for instance - the new ideal was the chivalric holy king who
embraced asceticism and gave himself to the Church. This ideal
paradigm shift was a consequence of two contemporary strands of
conflict: first of all the militant religiosity following the first
crusade, secondly the conflicts between the secular and spiritual
powers. From these strands of conflict emerged the chivalric saint,
an ascetic, monkish saint modelled on the legend of Alexis of Odessa
and which may very well have served as an driving force in the
establishment of the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers. This
chivalric ideal mixed with the Byzantine iconography of Saint George
- and also other warrior saints - and the result was that George
evolved into an equestrian and a dragonslayer. Although his legend
clearly stated the dragonslayer aspect from the beginning of his
cult, it was not until now this became a part of the representations
in art. It is therefore no wonder that the purportedly earliest
representation of George in English art is a wall painting from the
12th century showing him as a lancener.
Edward
the Confessor
Roughly
at the time of George's entry into English iconography, Edward the
Confessor (d.1066) was himself on the verge of becoming a saint. I
have expounded the genesis of his cult in greater detail elsewhere
so I will be very brief on the matter here.
In 1138 Osbert of
Clare, prior of Westminster Abbey, wrote the first purely
hagiographical account of Edward the Confessor's life and miracles.
The work was presented to the papal legate in England, but due to
insufficient support from the English church the motion was denied.
In 1161, however, the canonisation of Edward was again requested by
the English clergy, and this time the unity of the church was
satisfactory to the Pope. The hagiography which set the tone for
later renditions of Edward's legend was composed by Aelred of
Rievaulx in 1163, but he based his work to a great extent on Osbert's
piece, although he decided on some interesting omissions. One of
these was a reference to the legend of Alexis Odessa - paragon of the
chivalric sainthood - and another omission is a reference to Edward
the Confessor as an athlete of God.
The epithet "athlete
of God" was already an old topos of Christian literary
iconography by the 12th century, but it did receive a new burgeoning
during this period. For instance, a new hagiography written for Saint
Oswald of Northumbria referred to him in the same manner. Although
Frank Barlow argues that these elements omitted by Aelred of Rievaulx
were not Osbert's inclusions, they nonetheless point to a desire by
someone to align the old Anglo-Saxon king with the modern
sensibilities of the 12th century. However, since Osbert's text was
merely the foundation for the main text rather than the main text
itself, these aspects did not become a part of the Confessor's
iconography, but were rather left as waste themes.
Edward the Confessor and Edward Martyr, from
MS Royal 2 B VI (13th century)
The
Consummation: the 14th Century
The
Knight
During
the rule of Henry III the cult of Edward the Confessor reached its
summit. Even after Henry's death, the cult of the Confessor was
fairly popular - albeit with some competition from Thomas Becket -
but in the course of Edward I's reign the devotional focus of the
royal family started slowly to shift towards a more martial agenda.
Since Edward the Confessor was lauded as a Solomonic peacemaker, he
was not the right saint to turn to for aid against enemies, and
Edward I displayed the banner of St. George - among others - at the
siege of Caerlaverock in 1300. Furthermore, Edward I embraced the
Arthurian mythology, and in an attempt to subdue the Welsh he
proclaimed Arthur a saint. The implication of this was of course that
Arthur as a saint would be dead and not sleeping on Avalon preparing
for the final battle. The chronicler Peter Langtoft (d.c.1305)
pursued this idea by weaving the arthurian mythology into the lineage
of the English kings.
This
shift gained momentum further into the 14th century. Edward II had
three banners of Saint George made in 1322, and Thomas, Earl of
Lancaster and cousin of Edward II, is shown standing beside the saint
in Douce Hours (1320s), as shown here. When Edward III came to power in 1327 he had already had a
long-standing devotion to the chivalric George, and this, together
with the military climate of his reign, makes it no wonder that he
came to conclude the devotional shift towards George. In 1348 Edward
founded the Order of the Garter which worshipped Saint George as its
patron, and kept its headquarter at Windsor Castle. Interestingly,
the chapel dedicated to Edward the Confessor was rededicated to
George and the Virgin, and a statue of the knight-saint was erected
at the altar in February of 1351. August 13 the same year, Saint
George was proclaimed the
blessed George, the most invincible athlete of Christ, whose name and
protection the English race invoke as that of their patron, in war
especially (according
to the Patent Rolls). This was the consummation of the shift that had
begun in the 1290s.
It is of course interesting to note that
George is here referred to in almost the same way as Edward the
Confessor in Osbert of Clare's hagiography of 1138. This shows how
enduring the topos of athleta
Christi
really was, but although both these instances point to the same
ideological current, they are probably not directly linked. Osbert's
vita
had been surpassed by that of Aelred of Rievaulx and there no reason
to think that the formulation of George as an athlete of Christ was
done to outshine Edward the Confessor. Edward as an athlete of God
was a waste theme of his hagiographical image, not something that had
survived into the 14th century.
The
Virgin
By
1351 Edward the Confessor had become eclipsed by a different type of
saint, one better suited to the military pursuits of the English
king. However, Edward the Confessor does not wane into irrelevance in
this period, and although strongly devoted to the cult of Saint
George, Edward III had not forgotten his namesake saint. During a
fight against the French at Calais in 1349, he is reported by Thomas
Walsingham to have cried out Ha
Sant Edward, Ha Sant George.
Furthermore, when the Order of the Garter had been founded the year
before it had not solely been dedicated to Saint George, but, as
Samantha Riches puts it, "under the joint patronage of the Holy
Trinity, the Virgin Mary and St Edward the Confessor as well as St
George". Nonetheless, despite Edward III's vestigial loyalty to
the Confessor, this appears to have changed somewhat dramatically
when the Saint Edward chapel at Windsor underwent a rededication.
Whether this in fact does signal a dramatic shift in devotional
loyalty, can not be ascertained, and the trajectory towards this
conclusion may be less sudden than we may believe from the source
materials. After all, we do not know the thought processes of Edward
III.
However,
Samantha Riches argues that the patronage invoked in the Patent Rolls
pertains not to George as patron and protector of England, but as
that of the English king. Furthermore, Saint George often appeared
together with the Confessor. The figure erected in the newly
rededicated chapel at Windsor was flanked by a figure of Edward,
while an image of George from c.1360 at Heydor depicts both the
knight-saint and the two royal saints Edward the Confessor and
Edmund. It is therefore obvious that we cannot speak of an eclipse of
Edward's cult, especially since it may have thrived very well in
other echelons of society than in the king's inner circle. This,
however, remains conjecture as we have, to my knowledge, to few
sources to make assertions. Nonetheless, given the Confessor's
renaissance in the 1390s it is evident that he was not completely
outshone by Saint George.
George receiving his armour from the Virgin, from
MS Yates Thompson 13, book of hours of the Sarum Use, 2nd quarter of the 14th century. With thanks to
A Clerk of Oxford
The
Lancaster Years: the 15th century
Despite
the widespread effect of Richard's devotion to the Confessor,
Edward's primacy proved short-lived following the coup by Henry
Bolingbroke. The Confessor remained a relatively important saint in
the 15th century - testified to by the inclusion of his life in the
legendaries of the period - but he came nowhere near the ubiquitous
devotion towards Saint George which was sustained throughout the
period thanks to the Hundred Years War. Even after the war had ended
and turmoil began to brew on English soil, Saint George's position
remained strong and unparalleled.
Concluding
remarks
In
this blogpost we have seen briefly the parallel courses of the cults
of George and Edward the Confessor in England throughout the Later
Middle Ages. There are interesting similarities and equally
interesting differences which all serve to demonstrate the complex
set of parallel strands which comprise the landscape of medieval
religiosity. They were both virgin saints, but one was a knight and
the other a peacemaker. They both were referred to as athletes of
God/Christ, but for one this became a waste theme, for the other it
became a key aspect of his iconography. They both endured and left a
considerable impact on the cultural landscape of medieval England,
but they did so to different degrees. Both saints deserve a
comprehensive study of their cults, but until that has been
undertaken, this may serve as a superficial primer.
References
Barlow,
Frank, Edward
the Confessor,
University of California Press, 1984
Bloch,
Marc (ed.), “La Vie de S. Edouard le Confesseur par Osbert de
Clare,” Analecta
Bollandiana 41,
1923
Farmer,
David, Oxford
Dictionary of Saints,
Oxford, 2004
Klaniczay,
Gabor, Holy rulers and
blessed princesses: dynastic cults in Central Europe,
translated by Éva Pálmai, Cambridge University Press, 2002
Nairn,
Ian, Pevsner, Nikolaus, Sussex,
printed in The Buildings of England series, 1965: 234 (according to
wikipedia).
Ormrod,
Mark, "The Personal Religion of Edward III", printed in
Speculum,
vol 64, n. 4 1989
Prestwich, Michael, Edward
I,
Yale University Press, 1997
Prestwich, Michael, Plantagenet
England 1226-1360, Oxford
University Press, 2005
Riches,
Samantha, St George - Hero,
Martyr and Myth, Sutton Publishing,
2000
Riley,
H. T. (ed.), Thomae
Walsingham, quondam monachi S. Albani, historia Anglicana,
2 vols., pt 1 of Chronica
monasterii S. Albani,
Rolls Series, 28 (1863–4)
Summerson,
Henry, ‘George (d.
c.303?)’,
Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn
Vauchez, Andrè,
Sainthood
in the later Middle Ages,
translated by Jean Birrell, Cambridge University Press, 2005
Wright, Thomas, The
Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft,
London 1866
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/whgeointro.htm
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