23.04.2020

Not the happiest St George’s Day is it?

It is worth taking a moment though to consider what this day means, what it represents. As if you’ve got anything better to do…

It’s tempting to think that symbols like patron saints don’t mean anything, they’re just old symbols and time in which they were relevant has passed away, and that’s true, but you’d also have to apply that logic to all the other mystic paraphernalia of state and nation. Yes, it is all complete nonsense but it has very serious implications.

These stories inform who we are, and as Yuval Noah Harari explains in his brilliant book Sapiens, many of the things we hold dear don’t exist. Companies don’t. They are known as legal fictions, which allows the person who runs the company to avoid the risk of business, that’s why it’s called a limited liability company. So St George is just as real as Peugeot, or the Weatherspoon’s pubs he haunts.

In a strange twist of the law, which I believe occurs mostly in America, but don’t quote me, companies can be recognised as human beings, which makes me wonder if all of us are in fact fictional. This is called corporate personhood, the main reason, as far as I know is to get round lobbying and political donation laws, and be granted other civil and human rights. This might take some investigation, maybe one for another post.

So while all these things are magical and ephemeral, and don’t exist in physical reality, they do exist in a shared place beyond time and space, where we keep things like our countries, our identity, our beliefs, our national character. People fight and die over this shit. So St George who the heck was he, and why do we worship him? And what about the poor old dragon?

Well everyone knows he’s not even English, but none of us are, so that’s quite appropriate. But he’s also not English in a nefarious sense. King Edward the third was a Plantagent king, directly descended from William the Conqueror. He reigned from 1327-77, so through the first wave of the black death in 1348/9 and the peasants’ revolt in 1351, which we talked about earlier (I think I may have got my facts wrong when I said he was 14 years old that year, anyway…). So he considered himself French, or Norman, spoke French and ruled over the English, who during that time where getting a bit uppity. The English had their own patron, St Edmund the Martyr, who was a Saxon king from East Anglia. The peasants used him as an emblem for English freedom in their struggle against serfdom and oppression.

King Edward recognised the power of symbols, and didn’t want an Englishman as a patron saint of England, especially one was the first to call himself Rex Anglorum (king of the Angles or kin of the English) far too English. He was also king around the time England united for the first time against Viking invasion, and the Danelaw settlement which allowed Vikings in the north and Anglo-Saxons in the south (which is why we have a north south divide of dialect and customs today). Edmund was heavy with the symbolism of English struggles against Viking repression. So he imposed St George.

To this day we are still living under a Norman regime. Apart from the odd attempt by the Spanish in Elizabethan times, the Dutch in 1666, the Nazis having a pop, and the French a good few times, no one has been able to overthrow the existing order in England for almost a thousand years. The year after William conquered England, he declared all lands belonged to him, then went about handing bits of land out to his friends, creating the feudal system and class hierarchy we still struggle under today. In fact according to Paul Kingsnorth in a Guardian article in 2012, two thirds of the country is owned by 0.3% of the population, and 1% own 70% of the land, which makes Britain second only to Brazil in terms of unequal land distribution. Most of those families can be traced right back to the Normans. On top of that, our, and the EU’s slightly odd farming subsidy system means that people get paid for owning land that could be farmed, no matter what they do with it.

Queen Elizabeth the second is William’s 22^nd times granddaughter. She is the ultimate landowner, the cost of our tenancy is loyalty to the crown. Fucking nuts, isn’t it?

The acquisitive Norman culture of oppression, entitlement and cruelty have become one undeniable side of the English character, as evidenced by our enthusiastic involvement in the slave trade, the colonial expansion of capitalism, which turned inwards and cannibalised our own country, and now extends through time by indebting future generations. British exceptionalism, and idea of superiority and racism. In short, if these fucking Normans weren’t still ruling, we probably wouldn’t be in such a terrible mess with this pandemic.

So one way of looking at St George is as a symbol of oppression. A thousand year grudge.

I don’t know about the dragon, I’ll have to think about what that symbolises.

But maybe it’s time to question whether St George represents you, or if you could choose someone more fitting. Maybe Johnny Cash, or Harry Potter, whatever. Find your own personal Jesus.

It's also Shakespeare's birth and deathday, maybe he is a better fit for a saint for you?