Word had it that he appeared at the head of a spectral column of white horses during the early Crusades, turning the Battle of Antioch in the Christians’ favour in 1098. The first known appearance of the red cross in English battle lines dates from 1277, when it was carried as a banner during Edward I’s war to capture Welsh territory.

It reappeared in 1300 at the siege of Caerlaverock Castle during Edward’s campaigns in Scotland, but the banners of St Edmund (three crowns) and St Edward (five birds around a cross) were also carried then. At this time, Edmund and Edward (known as the Confessor) were still the patron saints of England.

St George’s flag seems gradually to have assumed greater prominence in combat during the reigns of the first two Edwards, and by the middle of the 14th century, not only were English forces used to calling on his aid in battle, but he had become identified in the common mind as the nation’s presiding saint. When Edward III created the chivalric Order of the Garter in 1348, it was St George who was adopted as its patron. The medieval French chronicler Jean Froissart, who visited the British Isles extensively in the later 14th century, refers several times to English forces praying to St George before going into combat.

According to a historian writing two centuries later, Edward III “appoynted his souldiers to wear white Coats or Jackets, with a red Crosse before and behind over their Armoure, that it was not onely a comely, but a stately sight to behold the English Battles, like the rising Sunne, to glitter farre off in that pure hew; when the souldiers of other nations in their baser weedes would not be discerned.”

By the time English forces were engaged in France early in the next century, the emblem of St George was an indispensable item of battle regalia. The red cross was flown from the masts of ships at the siege of Harfleur in 1415. At the decisive Battle of Agincourt later the same year, a disease-ravaged English remnant at the point of exhaustion famously routed the cream of the French nobility in George’s name. As so often, Shakespeare supplies us with the words that resonate down the centuries, when he has Henry V shout to the troops before the crucial advance: “Follow your spirit; and upon this charge/ Cry God for Harry, England and St George!”

The use of the saint’s name as a war cry didn’t survive the Reformation, when praying to saints was frowned on as a specifically Catholic practice. The boy king Edward VI, who devoted much of his brief reign to shoring up the Church of England founded by his father, Henry VIII, decreed in 1552 that, while the saint’s name was no longer to be invoked during battle, the symbol of the Red Cross was to be retained. This indicates the degree to which the banner had become associated with English military might as much as with St George himself.

Three patron saints?

It could be (and has been) argued that England effectively has three patron saints, in Edmund, Edward and George. This is because there is no mechanism, under the auspices of either the Church or state, for electing a new saint or for standing one down.

George may have usurped the earlier pair as the focus of military allegiance, and then popular affection, but he has no greater claim than either of the other two to his official standing. His is the flag, however, that we all know and recognise as the symbol of the English nation. (It’s also a whole lot easier to paint on your face when you’re going to support an England team than a device with three crowns or five birds would be.)

The St George flag is also the official flag, or ensign, of the Royal Navy. Since a reorganisation of the service in 1864, the White Ensign, as it is known, is reserved exclusively for Royal Naval vessels (including submarines) and onshore buildings and, as such, has precedence over the Blue and Red Ensigns. The White Ensign is comprised of the red cross on its white field, with a Union flag in the upper left quadrant (the “canton”).