Genealogy Forum UK

gardener wrote:Wasn't it yesterday?

SRD wrote:It's difficult for us to forget, we have three birthdays in the family and close friends, but what with all that I'm afraid the Turkish Knight tends to get a bit left out.

Rob wrote:Who was St George? He seems to me an obscure figure who killed a dragon!!
Other countries such as Spain and Bulgaria seem to have more infinity with him than the English.
I think of St George and i think not of England but The National Front!!
Why is that?
The patron saint of England?
There is nothing intrinsically English about the Saint or the day itself.
If England is going to celebrate all that it is good for, one needs to find a figure that both represents that and that only.

peterd wrote:thats the difference then i look at my self as english first then british

the most powerful of the Anglo Saxon Kings, Offa, is mainly remembered today because of "Offa's Dyke" - a long defensive trench he built to keep out the Welsh. He produced some fine coins (including a copy of an Abbasid Dinar which he thought had the right sort of look) and also persuaded the Pope to set up a new Archdiocese based on Lichfield which covered all the Midlands and East Anglia.

Rievaulx was founded in 1131 - Yorkshire's first Cistercian abbey. Its third Abbot - Saint Aelred - was one of the leading European ecclesiastics of the 1100s both in terms of holiness, scholarship and statesmanship. He was also responsible for building many of the abbey and monastery buildings whose ruins can still be seen today.

Lord Chancellor of Plantagenet Henry II's England, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, who was famously murdered (beheaded and brained or vice-versa) in his cathedral by four knights plus retainers on 29 December 1170.
Becket was not a popular, saintly or even particularly nice person, but the manner of his death fired up huge public interest, and within two years he had become a Euro Celebrity and was canonised. Graphic representations of his killing appeared in places as far away as Sicily (Mosaic in Monreale Cathedral), Spoleto (Umbria - fresco in the church of Saints John and Paul) and the pilgrimage churches of France such as Chartres (an entire window sponsored by the Guild of Tanners dedicated to Becket's life), as well as many English churches. His tomb and shrine in Canterbury Cathedral and the dozens of Limoge Chasses containing Becket "relics" gave new meaning to the commercial possibilities of pilgrimage and medieval celebritydom.
Before his fateful return to England, Becket had sheltered in Sens, then been put up for three years by the monks of the Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny, in Burgundy and whilst there had dumped on Henry big time from the pulpit of the Abbaye Ste-Madeleine in nearby Vézelay.